I actually have to thank you - you’ve brought in all of the completely and utterly ridiculous arguments I have seen in the comments section of the National Post.
You’ve gone with total denial (Robocalls conviction didn’t happen)
To a complete Tu quoque.
What’s next? I would guess lying about Mulcair, and calling him a “career politician”.
It isn’t disrespectful to hold politicians accountable for their misbehaviours, regardless of party. Indeed, it’s disrespectful to Canada if we fail to do so.
“None of that matters because the Tories will win after making thousands of phone calls telling likely Liberal and NDP voters that the polling places have moved.”
This statement implies that* it was because of the robocall scheme that the Tories won the 2011 election*. That implication is, in fact, demonstrably untrue; even the most cursory examination of the facts shows there’s no way in hell the Tories lose in 2011 without the robocalls. The robocall scam was illegal and there’s no real doubt more Tories than Sano were involved, but it did not affect the final outcome of the election.
A long-time NDP supporter I was talking to remarked that, so far, the election campaign has resembled The Wizard of Oz: Harper has no heart; Trudeau has no brain; and Mulcair has no courage.
[He’s somewhat pissed off at Mulcair’s move to what he thinks of as bland centralism]
Just so I understand, the biggest scandals you have up there are a robocalling prank, and a few Senators who submitted expenses for travel they didn’t actually take, even though per diem rules would allow it, and they reimbursed anyway.
This Yank (who has actually met Pamela Wallin, btw) doesn’t know whether to be dismissive or envious.
We’ve even apparently got a ‘Wizard from Oz’ behind the scenes.
Does that mean Elizabeth May is Dorothy? If she clicks her silver slippers together, will she find she had the power to get into the debates all along?
The Harper crew should be commended for their restraint, having only a mild “surveillance” sticker with a picture of a TV camera. I would have expected a stern “Absolutely No Trespassing – This Means You!” sign with a picture of a shotgun to ward off evil Liberals and dirty socialists seeking to do harm to the sacred Harper signs.
A little more than “a prank”, more like a subversion of the electoral process:
And it was not just one guy:
The robocalls were done by someone with access to the Conservative Party national voter identification database, known as “CIMS”. On this front, The Conservative Party stonewalled, and hindered any investigation, by not reveaing the list of people who had access to this database. The party’s lawyer Arthur Hamilton, instructed party workers not to discuss the events during the Elections Canada investigation of the Conservative Party headquarters. That’s the only reason more people were not charged, and
Sona was the only fall guy for the operation.
On the Duffy front, it is a little more serious than a few senators charging too many expenses; it begins with Harper’s “iffy” appointment of a senator who appears not to have been qualified to take the seat, involves a bribe to a sitting senator (to get him to shut up), and the subsequent whitewashing of an internal senate report, on the orders of unelected assistants in the Prime Ministers own office.
Oh, and the complete denial by Harper that he knew anything about what was going on, even though pretty much every single senior person in the PMO and Senate was in on the payment to Duffy.
Justin Trudeau held a talk just before the release of the budget and managed to say a number of astonishing falsehoods. I don’t know if you should blame him, his campaign staff, or both.
I have trouble getting a fix on he guy; sometimes he seems clever as hell, and sometimes he appears to be a total dumbass. I find that a troubling combination, as, whatever one can say about Stephen Harper or Thomas Mulcair, neither ever comes across as a total dumbass. He is far less of a clueless doofus than Michael Ignatieff was but that’s a low bar.