Well hey, if he doesn’t want the job, let someone else do it. I just can’t with people like him who says they want our votes and then acts like we’re doing HIM the favour. I get where he’s going south in the polls, but I wouldn’t say it’s a tipping point quite yet.
If the Liberals and NDP can work together and potentially even form a coalition, but the Harper Conservatives can’t work with anyone, what does that tell us about the Harper Conservatives and their esteemed leader?
If he doesn’t win the election, then that’s exactly what will happen. I don’t understand why the statement “If my party loses the election I will not be the Prime Minister” is a problem.
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If the Liberals and NDP can work together and potentially even form a coalition, but the Harper Conservatives can’t work with anyone, what does that tell us about the Harper Conservatives and their esteemed leader?
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I would not put it past the Liberals to form a coalition with the Conservatives. I don’t think they will, but another third place finish and you’d better believe the self-declared “natural governing party” will have some angry true believers demanding they do something to stay in power if a coalition with an NDP plurality doesn’t work out. After all, they happily propped up Harper’s crew from 2008 to 2011.
Harper’s position, which seems reasonable to me, is that the plurality-winning party should get first crack at forming a government, as in fact his did in 2006 and 2008. That’s always been his position.
When is the last time we had a federal coalition government* in Canada? We don’t really do coalition governments here. The party with the most seats always has the first shot at forming a government.
*(It was back in WWI.)
ETA: I see RickJay beat me to it.
I would agree with this - whichever party wins a plurality should get first crack at forming a government. The trick is, that government must have the confidence of the majority of the MP’s.
If there is a weak minority CPC government, they will fall at the first confidence vote. (I don’t for a minute believe the Liberals will prop them up again) The question is … what then?
Does the GG see if another Party can hold the confidence of the majority of MP’s in parliament? Or does he immediately call for a new election? I would say the former is what should (and will) happen.
At any rate, I hope it does not come to this. Harper’s party is busy shooting themselves in the foot, and I think the wheels are really going to come off the campaign in the near future.
If a minority government is making reasonable compromises then supporting it is the right thing to do. The alternative is complete dysfunction and a constant series of elections. The worst damage that this idiot has perpetrated on the nation has mostly been during his unconstrained majority tenure.
Interesting two-part analysis here of how Harper may be the worst PM in Canadian history. A good point-by-point appears about halfway down the first part:
http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/06/07/news/harper-worst-prime-minister-history-part-two
That’s the most outrageously biased piece of reporting I’ve seen in my life.
I get that he has a defeatist attitude because he has no inclination to work with anyone. Harpo’s been too extreme for so long to actually work with anyone. It’s all or nothing. the other parties are saying similar things about forming the government, they aren’t saying that they won’t be leading their party.
Pierre Trudeau still lead his party after Joe Clark won the minority, lucky for Pierre there was enough of a coalition with Ed Broadbent’s party to bring Joe down at the first sniff of non-confidence. The problem with Harpo is he’s never wanted to work with the other parties, so that if this situation arises he just doesn’t have the opportunity to go back in power as Trudeau did.
In both cases, the BQ still existed as a millstone to government. That may not be the case this election. I see no reason to doubt that a majority NDP/Liberal government would not be able to strike a deal.
My goodness. Denigrating the Prime Minister.
How horrible.
Oh, I think he’d work with anyone to remain on as PM. The central purpose of the Harper government is that Stephen Harper be the Prime Minister. They don’t seem to have any other particular policy of significance.
Your characterization of Harper as “extreme” is bizarre, the sort of stuff people were saying in 2005 when he had the “secret agenda” of horrible things he would do and none of them happened. Remember when he was going to ban abortion, bring back the death penalty, cancel Medicare and declare martial law?
Stephen Harper is the LEAST extreme Prime Minister that Canada has had in my lifetime. The Conservatives have done very little of actual significance. The lists of Harper horrors you read on Facebook are largely things they DON’T do, like support veterans, or are administrative things blown up into nightmares they aren’t, or are things like C-51 that are symbolically significant but don’t really do a lot, and that’s the Harper way of doing things. It’s like his unflinching support of Israel; it plays well to some people and poorly with others, but in the end it doesn’t mean anything, really. Support from Canada’s Prime Minister has about as much an effect on Israel’s security or the plight of Palestinian people as does tonight’s Blue Jays - Red Sox game. There’s no landmark thing you can say they’ve done, no attempt to really do anything even approaching extreme. Trudeau changed the Constitution, Mulroney brought in free trade, Chretien cut budgets and balanced books. What has Harper done? Well… I can’t really think of anything like that. The Conservatives just do little things and say stuff that plays to the voters. What the hell is their major policy initiative? The child tax credit? Beats me.
That’s not a “coalition.” Trudeau didn’t form a coalition government with the NDP. He just had his party vote in a confidence motion with them. You know who else did that? Stephen Harper.
In the case you also have to believe that the vast majority of Canadian media is also “outrageously biased”, from your perspective. Because the sordid history of the Harper government is factual and verifiable and has been widely reported in our major newspapers and news broadcasts, and commented on by respected and credible sources. For instance:
Starting in 2010, Harper tabled a bill with 883 pages that included changes to Canada Post and environmental assessments. Since then, Harper has passed 10 more omnibus bills to circumvent debate in parliament, often making sweeping changes to laws and regulations. “All have been an abuse of process and shown contempt for Parliament by subverting its role,” editorialized The Globe and Mail last fall. “Major changes to policy and law that should have been examined by MPs have been pushed through with almost no debate, sometimes with disastrous results.”
