en-us https://www.intensedebate.com/users/565224 Comments by PoliticalPundit http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144509780 Brilliantly put. Restores my faith in the common sense of my fellow Canadians! Keep on upholding the high standards for all Canadians, especially our troubled politicians. Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:22:51 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144509780 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144351309 Garbage. Conservatives will have to cooperate and support many of the Liberal government's bills. If they do not they will suffer the wrath of Canadians. Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:12:07 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144351309 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/heres-where-the-whole-campaign-vanishes-down-a-rabbit-hole#IDComment144350628 Mansbridge, in a premeditated move, laid a trap for Ignatieff and he fell into it big time. Shame on Mansbridge. He has lost a lot of credibility and so had CBC. He was shameful and very determined to play a king maker role in the election. Harper is a constitutional revolutionary. He has poisoned and warped Canada's parliamentary system into a strange republican system where he remains in power no matter what transpires in the House. How? By claiming, quite wrongly, that it is constitutionally and politically illegitimate for any other opposition party to form a government at any time between elections. If, after the election, a prospective Harper minority government falls on its Throne Speech or its budget that matter is punted to the GG. The GG must decided one of two things: 1) drop the writ for an election. He is unlikely to do this immediately after an election; 2) call upon the leader of the official opposition to form a government if he can assure the GG than he can obtain the confidence of the House. Harper, by warping and undermining our Parliamentary system, has put himself in a win-win situation. He can't loose power because he will hold a plurality of the seats. He will be called upon to become PM and form a cabinet. The opposition might defeat him but the GG's hands are tied. The GG will not be able to call upon the leader of the Official Opposition, as is custom, to form a government. The media, badly informed on the nature and scope of Canada's Constitution Act, 1867 as well as the unwritten rules of how Parliament functions, has aided and abetted Harper's constitutional revolution. Peter Mansbridge's entrapement ploy is merely the confirmation that he has sided with Harper all along in his attempt to subvert our Parliamentary and constitutional democracy. Shame on him! Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:09:05 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/heres-where-the-whole-campaign-vanishes-down-a-rabbit-hole#IDComment144350628 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144347831 Garbage. Conservatives will have to cooperate and support many of the Liberal government's bills. If they do not they will suffer the wrath of Canadians. Not much critical reasoning in your diatribe. Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:55:37 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144347831 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144347521 Mansbridge, in a premeditated move, laid a trap for Ignatieff and he fell into it big time. Shame on Mansbridge. He has lost a lot of credibility and so had CBC. He was shameful and very determined to play a king maker role in the election. Harper is a constitutional revolutionary. He has poisoned and warped Canada's parliamentary system into a strange republican system where he remains in power no matter what transpires in the House. How? By claiming, quite wrongly, that it is constitutionally and politically illegitimate for any other opposition party to form a government at any time between elections. If, after the election, a prospective Harper minority government falls on its Throne Speech or its budget that matter is punted to the GG. The GG must decided one of two things: 1) drop the writ for an election. He is unlikely to do this immediately after an election; 2) call upon the leader of the official opposition to form a government if he can assure the GG than he can obtain the confidence of the House. Harper, by warping and undermining our Parliamentary system, has put himself in a win-win situation. He can't loose power because he will hold a plurality of the seats. He will be called upon to become PM and form a cabinet. The opposition might defeat him but the GG's hands are tied. The GG will not be able to call upon the leader of the Official Opposition, as is custom, to form a government. The media, badly informed on the nature and scope of Canada's Constitution Act, 1867 as well as the unwritten rules of how Parliament functions, has aided and abetted Harper's constitutional revolution. Peter Mansbridge's entrapement is merely the confirmation that he has sided with Harper all along in his attempt to subvert our Parliamentary and constitutional democracy. Shame on him! Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:54:03 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/19/ignatieff-talks-minority-scenarios-it-shouldnt-matter-but-it-probably-will/#IDComment144347521 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/12/greetings-tiny-citizens-of-tomorrow/#IDComment142818501 And just when you thought SF could not get any funnier! Left me rolling on the floor of my office. Keep the irreverence coming Scott. Moment of levity like this are far too rare in our bleak campaign. For Harper, the little chicken little of Canadian politics, the sky is always falling. But of course he will prevent it from doing so but only if he is given a majority. Otherwise he walks away and chaos takes over. Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:16:13 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/12/greetings-tiny-citizens-of-tomorrow/#IDComment142818501 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/06/harper-and-the-press-matching-bubbles/#IDComment140606998 Harper's control over the media is remarkable! And very scary! Paul Wells took a week to figure this out and hopefully hopped off ScareAir and saved his boss a load of cash! Why don't his fellow journalists do the same? I guess they all suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. Thu, 7 Apr 2011 00:49:24 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/06/harper-and-the-press-matching-bubbles/#IDComment140606998 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140459456 Not true! Harper wants to cut public funding to all political parties because this funding keeps the opposition parties competitive! If Harper does not win big in Kenny's so-called Ethnic enclaves he will blame it on Canada's Election Act and the grants to all parties. Wed, 6 Apr 2011 12:32:59 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140459456 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140229825 David Smith (Nov. 2010 Literary Review of Canada) in his excellent review of C. P. Champion's book The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism 1964-1968, has this to say about Champion's strange chapter on Courting the Ethnics. "As Champion tells it, in the 1950s, the Progressive Conservatives with their "one Canada" appeal made converts among ethnic voters. But by the mid 1960s, Diefenbaker's "stubborn defence of the Red Ensign is thought to have alienated much of this new support." The Liberals, seeing an opening, set out to "[Court] Our Ethnic Friends" (the title of chapter six). No electoral or demographic evidence is provided to support this narrative, and in its absence there is good reason to doubt the claim. Who is an ethnic voter, and do all ethnic voters respond electorally the same way? Are there differences between urban and rural voters (ethnic or otherwise)? Are there variations in voting behaviour across regions? These questions are not raised by the author, let alone answered." And there is much more to chew on in his thoughtful review of what is a very stilted and rather strange book. Clearly, Champion's work cannot be relied upon to make a helpful analysis of Kenny's "Courting of the Ethnic Communities." What happens if Kenny's "Courting of the Ethnics" does not pay all political dividends that are expected and needed? Will he or Harper on election night pull a Jacques Parizeau and blame the "ethnics and money" for the failure to get a majority? Let's just wait and see, OK. Tue, 5 Apr 2011 19:12:42 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140229825 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140217765 Paul, what is the thesis of C. P. Champion's book The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism 1964-1968? For readers to make sense of what you are saying we have to know the author's central argument. Please enlighten us because this issue is central to the current election. Mansbridge had a pretty good shot at unraveling the immigration conundrum yesterday evening but still missed the mark. Tue, 5 Apr 2011 18:15:37 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/05/courting-our-ethnic-friends/#IDComment140217765 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139973093 Yes, bring on the wiki leaks on the Afghan War and Canada's treacherous cover up! Mon, 4 Apr 2011 20:44:51 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139973093 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139971349 By the way, has anyone noticed the picture. Mrs. Harper has on a pretty grim face. Her body language since the outset when Harper emerged from seeing the Governor General tells us everything that we need to know. Perhaps she has been shell-shocked by Harper's high pressured campaign of doom and gloom if voters don't elect him Prime Minister for life! She will become a Prime Ministerial widow, watching from behind the curtain as Harper performs the third Act of his trilogy. Mon, 4 Apr 2011 20:37:43 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139971349 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139966932 Yes, the biggest, boldest, Bastard ever! He will make Trudeau and every other PM look like boy-scouts in comparison. Why? Read my column above. Harper is quickly becoming the self-anointed Messiah. This Harper Messiah is emerging in response to the gloomy picture that he is painting of Canada's and Canadians past, present, and future. It is a brilliant self-serving prophecy! Mon, 4 Apr 2011 20:16:43 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139966932 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139964237 Paul's crunching of the numbers is also very enlightening. It mirrors what the Conservative operatives have been doing these past two years behind closed doors. They concluded some time ago that no matter how you did the math, Harper would emerge with a slim majority or, if he can paint the coalition as something worse than a nuclear meltdown, then Harper would get a big majority if the momentum was such that beleaguered Francophone Quebecers would come on side in order not to be