At the time of writing this, it is not by any means certain that there will be Canadian election any time soon. So maybe I’ll be wrong - it won’t be the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time that I make a public fool of myself on the message board.
My guess is that between the budget and the non-confidence motion, we will see the government fall by the end of the week. However much Prime Minister Harper claims that Canadians don’t want an election, the recent attack ads, and the new Conservative Party attack website are doing nothing to calm the situation.
At present, it rests with Jack Layton and the NDP, though that too may change.
So, I propose a respectful exchange of opinions as the events unfold - what do my fellow Canadopers think of the current situation?
I’ve already been getting polling phone calls so I think an election is pretty well on it’s way.
Personally, I think the opposition parties are stupid to force the issue now. I would be surprised if an election resulted in a government much different than the one we have now.
I don’t know; I’m always surprised to see the Conservative Party numbers so high. I admit to being strongly biased against them, but between the ‘Harper Government’, the Bev Oda scandal, the Bruce Carson affair, the contempt of Parliament, something’s got to come back to haunt them.
If an election was called tomorrow the result would be a Conservative minority.
These scandals are nothing really compared to bags of cash changing hands in Québec. It’ll take something like that for people to take notice. I don’t mean to trivialize what’s going on but I think a lot of people have become so desensitized to the never ending demand from opposition parties for peoples heads no matter how large or small the matter. It’s turning into the cry wolf syndrome.
The way I see it to date Harper is the one I trust the most out of all of them, well actually there’s only one other choice realistically and I definitely don’t trust him.
There’s no way the NDP want an election. They have lost considerable ground in the polls. The big question is if there is anything in the budget that the NDP simply can’t accept.
If there is a election, I’ll go on the record predicting a Conservative majority and another leadership convention for the Liberals.
Again, the polls are contradictory - in this article, the Nanos Research poll for CTV and The Globe and Mail shows the Prime Minister’s numbers are down.
I think the last two weeks have revealed some scandal that could stick to the Conservatives.
Sure, Harper’s numbers are down, but still almost double Jack’s and Iggy’s. And the party results point to another Conservative minority. That’s how I think things will turn out if we go to the polls again; they have my support.
Yes, another Conservative minority.
Which makes all the election talk just silly.
And it’s not so much that folks love Harper, it’s that there isn’t anyone better. All the leaders have their foibles, their ridiculous talking points and their “difficult” MP’s.
Not enough has changed since the last election for there to be any real change in the result. Sure, the Conservatives have had a lot of little scandals lately (though I am right-leaning I think they should have tossed Oda under the bus. Less so Mr. Kenney) but it’s all so bizarre that no one really cares. If they’re even listening.
And the Conference Board of Canada’s Economy Forecast has been released, showing that we are in the middle of the pack, yet down from the height of the recession two years ago. Full article here.
Michael Ignatieff has my full support, for the record.
None of the minor scandals will stick. They’re just not of sufficient importance or emotional impact to swing many votes.
If we have an election we’ll spend millions of dollars to return a Parliament that will look pretty much just like this one.
Not that it won’t have an impact; it will, thankfully, end Michael Ignatieff’s ridiculous political career (good) and will be Jack Layton’s last election (probably not good for the NDP.) It’ll further entrench the Bloc (very bad.) If he doesn’t acheive a majority you’ll start to hear rumblings about replacing Stephen Harper, too… they won’t dump him soon, but it’ll be the beginning of the downslope of his career.
So an election will, at least, speed up the ascension of new leaders by a year. In the case of the Liberals, that could be a huge upgrade.
I don’t understand what the Conservative Party was doing chumming around with Bruce Carson; either they’re stupid or they actually are as dirty as the Liberals would have us believe they are. I have supported PM Harper since the start, but this isn’t looking good. I might have to abstain from voting if it turns out the PCs are Bad; I can’t hold my nose hard enough to vote for anyone else.
