I don’t like that Dalton McGuinty came to power trumpeting “Better Healthcare!”, “Better Education!”, and the fantastically nebulous “Family Values!”.
Guess what, Dalton McGuinty? Healthcare has really not much changed after more than 10 years of your leadership, education problems and issues have not been solved to any discernible degree, and my family’s values still have fuck-all to do with the Provincial Government.
But hey, the Conservatives were a mess, Ontario isn’t bristling with For Sale by Bank signs, and we get the 3rd Monday of February off work, with pay. So I guess you weren’t a total failure, Dalton McGuinty.
There you have it, the lifetime of my Tercel. Miss it already. Cried like a baby. Picking up the new car a bit later today. Gotta get to the SAAQ first (note…two As…not the SAQ! Hehe).
Given the hole the guy made in the car when he ripped off the license plate since the bolt was rusted, I’ve concluded that my car mostly consisted of paint holding rust together. The paint still looked amazing though!
A moment of silence might be in order for the dearly departed. Would you like to say a few words on behalf of your car, mnemosyne?
I don’t fully understand why Dalton Mcguinty would pull the plug at this time, although I have my suspicions, but why would he also prorogue the Legislature? The optics of the MLAs having an impromptu vacation just before the holidays start to ramp up can’t be good.
If he’s stepping down for personal reasons why not have the Deputy Premier take over?
Proroguation effectively stops the power plant inquiry dead, since that’s a legislative committee. The investigation cannot continue, so there’s a good chance it will die away, lose the opportunity to find some of the relevant evidence, or simply fall out of the public’s line of sight.
They’re MPPs, by the way, not MLAs, in Ontario.
This is all about the government’s house crumbling; it has nothing to do with McGuinty’s nebulous personal reasons or (laughably) a run for federal leader. The province is on the precipice of both a major scandal and a financial disaster nobody, least of all McGuinty, has the moral courage to fix. This way he walks away as Premier, on his own terms.
More likely, though, by shutting down the legislature (he discovered he could do that after Harper showed him how) he’s stalling or shut down probes into criminal activity while making it possible to be appointed to some sinecure or other by the federal Liberals if they ever form another government in his lifetime.
As bad a leader as he turned out to be, Stephane Dion was a man of principle. He was one of the most honest and fortright people to lead a major political party in my lifetime. Turns out he was best off in a supporting role, but there was a guy who was truly decent and principled, who was willing to say what he believed in and stick with it no matter slings and arrows were directly his way over it. You can’t blame the Liberals for giving him a shot. He was one of the best human beings in Parliament.
McGuinty was an incompetent Premier and is a man without, as near as I can see, any clearly held belief in anything. He could and did do whatever it took to get and stay elected; that was his one and only guiding principle. Once it became obvious he wasn’t going to get elected anymore he had no reason to continue holding the job. He doesn’t believe he can win the next election, so he doesn’t care enough to keep working at the job; it’s really that simple.
Is it me (with knowledge of politics to rival Callista Flockhart’s ankles), or is the Canadian political scene largely comprised of the ruling party (realistically mostly a 2-horse race) simply having the better leader?
If Mike Harris still were in charge of the PCs, would McGuinty have stood a chance?
If Chretien hadn’t retired, would the Liberals have gotten another term governing Canada?
Again, purely flimsy superficiality on my part, but how often do we actually see two kick-ass leaders (respect to Jack Layton) go toe-to-toe?
For a lot of people this is no doubt true. Witness the last federal election where waitresses and college students were getting elected in Quebec. Even if you ask people in Ontario they will say, I didn’t vote for McGuinty. Well, no because you don’t live in Ottawa South.
People sometimes know nothing about their MPs or MPPs and are just voting for the leader they like best. It’s not like it’s difficult to at least do some background reading on the candidates in your riding.
Had Harris stayed on instead of Ernie Eves the result would have been identical. The PC government was well past its best-before date and was massively unpopular. I also suspect Chretien would have lost power in more or less the same manner as Paul Martin didl; the party was dogged with scandal, and Chretien was more tainted with it than Martin was. Frankly I suspect Chretien is an outright criminal who got away with it.
Same with, say, Brian Mulroney, who resigned before the jig was up at the federal level. The PCs were going to get demolished no matter who was leading them; the party was literally breaking up.
