It would NOW. He had a chance, however, to look like a leader six months ago by saying “I have no intention of bringing this government down unless there is a major breakdown in governance or evidence of criminal activity.” Instead of playing the monthly we-will-we-won’t game he should have shown leadership for his party and his country by admitting Canadians don’t want an election now and that there’s nothing to be discussed.
But instead he’s been playing the “I wanna be Prime Minister now, now now now!” game, and so he’s stuck.
The Liberal Party is suffering from the same disease that affects a lot of parties that only recently lost an election; the It Must Have Been A Mistake Disease. We saw this with the Reform Party, too, especially after the 1997 election; the sense that the party refused to believe they’d lost a legitimate election, and that somehow they deserved to be the party in power irrespective of what the voters had said. Remember when Preston Manning said Jean Chretien should be removed from office for being mentally unstable,m and his evidence of Chretien’s mental instability was that he didn’t believe in the same things as the Reform Party? That’s the sign of a guy who just cannot accept that the voters said “We do not want you in charge.” It seems to take a party some time to understand that you usually lose an election because you deserved to lose and that you need to provide the electorate with a reason to vote for you.
What reason has Michael Ignatieff given the Canadian electorate to vote for him? He speaks in banal generalities and vapid talking points. There are many reasons I might want to NOT vote for Stephen Harper - excessive spending being #1 on my list - but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll want to vote Liberal. Ignatieff’s doing a horrible job getting across any message other than “I’m Michael Ignatieff, and I want to be Prime Minister.”
For the sake of himself and his party he should have backed away from confrontation and spent at least a year or more defining what the hell it is his party stands for.
Well, I think a more accurate description would be that the Liberals are suffering from the classic democratic problem of, “if the other party does well, we lose.”
As a bit of background, I grew up in the era of Liberal dominance, and then moved to the US, where I saw this as horribly poisonous. Remember the Surge? The surge was actually needed (because of previous fuck ups), but because it was suggested by the Republicans, the Dems had to be against it, with all the vigor they could muster. And then, they NEEDED the surge to fail. They were against it, so if it succeeded they’d look like the failure.
Right now, the Liberal Part needs the Conservatives to fail, otherwise they can never hope to win an election. So it’s in their best interest to have things to go shit. But as I said above, things can only get better from this point on. They need an election while people can still remember the bad times.
And one other point, if you look at the past election results, the voters did not elect the Conservative party. The majority actually said they want “someone else” running the country, hence the minority government scenario. In effect, if you consider the Liberals, the Bloc, and the NDP as left of centre, the majority of Canadians said they want a liberal (small L) government.
If I were a liberal, I wouldn’t worry too much. Politicians don’t need bad economic times to screw up. Some of the biggest screw-ups in Canada came during economic booms, because that’s when the money flows easily and the people stop paying attention to what the politicians are doing.
We’re actually creating jobs again. Albeit part-time jobs, but jobs nonetheless. Even the slight uptick in unemployment (from 8.6 to 8.7) is good news, because the analysis says it’s because of the return of discouraged jobless people back into the job market, meaning confidence is rising.
And if oil continues to tick back up, expect the oil sands to rev up again soon, creating thousands of jobs.
Just to add my voice to this discussion. I’m quite happy with the Harper minority government even though I’ve historically sided with the Liberals, the party which in my opinion best represents the average Canadian. I even think Iggy is the best man to lead the Liberals. However, until Harper does something for me to disagree with, or I smell a serious chance for a Liberal majority government, I’ll be pissed off to have to go to the polls again, and waste my taxes just to maintain the status quo.
The problem is, the status quo is not that Harper and the Conservatives are the Government, but that they’re a minority government. This hamstrings them from doing anything but marking time. Of course, from the perspective that the less government the better, this could be seen as a positive. But still, a Government that is supported by a majority in Commons is the default position for Parliamentary government. I hold no brief for Harper, but if he’s going to be P.M., he deserves to have the chance to get a majority. One can make arguments for and against last fall’s prorogation, but it’s been close to a year since then – if Harper deserved a chance then to demonstrate what his Government could do, that deserves to have the voters decide whether to support or reject it on the basis of a year’s accomplishments.
I don’t know. I think that most of the Canadian electorate is a little election-weary, having had a few of them in the fairly-recent past, although there will always be those die-hards who will try to convince anyone who listens that their party is only one election away from forming a government, especially if we have one now. Besides, elections are expensive, and in this economy, I think we’ve got better things to spend our money on.
