I don’t believe the “party in power” has yet faced a confidence vote, so do you believe this is the time for the coalition to organise and form a coalition which can hold the confidence of the house?
Well, they have six weeks to work on it. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
I’m reading the text of both speeches this morning, not seeing the video, so I’m missing any nuances there.
Mr. Harper’s speech has two inaccuracies - the coalition does not want ‘to overturn the results of that election.’ The coalition bases its power in the results of that election, pure and simple. They have the numbers; if voters had elected more members of the Conservative party to the House of Commons, the coalition would not be able to form the government. Whether the election results are based on the strength of an individual candidate, the platform of the party they represent, the regional predisposition to one party or another, it does not matter. That the coalition is using the election’s results in a way that does not suit the Prime Minister is true - that does not mean that they are overturning those results.
Later in the speech, where Mr. Harper says ‘Let me be clear.’, he then repeats the inaccuracy that the Bloc are in the coalition. They are not. They have agreed to support it, but they are not in the coalition. However Mr. Harper feels about the Bloc’s support for the coalition, he is in fact, not being clear at all, he is giving inaccurate information that makes his opponent’s position look worse. That is not clarity.
What might have softened my feelings toward Mr. Harper and the Conservatives would have been some acknowledgment that this crisis has been caused by the Conservatives employing the same hard-ball tactics that they used in the last minority parliament. I was wrong in accusing them of again making this a confidence issue to intimidate the opposition - Post #18 of mine, thanks to Rysto for fighting my ignorance in Post #19 - however, knowing that this was to be a confidence motion, they did nothing to seek consensus with the opposition, and even went so far as to antagonize them. Mr. Harper has no one to blame but himself - I need to hear him say so before I can move on.
As for Mr. Dion - I think it would have served him well if he had rebutted some of the points made in Mr. Harper’s speech, and emphasized that all the economic support and incentives mentioned were not in the financial statement that provoked the crisis. Instead, well, good Lord, does he ever come across as that Professor you had in university who understood the subject so thoroughly he couldn’t begin to express it in such a way as to make anyone else understand it.
Still, I have much more respect for someone who seeks consensus and compromise than someone who seeks to impose his will against the majority.
So, there we have it - Coriolanus versus Polonius.
Just saw this - Parliament shut for 7 weeks.
Interesting times - what now?
Somewhere C.D. Howe is smiling. The Pipeline Debate is no longer the most egregious abuse of Parliament by a procedural referee.
Elsewhere, Dief weeps as he looks that the once proud legacy of his party.
I think I’m coming to the position that they’re ALL to blame for this. Jerks.
Bloody hell! And also dammit!!!
Well it could be said that if this fiasco gets people more involved and intimate with both our politics and our way of governance, then something good will have come from it.
Unless we march on parliament with torches and pitchforks, we are stuck with these putz’s, changing the govt at this time is only rearanging the deck chairs.
This session is forked until late january.
Declan
I’m sad that it’s been made a Quebec separatists against the Rest of Canada issue in many people’s minds. They hear Harper and his minions repeat “separatist”, “coup” and, if I go by the open line radio programmes, they believe it.
What the coalition was attempting was not a sudden, unconstitutional overthrow of the government, but a mechanism to replace a government that is no longer functional by a grouping of other parties-- people who were also elected by the population.
The Bloc had been working constructively with the Harper’s government until recently. I wonder how they’ll be able to work together anymore.
Like many people in Quebec, I’m a federalist.My family is half French half English/Irish mix. Even I feel insulted by all these distortions of the truth and the singling out of the Bloc as culprit. During my adult life, I’ve voted Liberal or NDP in federal elections, Liberal in provincial elections.
Today, faced with the scorn heaped upon us, I can understand Quebec nationalists. I thought that scorn was a thing of the past, I was wrong.
Harper may be the best thing that’s happened to the Quebec sovereigntist movement since René Lévesque.
Well, not exactly. What he says is “Canada’s government cannot enter into a power-sharing coalition with a separatist party.”
It’s indisputably true that the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement that their government would be supported by the Bloc Quebecois. You can call that an alliance, coalition, arrangement, understanding, contract, or whatever you like, but it is what it is. Complaints along the lines of “it’s not a war, it’s a police action” are neither meaningful nor honest.
Saying the BQ would not be part of this government is like saying that Conservative MPs who aren’t in cabinet aren’t part of the current government. They’re agreed to work together as if in a coalition government. They may have agreed to act as the backbenchers, but it’s the backbenchers who let a government function.