Of course, someone has to win and someone has to lose, and a loser NEVER looks kick ass in retrospect.
Let’s be honest, Stephen Harper is not the world’s most inspiring or likeable politician. Even the 40% of Canadians who voted for his party don’t generally look to him with a lot of admiration. He keeps winning because he’s largely seen as a safe and competent bet at a time when people are putting a huge emphasis on safety and competency; they look at the USA and Europe, say “well, we seem to be better off than that” and decide “more of the same” sounds pretty good. So Harper then gets a reputation for being a brilliant master of stretegy, which he really is not; he’s simply got a nose for exactly what Canadians want right now.
But fast forward a bit; if the world is more economically stable and the CPC isn’t bri9nging anything interesting to the table, Harper won’t have any affirmative reason for people to vote for him. He’ll just be this unlikeable guy in a sweater vest, and out he’ll go, and suddenly he won’t look so kickass anymore.
Probably the best matchup we ever had was in 1988, Mulroney vs. Turner vs. Broadbent. People remember John Turner as a two-time loser, but he was a dynamic, smart man with a hell of a track record in Trudeau’s cabinets. Mulroney was, albeit for a brief time, one of Canada’s most dynamic politicians, and Broadbent could put up a hell of a fight. That was a pretty good bout.
Canadian politics exhibits a strongly cyclical nature: parties typically hang on to power until they get too corrupt and complacent, and then get replaced by the other guy. The other guy then hangs on to power for a while, and the cycle repeats.
What is unusual these days is that the Liberals simply cannot seem to bounce back.
My buddy’s dad (RIP) was a local electrician back in the '70s, '80s, and ‘90s.
My buddy’s brother (RIP) committed suicide in the mid-‘90s, and after the funeral a bunch of us went back to his parents’ farm and got to drinking.
His dad’s plumber buddy was there, and the 2 old-timers had a few good laughs about "back in the day, all hammered up cruisin’ the back roads…"; not an uncommon thing, 'round these parts.
A few years later, the plumber, already a couple-terms reeve, entered into provincial politics, became our MPP, and headed up the enactment of the very strict new (and none-too-popular 'round these parts) drunk-driving legislation, introducing the breathalyser interlock punishment.
As messed up as they have been, let us bear in mind the Liberals have been out of power for just six and a half years, which in Canadian federal politics isn’t long. Parties are typically in and out of power for longer than that. The length of time parties have bene in power, starting in 1867 with John A. MacDonald’s Tories (some of these are rough estaimates based on a timeline:)
Conservative - 6
Liberal - 4
Conservative - 18
Liberal - 15
Conservative - 10
Liberal - 9
Conservative - 5
Liberal - 22
Conservative - 6
Liberal - 27
Conservative - 1 (the Joe Clark hiccup)
Liberal - 4
Conservative - 9
Liberal - 13
Conservative - 6
Really, six years in the woods isn’t that long. At the end of this mandate it’ll be 9, which still isn’t that long.
Oh I agree, I wasn’t refering to them simply being out of power. By “not bouncing back” I was refering to their apparent disintigration as a viable brand, inability to find a leader, etc. over the past 6 years.
Thanks Rick Jay, I learned something today. I had always thought all provincial houses had MLAs; must be the growing up in Manitoba.
Incidentally, I never had the chance to respond to your post about the aircraft, I should have clarified a bit more. The RCAF recently has had a tendency to buy the first iteration of a model respecting fighters including the F-5A, F-18A, and the Voodoo (Technically,although a B model, the A model was strictly a strike aircraft.) We have had great success in the past making a good airplane into a great one like the F-86 and our H model C-130s which have the highest flight hours in the world. The issue I have with the F-35 has less to do with the shenanigans that the Harper government has been playing with the press, but more about the airframe itself. Yes, it’s complicated and once it works it will be a really good aircraft in its projected role. So would the XB-70 Valkyrie.
By delaying our purchase until the majority of the problems are ironed out, we avoid the political issues the Americans are having between the GAO and LocMart and the technical issues like the ones they are having now that are somewhat similar to the ones that plagued the early F-18 and F-16. I think the Aussies have the right idea.