In 2013, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which represents 20,000 federal scientists, found that hundreds of their members said they had been asked to exclude or alter technical information in government documents for non-scientific reasons, and thousands said they had been prevented from responding to the media or the public.
In 2012, the government launched an unprecedented assault on Canada’s environmental laws when it introduced Bill C-38, mentioned above – an omnibus bill that put a halt to automatic environmental assessments of projects under the federal government’s purview. All told, the Fisheries Act, Navigable Waters Protection Act and Canadian Environmental Assessment Act were either repealed or simply gutted, while the NEB was neutered.
“So you can go through all the legislation that was changed… there’s a direct link to the long-standing requests of the oil industry to remove these environmental barriers to rapid resource development,” says Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based environmental group.
And so on and so on … it’s possible to go on for pages.
This wraps it up nicely:
For many political observers, one of the most alarming changes Harper has ushered in is not even legislative: it’s the way in which political discourse is conducted. “They have a clear policy of dishonest spin on almost everything,” says [Duff] Conacher [founder of Democracy Watch]. “They’ve done that far more than any other government in the last 25 years, which is to lie and stick to the lie.” … Michael Harris agrees with Conacher, saying “(Harper) is a person who does not believe in the truth… For the prime minister of a country where he’s setting the entire agenda and putting the signature across a whole government and where words don’t mean much, we are in a lot of trouble… He is the first prime minister who is a marketer, an aluminum siding salesman. He is not a truth teller.”
In fact I DO believe that. That’s exactly what I believe.
ETA: The Sun newspapers are the only right-leaning papers that support the Conservatives. And, no, they’re not Fox news. They have a very decent editorial team and opinion writers. And, facts are readily verifiable.
(The National Post is a close second.)
The things that didn’t happen were things that would have been political suicide, though that didn’t stop Harper’s lunatic backbenchers – the fundies and evolution deniers that were inherited from the Reform Party – from clamoring for them. But I mentioned in the previous post some of that things that did happen, and the previously cited articles present a much more complete list. Many of them, like the trashing of environmental regulations, the contempt for science and the silencing of scientists, are unprecedented in Canadian history.
Harper isn’t extreme? This is the guy who, as head of the Canadian Alliance, wrote a fundraising letter in 2002 which was essentially a barely coherent rant against climate change and the Kyoto Accord:
“Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations,” says the letter, signed by Harper.
“Implementing Kyoto will cripple the oil and gas industry, which is essential to the economies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia . . .
… He also blasted the treaty for targeting carbon dioxide — which he said is “essential to life” — and played down the science of climate change as “tentative and contradictory.”
Harper went on to promise a “battle of Kyoto” in hope of defeating the Chrétien Liberals’ efforts to implement the treaty legislation in the House of Commons.
American Tea Party types and other fringe right-wing extremists believe the same thing about their media, too. Apparently the only dependable media for the far right are Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Sure. That’s why Sun TV was so successful that they went off the air after one or two astoundingly embarrassing years. They were unable to obtain must-carry status as a news channel because they weren’t a news channel, they were widely regarded as a right-wing joke. They featured raving lunatics like Ezra Levant and a few other raving dipshits whose names I don’t recall. It was like Fox News done by third-graders with severe ADD. The Sun newspapers are part of the same organization.
I think it was censorship to not allow Sun TV to be part of the basic channel package of TV providers. This is why they couldn’t make a go of it. Did I agree with them on everything? No, I didn’t. But what’s fundamentally wrong with having an alternate view on politics? The CRTC has no business censoring what political party people support. How is this even possible in Canada?
A news channel that presents itself as right-wing isn’t even allowed to be included with the CBC, CTV, Global News, etc. as an alternative? These other news channels get to be included but not Sun TV?
I don’t support that decision at all.
“Censorship”? That’s just extremely silly. No one was censoring Sun TV. They were free to blather on and froth at the mouth all they liked. The CRTC decision was to deny them the special privilege accorded legitimate news organizations in the public interest, because news – accurate, objective, honest news – is essential to a functional democracy.
You can’t just set up shop as an opinionated broadcaster of politically motivated drivel and call yourself a “news channel”, and expect to be granted all the privileges of a legitimate news organization just because you say so. The special provisions of the must-carry privileges are not with respect to political opinions but with respect to actual news – the word has a specific meaning. The CRTC acted responsibly and in the public interest.
I disagree. And I have a right to disagree. The CRTC should not have had a right to disagree with a news channel presenting an alternate view.
Again, I’m not frothing at the mouth over this, and some things Ezra Levant said are downright embarrassing, however I think in a democratic society we should be, need to be, presented with alternate opinions.
Brian Lilly was quite good and informative.
The “trashing of environmental regulations” is the sort of thing I mean by administrative matters blown up into nightmares. Canada’s network of environmental regulations is in fact basically the same, and if anything stronger, than it was in 2006. There isn’t more pollution belching into the sky or pouring into the rivers. This isn’t a dirtier country than it was then.
Harper’s letter about Kyoto is what it is, but
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I stated Harper was not an extreme PRIME MINISTER. What he wrote before he was Prime Minister is irrelevant, and
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Perhaps you do not remember the Kyoto Protocol (not “accord”) and how all that went, but it was a sad joke that no reasonable person ever thought would accomplish anything, and the man most responsible for killing any chance of Canada contributing to its success was Jean Chrétien. His government signed it and then cheerfully ignored its existence as it withered, which, in fairness, is exactly what most of its signatories did, too. He did a fine PR job of pretending his government cared while it did nothing to achieve Canada’s targets. The Harper government didn’t kill Kyoto. They buried the corpse.
Again, “opinion” is not news. The privileged carriage of news channels is intended to ensure public access to news, not the inane chattering of opinionated lunatics.