Harper may not be doing much, perhaps because of his minority government, but one person’s “not doing much” can also be seen as another’s “doing neither good nor bad.” I’m leaning towards the latter; especially in economies such as this, I would rather have a government that in not doing much, ended up doing neither good nor bad. We would do well to remember the recession of the early 1990s and Ontario’s experience under an NDP government that chose to “do much” in that economy, and how painful that turned out to be for Ontario.
Everyone is asking the same thing: what does Iggy plan to accomplish? He won’t get specific about what he would do differently than Harper, so when people look for a justification for another election, there’s nothing there. If someone could explain why it’s smart for a centre-left party to threaten an election without a platform of proposed changes (or a likely shake-up of seats that would imply big changes), I’m listening, but it sounds like he’d just make his own party vulnerable to attacks from both sides.
And to be honest, there’s no reputable poll out there that suggest the Liberals have any chance of forming a government, short of some sort of dead girl/live boy campaign disaster. The numbers simply do not add up.
Ignatieff’s bluster frankly does not speak well to his abilities as a politician. Aw, hell, what am I saying - he’s an awful politician, every bit as bad as Stephane Dion. Arguably worse, in fact. Harper can be vindictive and short-sighted, and Layton showed a remarkable lack of character and class when he got a whiff of power, but Ignatieff looks like the world’s best-educated fool. He’s badly misreading the Canadian people, badly misreading the political winds, timing this atrociously in terms of the direction of the economy, by many accounts had his own caucus doubting his judgment, and has done a horrendous job selling himself to the Canadian people, a remarkable non-achievement when you consider how lacking in charisma his major opponent is. Actually, to be more precise, he’s doing no job at all selling himself; I don’t think he clued in fast enough (if he ever has) to the fact that just because the Liberal Party thought he was their saviour doesn’t mean 32 million other Canadians think that, too.
I don’t know Ignatieff personally, and he’s obviously a smart man, but from my limited observations, his favourite topic appears to be himself. As nasty as those Conservative attacks ads were, they are, basically, true; Ignatieff’s entire record and CV indicate his overriding concern at all times is Michael Ignatieff. He writes entire books on his obsessive interest in himself and his own background. I’m not sure his vision of himself extends much beyond himself; I don’t think he understands that people aren’t just going to line up to vote for him because he sounds smart and is a tall white man with good hair. Most politicians are egotistical, but most have an empathetic understanding of how they’re perceived by the voters and what they have to do to appeal to certain voters. I don’t know that Ignatieff does.
In other words, he’s demonstrating more or less every stupidity you’d expect of a privileged upper class type who just got back to the country about six years ago and was parachuted into politics without having to pay any dues.
To defend him for a minute, here, though, you have to admit, he is tall, and his hair is much nicer than Stephen Harper’s. (Layton’s hair is so minimal it’s not worth discussing.) He also, as you can see here, has some very nice china.
Ah yes, YouTube. Want an example of what I’m talking about? It’s best not to go into an election against the Cons being led by a man with this meat hanging around his neck, inviting the left to take a bite.
All they have to do is quote him. Such are the dangers of being a public intellectual before getting into politics.
Sigh…I’m disgusted with the leadership of all the major parties.
I admit to a visceral hatred for Harper and his mean-spirited, petty arrogance and the bumbling of his cabinet ministers is, frankly, an embarrassment. The Chalk River fiasco still infuriates me. And my MP, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s, fear-mongering crime bills and endless push-poll mailings on the taxpayer dime guarantee that I won’t be voting Conservative any time soon.
That said, I don’t like Iggy any better. He’s just a slumming carpetbagger without a clue but a huge sense of entitlement to make up for it. I was pretty disappointed with his disappearance from the scene over the summer and his “boy who cried election” routine is really starting to grate on my nerves. I didn’t like Dione either, but at least he wasn’t a neo-conservative in disguise and he actually seemed to care. Unless the Liberals can field a really compelling candidate for my riding, they won’t be getting my vote either.
If there is an election (I give 50/50 odds) I’ll probably end up throwing away my vote on the Green party like I did last year.
Basically, the Conservatives now want to go ahead with EI reform which as I recall was one of the sticks up Ignatieff’s butt. So they come up with this legislation, knowing that an election will torpedo it. And then when Ignatieff starts going on about how the Conservatives refused to reform EI, they can say they were in the process of doing so when he pulled the rug out from under them by forcing an election that no one wanted. Sneaky!
Why the hell would the location of a woodland backdrop matter to any rational person? I mean I understand Canadian political journalists are desperate to make more predictions and speculate on just about anything … but a forest in a politcal ad? Who the hell cares if it’s a real place or not?