What I’m really hoping for is for Iggy to lose an election and disappear with a puff of smoke back into academia.
Jack Layton just announced that the NDP won’t be supporting the budget that was just presented. Assuming nobody flips, the campaign will probably be beginning within a few days.
Oh geez. Im sick to death of result minority elections.
Currently I am politically homeless, my politics scew left, sometimes Liberal, more often NDP but looking at budget highlights I don’t think I can vote for parties that want me to pay for an election (again!) so they can be righteously indignant about this, without any real hope of changing the outcome.
I will decide more afterthe CBC mothercorp tells me what to think tonight.
If Michael Ignatieff actually fights an election on this budget, his career is probably over.
Now, having said that, as the old saying goes, campaigns do matter. The Conservatives would have lots of time to hopelessly blow it. But if they don’t make a horrific gaffe, where are the Liberals going to pick up ten percent? They’re starting off on the wrong foot just by forcing an election (while I realize they need the NDP and Bloc to force an election, people will primarily blame the Liberals.)
The contempt of Parliament charge, I just don’t think has much traction, and it’s going to be buried by the issue of the budget.
There’s no reason to hold an election. This is stupid.
The Conservatives might not have anything major to really resonate with the electorate, but their support is slowly being chipped away. Death by a thousand cuts. The G20 fiasco, the Internet limitation proposal, the six dozen minor scandals that have kicked up in the past week… each one will alienate some people, and some people will just abstain from voting as a result. Minority government, for sure… but whose? Every party is at the very least a disappointment, if not totally insane. Until the Conservatives start supporting communities and families, the “leftists”* start realizing people need to actually work, and the Greens accept that almost everything they oppose is necessary for the continued functioning of our society, there’s really nobody left to vote for.
I actually can’t figure out what the difference between the NDP and the Liberals are these days; the Liberals have done such a poor job of branding themselves and advertising what it is they actually support, that I have no idea what they stand for or what they intend to accomplish. Hopefully the election campaign will make that clear. Hopefully they actually know.
I believe (and I could be wrong) that the Liberals stand for Michael Ignatieff getting a Prime Ministership to put on his resume before he flits off into the night.
I’m not sure in which way the Bloc could be entrenched more than it is now. This is a party that’s existed for more than 20 years, even though in the beginning it was only supposed to exist for a few years at most. Every time there’s an upcoming election, commentators debate whether the Bloc still serves a purpose in Ottawa, but who wins this debate doesn’t matter in any way because voters still send large numbers of Bloc MPs to the Commons. Even in English Canada, many people’s view of the Bloc has shifted to that of a party whose goals they don’t agree with, but that’s still an effective opposition, this at least in some part due to Duceppe’s leadership. It’s seen as part of the Canadian political scene, or even the establishment. Regardless of the result of this election, the Bloc’s as entrenched as it’s going to get. I suppose that if the Liberals get pummelled into the ground, and the Bloc emerges after the election as the Official Opposition to a Conservative majority government with few MPs from Quebec, this could create a sense that the Bloc is “Quebec’s party” with the Conservatives being “English Canada’s party.” But that’s an unlikely result.
This being said, what might be interesting (and you would presumably find really bad) is if other Canadian regions started sending regionalist parties to the Commons. Back in the pre-Bloc era, regional concerns were discussed at the party level, the party then publishing a pan-Canadian platform; this would move Canadian politics to a paradigm where regional concerns would be discussed at the level of inter-party negotiations. I’m not saying it would be better, but it would be interesting, it would remove the Bloc’s specificity and establish once and for all that what defines Canadians, even before whether they are liberal or conservative, is which part of the country they identify with. It happened in the past, with the Reform as a Western Canadian party by and for Western Canadians from 1988 until at least 1997, but then the Reformers decided they wanted to get in power and had to morph into a pan-Canadian party.
About the only way to defeat the Conservatives would be for the left to unite, rather than spilt the vote. That’s not about to happen. Too bad, in my opinion.
