We could argue that if the Conservatives win again (even if it’s only another minority government), Dion will have to step down as Liberal leader, so maybe the Liberals won’t be so afraid of acting as an effective opposition. And if there is a real chance his government could fall, maybe Harper won’t make quite as many votes confidence motions.
I think a Conservative minority government isn’t a bad result; in fact, I think it’s the best thing that could come out of this election.
My preference would be a Liberal minority, with the ability to govern effectively with the backing of the NDP. That ain’t gonna happen. The worst possible result would be a majority Conservative government. I hope that won’t happen, but I wouldn’t bet against it. I think that the best possible result is a Conservative minority. I think that Harper probably made that the best he could hope for. Strengthening the Bloc with his culture commentary may have cost him the seats in Quebec that he needed for a majority. My riding in Guelph is still too close to call. The campaign has been more lacklustre than most since all the parties blew their budgets on the abortive bye-election.
This is pretty much what I’m hoping for. My riding is probably going Liberal with or without me, the MP doesn’t seem to have flubbed things too horribly and the Conservative candidate is, to put it mildly, my complete opposite so, although I dislike Dion, I’ll be checking the Liberal box.
But that’s what happened last time and the Liberals spent the better part of a year rummaging around the furniture looking for change and a leadership candidate. They wound up with Bob Rae (NDP Premier), Michael Ignatief (Academia), Stephane Dion and an assortment of 3rd stringers from within their ranks. Hell, Gerard Kennedy was king maker and he was a recently resigned Provincial Cabinet minister.
So you’d have a nasty combination of fiscal and institutional weakness stretched out over at least 6 months. The Liberals almost want to let the conservatives win a majority so they can focus on rebuilding their party infrastructure without having to spend political capital enabling the functioning of the parliament.
All in all I’ll go with the Conservatives who align best with my ideals (when they don’t actively jettison them for voter appeal). But my secondary consideration is the federal public service needs a few more years of “right wing” hiring to help balance out 13 years of “left wing” culture setting.
The other issue for me is the military. The liberals have been absolutely useless when it comes to funding the military and living up to our NATO commitments. They played games over the helicopter contracts which wound up costing billions and hurting readiness. They let the military be so under-funded that we couldn’t even transport our soldiers into combat zones, and had to rely on the Americans and Brits for airlift.
They left our arctic waters completely unpatrolled, at a time when the northern sea passages are opening up and several nations are jockeying to claim vital territory. Russia has already made claims in disputed waters.
In addition, their wishy-washiness on Afghanistan was disgusting. Everyone, including the Democrats in the U.S. as well as the UN and NATO, agree that Afghanistan is a critical battlefront and a just war. And yet, the Liberals wanted to pull Canada out of it, sending yet another signal to the U.S. and others that Canada is not a dependable ally. I’m pretty much a single-issue voter on this one - as long as the Liberals can be counted on to treat our military poorly, to refuse to defend Canada’s interests in the north, and to refuse to meet our commitments to the world, I wouldn’t vote for them. They could offer me a new pony every month, and they still wouldn’t get my vote.
I understand all that, Sam - and agree with a lot of it. So what would be your suggestion? (that’s not sarcastic - I’d really like to know.) I’m in Mississauga East, the Conservative is unacceptable to me, I’m not left enough for NDP, I see Green as a wasted vote and the Marxist wouldn’t get my vote for money.
So - Liberal or abstention?
Oh, I can’t tell you how to vote. Vote your conscience. Pick the best candidate that supports your views.
Oh, I hope I didn’t come across as asking what to do, sometimes I’m not real clear. I was interested, in what you might do in that type of situation as I respect your knowledge in things political even if we do differ ideologically. I know that that you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, so tried to give some info. It’s ok - maybe the debate will solidify my choice. 
Hear hear!
This thread should be resurrected, with the election still 10 days away.
No, the Liberals didn’t have anyone good on the farm team. That happens sometimes.
It’s not necessarily the case that Dion will be fired, he may learn from this and become a good leader. It’s certainly happened with other leaders. On the other hand, he may lose the leadership.
It too the Conservative movement 11 years to get ITS shit together, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; that was about as long as the Liberals were able to run a competent government (so it’s too bad they were in power for 13.) Harper’s government has, I suspect, at least one more competent term in it, so the Liberals have time to reassess themselves and figure out a way to draw in support from other parties.
People talk about the division of the left as if it’s something that needs correcting, and it does, but it’ll happen in good time. The Conservative movement was blown to bits after 1993 and we heard whining from them for years that it needed to be united and how the Liberals were exploiting their division to win elections, but that division needed to happen. The Reform Party was not up to the task of governing, and neither was the rump PC Party. The Alliance was a sad joke, an “alliance” that did not ally itself with the party it was supposed to ally with, like a person marrying themselves. The Conservatives were reunited when they had the right leader and when they were able to appeal to Canadians across the country.
Maybe the Liberals need to go through that a bit.
I’m reminded of one columnist well after the 1997 election, talking about Preston Manning and his Reform party, that they didn’t seem to trust democracy because it kept coming up with results they didn’t like. The Reform reaction to elections - remember when Manning wanted Chretien forced to resign because he was mentally unbalanced, and the evidence he was unbalanced was that he didn’t have the same policies as Reform? - was that something had gone wrong, that the people must have been mistaken in some way. The Liberals still have a lot of that now; they still have the arrogant, our-values-are-the-only-valid-Canadian values attitude about them. They remind me far more of Republicans than the Conservative Party does, with their exclusionary approach to debate; our values are correct, your are wrong, so forget policy. We have the right values. Everyone else is un-Canadian for arguing with us. It’s what Dick Cheney would say if he were Canadian.