left out of Harper much grander coalition. This is why the Conservative operators planned over the fall and through the winter for a spring election. I tried to convince some journalists that this is what Harper was up to but then they all thought I was smoking pot! And I also agree with Paul that if Harper gets a third minority government he will be in the saddle for quite some time to come. There is nobody in the Party that will try to push him out and the party loyalists will not stand for such a coup. To a growing number of Canadians Harper is their long sought after "Great White Hope." They thought they had found such a Messiah in Brian Mulroney but he turned out to be a Francophone Quebecer in disguise despite his Irish roots. Harper, many Canadians believe is the genuine thing - a true Christian Nationalist Strongman Messiah who will hold the world at bay, take on the Quebec secessionists if needed, and tackle head on all the domestic and foreign threats that increasingly fearful Canadians appear to be facing. English-speaking Canadians have been searching desperately for just such a Messiah for a very long time. Canadians are now well into the second act of Harper's grand play. It will be something to watch the 3rd act unfold once Harper gets his majority. Massive retribution and restructuring of Canadian society, despite what Harper says, will get underway in a flash. Mon, 4 Apr 2011 20:03:11 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139964237 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139955978 Remarkably prescient piece on Harper's doom and gloom strategy. Scare the living daylights out of enough naive Canadians and you get your precious majority. La politique du pire!! As Flanagan says: Politics is War! And Harper is on the war path. According to Flanagan the Harper Conservatives should have won the 3rd Punic War in 2008 but came up short for a variety of reasons. Most importantly Canadians did not trust Harper. Harper's response: Let's get voters to distrust the opposition coalition even more than they distrust me! In short, Harper is the lesser of two evils. Harper’s low-bridging and bubble approach seems to be working in spades. Why? Because he has convinced a great many Canadians, who are being made to fear for their jobs or who are currently underemployed, that it is ‘Strongman Harper or Coalition Chaos’. This is why Harper framed the election around the coalition issue and which the Ignatieff team did not see coming. The idea of a dreaded coalition of immoral liberals and the beyond-the-pale socialists and secessionists, Harper is convinced, will scare the living daylights out of hard-pressed middle-class Canadians. Their internal polls confirmed this for the Tories so they based their entire election campaign launch on this scare tactic approach – drive the coalition idea until the big lie is firmly embedded in the minds of fearful Canadians. And it has worked in spades. Better the devil they know, Harper and his contempt of Parliament, than the devil, Ignatieff, they have been convinced is not a Canadian, does not have their interest at heart, and will leave Canada once defeated. This was Mackenzie King’s very successful mantra in 1935 (Its King or Chaos) against a beleaguered R. B. Bennett’s New Deal. King simply ridiculed Bennett, and offered little in terms of a platform except the prospect of freer trade with the United States. Politics is 99% perception and therefore has little to do with reason. Ignatieff now understands this reality but it just might be too late to attract disgruntled and fearful Canadian liberal-minded voters with a very different emotional message. Ignatieff can only turn around Harper’s polling momentum if he can convince, using a very emotional approach, NDP and Green voters, and perhaps a few federalist oriented Bloc voters, that a Harper majority government intends most certainly to kill the social service state and to relegate all the left-of-centre parties to the opposition benches for a generation. In short, Ignatieff has to turn the table and proclaim loud and clear: "Its Harper and Chaos!" Mon, 4 Apr 2011 19:30:57 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/harpers-game/#IDComment139955978 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/03/that-seventies-platform/#IDComment139915883 A true thinking person's post. Bravo! Keep the info coming. Otherwise it is back to the 1950s with Andrew Coyne and his followers. Mon, 4 Apr 2011 16:40:25 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/03/that-seventies-platform/#IDComment139915883 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/03/that-seventies-platform/#IDComment139906549 Harper's 'jets and jails' and his pandering to the corporate world will take Canada back to the 1950s. Andrew does not mind that this is so because his mindset is truly one of the 1950s. For such a young man this is especially curious but I guess the New Conservative Right are really back to the future devotees. Coyne does not mind the Harperites spending like drunken sailors on 'jets and jails' and deeper tax cuts to global corporations, corporation who no longer have any sense of behaving like good Canadian corporate citizens but simply blackmail states around the world to give them a free ride or they leave for greener pastures (pun intended) where ever far greater profits might be. Coyne despises the fact that a Liberal government might decide to spend on the priorities of Canadian citizens rather than on the priorities of the global corporations, corporations that have been transferring good paying jobs abroad for