He could not have know what would be in Mr. Harper’s speech. They were both pre-taped; neither would know what the other would say until after the fact. So he was forced to be general in his comments. If he had been overly specific he would have run the risk of looking utterly disconnected from what people had seen and heard Harper say only moments before.
What he SHOULD have done was hired a film crew equipped with something better than my Logitech QuickCam. If you haven’t seen it, you don’t know how bad it looked. It was like a Youtube video. A really bad one.
So how will this affect the 10 or so seats the Tories hold in Quebec? Assuming that when Parliament comes back into session at the end of January, the confidence vote is lost and we end up going to election (I realize that’s only one possible outcome, but roll with me), can Harper get a majority? Could the Liberals get a minority? Any way I look at it, all I see is us ending up exactly where we are, only having spent another $300 million on an election that no one wants and with an even lower voter turnout than the last one. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see Harper get his comeuppance, but what I really hope for is that he engages in some meaningful dialogue with the opposition and compromises, rather than poking them in the eye.
Everything that I’ve heard leads me to believe that Harper has peed in the well in Quebec. He and his party will be dead there for a generation. Whether the BQ is strengthened or the (without Dion) Liberals or the NDP gets seats is beyond my power of prognostication, but if Harper wants a majority, he’d better hope that he gets it elsewhere.
He’s dead to Quebec.
He’s dead anyway unless he has a miracle resolution between now and January 27, so what difference does it make? Barring a series of backroom deals that would bring MPs across the floor to give him a majority, his government dies then, and if it dies, he’ll lose the leadership.
If he loses the leadership the Conservatives are rid of him, and the quality of the next leader determines their future.
If he somehow gets nine people to cross the floor he’s in power until 2012 - and that’s enough time for the political sands to shift in any number of ways, in addition to the fact that he’ll come out looking like the greatest politician of all time and the coalition will look like three Wile E. Coyotes freshly blown up by their own Roadrunner-catching invention. How he could possibly pull off a comeback I have no idea at all; this just looks like a stay of execution. But those are the two scenarios and in neither case is the public consulted.
Getting Liberals to cross the floor, or breaking the coalition in some other way, is his only hope. If there’s any other way out, I don’t see it. Either way, political opinion polls in the short term don’t matter; this issue is NOT going to the electorate.
I could have written this exact same post (pretty much right down to the ancestry, though I’ve got a hint of Scottish in me too!)
I am not a Canadian first, and then Quebecois.
I am not Quebecois first, and then Canadian.
I am both, at all times.
It seems a few of us just can’t win. 
Useless speeches, both of them. I am completely disgusted by how amateurish our politicians are - how can they be in federal politics and be this pathetic? If they can’t even do the politics properly, what is supposed to reassure me that they can come up with proper policies / law? Harper basically used his speech as a rallying cry without trying to reach out to the Opposition parties and Dion bungled his opportunity to appear like a reasonable alternative.
Harper’s speech today after getting the permission to prorogue Parliament that he wanted was a little better, at least offering that tiny olive branch to the opposition parties to give them room to back down after some of their concerns are heard and hopefully incorporated into the upcoming budget.
So now we get to sit and wait 7 weeks before this gets resolved.
A plague/pox on the entire House (of Commons)!
Heh. That’s exactly what Peter Mansbridge said, and I laughed then, too.
Then I watched the video itself, and sighed. Dion is not making it very easy to be on his side. I actually know a couple of Liberal staffers. They’re intelligent, perfectly competent people. He couldn’t have had one of them deal with the focus button?
Let’s hope they use this to learn how to function as a group of adults, quit accusing each other of treason and other BS, and figuring out how to actually do the job they were elected to do!
Bunch of bozos.
Also, I want to win the Lotto 6/49.
Well, they seem to be uniting us all in our hatred of game-playing politicians. 
Yeah, Harper blaming everything on the Bloc was not cool. They have plenty to answer for (in my opinion), but this isn’t one of those things. More accurately, he could blame it on himself for finding a way to blow the last election by not getting a majority by listening to whoever was advising him then as well as now. Either he comes up with these terrible ideas by himself, or he has people giving him terrible advice; either way, he is losing my respect big time. And I think he could be a very good Prime Minister during an economic crisis, if he could pull his head out of his ass and stop playing dirty politics.
Isn’t this the sort of thing PMs do in countries with weak traditions of democracy? What’s next, a declaration of a state of emergency?