The thing is that in a democracy, the people are correct. They vote the way they do for a reason. I’m not saying every voter’s informed and votes smartly, but if you keep losing there’s a reason for that.
The Liberals need some time in the wildnerness. The NDP still haven’t earned the right to step out of it.
I’m betting that no matter what happens in the election , Dion is just a place holder for Justin Trudeau, the only problem so far that I can see is that he has no fire to effectively run the opposition as everyone has noticed.
Times will be interesting.
Declan
Trudeau’s only 36 and, assuming he is elected, will be just a rookie MP, so Dion would have to hold the place for awhile.
If the Liberals actually get all Trudeaumania on us and sweep J. Trudeau into leadership, I’ll lose a lot of respect for them; they’d be moving more and more towards being just like the Republican Party. I’ll be praying for them to collapse and let the NDP become the Opposition.
Pierre Trudeau was a very influential social, economic, legal and political intellectual and activist before he ran for office – essentially he groomed himself from early on to change Quebec and Canada.
In contrast, his son Justin Trudeau is a simple high-school teacher. I very much like the positions that Justin takes, but I would never confuse him with someone who should lead Canada into the 21st century. He is not the intellectual and political heavyweight that his father was at his age.
For example, Justin is now 36. He has bachelor’s degrees in English and teaching, and is working on a master’s degree in geography. He has spoken publicly on a handful of non-controversial issues such as avalanche safety, reading novels, and Canadian involvement in the Darfur crisis.
Before the same age of 36, Justin’s father Pierre had earned a law degree from the University of Montreal and a master’s degree in political economy form Harvard, and had taken further post-graduate studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and doctoral studies at the London School of Economics. He had taken on the regime of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Anglo business establishment by founding and editing the hugely influential Cité Libre that set out the intellectual foundations of the quiet revolution. He had been a Privy Council economic policy advisor to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet. He had been blacklisted by the Quebec government from becoming a law professor, and had been blacklisted by the American government from entering the USA. All before he was the same age that Justin is now.
In short, Justin is a bright, nice person with a good social conscience, but he not anything like the intellectual heavyweight and political animal that his father was. There is nothing to suggest that he will grow into the shoes of a statesman, let alone the shoes of his father, who far more than most Prime Ministers very much changed the course of Canada.
Thanks to Paul Martin, who forced all other leadership contenders out of the party, and only then discovered that he’d left himself in charge of a gutted party that couldn’t govern effectively anymore.
I suppose a lot of the blame can be assigned to Martin.
More than any other person who has ever held the office of Prime Minister in our nation’s history, Martin is an example of the Peter Principle in action. He was a great finance minister and part of a very effective government, and he used that leverage to get himself promoted to a job he was hopelessly bad at, and hurt his party on the way.
It’ll take the Liberals awhile to fix themselves. When you’re even in a position that you would seriously consider Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff as possible party leaders, you really need to spend a few years sorting through some better candidates.
I can understand your hostility to Bob Rae, but I’m puzzled by your aversion to Michael Ignatieff. He’s much too far right for my tastes, which was why I was pulling for the ‘Anyone but Ignatieff’ camp and in fact, hoping for Stéphane Dion because I supported his ideas. While I still support Dion’s ideas, I no longer see him as the man to defeat Harper and so, I’m looking at holding my nose and supporting Ignatieff as the next leader of the Liberals.
Just curious what you have against him… I can’t imagine he’s too right wing for you.
His allegedly being right wing has nothing to do with it. The only positions I’ve known him to hold that have been identified with the “right wing” were support of the Iraq invasion, which was stupid, and disregarding civil rights to fight terrorism, which is disgusting.
I don’t like him because I think he’s a blowhard who’s in politics because he feels he’s entitled to it. He’s lived almost his entire adult life away from Canada and I don’t think he knows anything about or, when you get right down to it, really cares about me or other ordinary Canadians.
I think what RickJay has said has a great deal to do with how Dion came through the middle. Dion, Ignatieff, Rae and Kennedy were all close enough that any of them could have won by capturing the middle. Rae had parachuted in from the left; his old roomie Ignatieff had parachuted in from the USA and at that time was still supportive of the invasion of Iraq; and Kennedy had parachuted in from provincial politics. Neither Rae nor Ignatieff were centrist enough to bring over Kennedy’s people, whereas Dion was. Neither Rae nor Ignatieff were willing to withdraw so that any other candidate could win, whereas Kennedy and Dion were. That let Dion take the middle when Kennedy bailed after the first ballot and gave his delegates to Dion. I think that Ignatieff would have had a much better chance to take the middle if he had lived in Canada in the previous three decades, and if he had not been such a hawk over Iraq and shades of torture. With that sort of background, why would the average Canadian vote for him when they already had Harper and his party covering that angle?
Besides, he was UCC rather than Appleby. 
Plus, his wife hasn’t had an affair with the Rolling Stones.
Attempted funnyness aside, excellent post.
Gotta love that photo – you know, THAT photo – the one with Mick’s famed lips and Margaret’s “lips”.