over three decades. In doing so, these corporations have forced many western states to create jobs in the public sector, jobs that are needed as much as those in the private sector. Unless of course Coyne, like Preston Manning, believes that nearly all public sector jobs can be privatized so that the corporations can make more profits while making public services far more expensive. Mon, 4 Apr 2011 15:53:23 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/03/that-seventies-platform/#IDComment139906549 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/26/the-clash-over-coalitions-on-the-campaigns-first-day/#IDComment137883294 Harper's hypocritical anti-coalition diatribe displays his utter contempt for Canada's Constitutional democracy. he really despises our system of government! If the CP wins a plurality of seats Harper has a right to form a government and meet the House with a Throne speech and then to introduce his lame budget once again. If PM Haper is defeated on the Throne speech or the budget the next move is up to the Leader of the Official opposition and the Governor General. GG David Johnson will most certainly not be intimidated by Harper into granting him yet another tome out to get his act together nor will he dro the writ for another election. GG Johnson will call upon the leader of the Official Opposition to ask if he can form a government that will hold the confidence of the House. If he is given these reassurances the LOL will become Prime Minister! Harper may not like our system of Constitutional democracy, preceding instead the American Republican system, but he is contemptuous in the extreme in trying to alter it to suit his desire for unconstrained power and to become President for life. Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:22:21 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/26/the-clash-over-coalitions-on-the-campaigns-first-day/#IDComment137883294 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/21/is-parliament-about-to-make-a-comeback/#IDComment136533220 *** The leaked Flaherty budget appears to prove my point. Harper is keen on buying Layton's and Duceppe's support for the budget and then shoving this support in their face when the time is right to pull the plug on his own government. Standby for the real show! PM Harper and the Harperite gang will finesse their way around a contempt of Parliament charge using arcane tactics and strategies that Prof. Ned Franks of Queen's Univ. is alluding to. Hairs will be spit and the opposition will crack and the matter will be dropped. And no, Andrew, Parliamentarians will not have restored even a minimal level of their long lost power to keep the Executive to account for its actions and inactions. On the crucial matter of Canada going to war yesterday in Libya, it is very clear that the right of Parliament to decide has been trumped yet again by PM Harper's personal decision to send Canada's Armed Forces into battle without prior consent of our elected MPs. Mackenzie King is surely spinning wildly in his grave. What is even worse concerning this decision to go to war is that the leader of the Official Opposition and the leaders of the two other opposition parties gave their consent to Harper behind closed doors or perhaps over the phone!!! Debating the decision to send the Canadian Armed Forces into war -- Harper made it very clear that Canada was at war -- after the fact is further evidence that Parliamentarians have lost any real power over the future of the nation. Canada's Democracy is in shambles and most Canadians have no understanding or do not care one wit!! Andrew Coyne can dream the impossible dream but his comments put Canadians back to sleep rather than stir them into defending and promoting their democratic rights. Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:40:11 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/21/is-parliament-about-to-make-a-comeback/#IDComment136533220 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/16/coyne-v-wells-on-the-unlikely-possibility-of-an-election/#IDComment135587808 Andrew Coyne comes across as the hopelessly naive idealist. He forgets that "Power is power, is power!!" Paul Wells comes across as a political realist who understands Harper's modus operandi! Power is where it begins and ends. Without power you remain an eternal backbencher spitting in the wind. Harper hated being a backbencher. He graves power for the sake of power because it defines who he is and make it possible for him to transform Canada into his image of what it should be - a pale replica of a deeply New Right Conservative Republican United States. Yet, Coyne may get his wish - he would like the Harperites to be called to account for their wandering ideological ways and most Canadians it now seems would agree -- if Jack Layton comes to his senses and assists the Liberals and the Bloc to defeat the government. Harper's attack yesterday on the Bloc tells me that we are headed into an election. Harper's hand outs and photo ops all over the country, including money for a refit of Quebec City's Airport but not a new Stadium, also tells me that he will pull the plug on his own government. Harper has spent Billions of Canadians' tax dollars on stimulus boondoggles and is very anxious to reap the political rewards before Canadians fully realize how politically corrupt and unethical the entire operation was. Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:04:21 +0000 http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/03/16/coyne-v-wells-on-the-unlikely-possibility-of-an-election/#IDComment135587808