Whether The Coalition Lives Or Dies, The Damage Has Been Done

Lorrie Goldstein has an interesting article today in the Sun [thanks Sor] about the divisive tactics that the coalition parties have used to further alienate and anger Western Canada. The Liberal intelligentsia have long considered Ontario as their only necessary stronghold for national support, and the latest quest for power only displays how much contempt for the rest of Canada they possess. Borne out of a long-standing strategy of siphoning money from western Canada, the Reform/Alliance movements were formed, that ultimately culminated in the leadership and election of Stephen Harper. A westerner, Mr.Harper did more to unify Canada in his short time as leader, than the entire efforts of the previous Liberal governments. And how was western Canada then rewarded for this? The coalition government that was formed in the back rooms of a defeated Liberal party run by a desperately irrelevant leader, a labour unionist lackey with a penchant to provoke disunity, and a party whose sole existence depends upon the taxpayers of a country they do not wish to belong to.

And now Michael Ignatieff has waded to the front of the line in the Liberal ranks, using his own powers of persuasion. He alone now holds the power to either cautiously rebuild the Liberals, or else seek the vaunted power of a coalition enterprise. Mr.Ignatieff is the inheritor of a failed coup, but it does not mean that the new general is entirely set upon putting away his camo fatigues. He can always use it as a threatening bludgeoning weapon at any time, meaning that the damage to Canada has already been done, and western Canada will always have to live under the threat of usurpation of power so long as the tentative coalition deal lives under a minority Conservative government.

As Ian MacDonald explains, the tactics taking place in the past week have been anything but exemplary of the democratic consent they purport to uphold:

Think about it–only a week ago, Dion was still barricaded in the opposition leader’s fourth floor office in the Centre Block. Today, Dion is out, and Iggy is in, having been officially confirmed as leader last Wednesday, after Dion was forced out, while Leblanc and Rae dropped out.

The party had no choice but to dump Dion after the failed parliamentary coup and the bungled delivery of his blurry videotaped address to the nation. In every coup, the first thing they do is take over the TV station. These clowns couldn’t even find it. Instead, as in every failed coup, the leader was stood up against a wall and shot.

Despite what Jack “the season of miracles” Layton says, the power of the coalition now rests in the hands of a man crowned by the divine right of the Liberal caucus. As written by Pat MacAdam in the Ottawa Sun today, the Liberal Party has been known for orderly transition of power from one leader to another through the “natural” changing of governance as chosen by the people. By agreeing to this coalition power in principle, and choosing a leader without democratic ascension, the Liberals have diverged from that path forever. Until the Conservatives win a majority government, the threat of this accord hangs over Canada as much as the omnipresent but understated fact that one day Western Canada might just pick up their bags and leave Ottawa forever.

Related

Sandy has similar thoughts about Mr.Goldstein’s article.

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How Shrewd Is Harper’s Partisan Ploy Of Stacking The Senate?

There have been a number of speculative comments about the announcement that Stephen Harper will stack the Senate with Tory loyalists determined to bring about Senate reform. Many believe it is the right thing to do for a number of reasons, mainly citing that sometimes you have to dance with the devil in order to beat him at his own game. A staunch reformer of the unelected Senate, Mr.Harper announced to the obligatory boos and hisses from the opposition, that he will fill 18 vacancies in order to bring reform from the top-down. But not everybody agrees with the timing and the alleged motives. Certainly if one believed that Stephen Harper only makes decisions in the best interests of democracy and country, then the move seems an altruistic one. But given the fact that the man narrowly escaped being dethroned by the opposition by the saving grace of the Governor-General, it has been suggested that he does not have the implied confidence of the House to make Senate appointments. This from Norman Spector:

As I wrote on the commentary pages of this newspaper on Tuesday, it would be unprecedented for the Governor-General to refuse the Prime Minister’s request for an election if the Conservatives are defeated in January.

[...]

Following the same logic of parliamentary propriety, I’m very troubled by the Governor-General’s decision to accept Mr. Harper’s request to prorogue the House-an act clearly designed to prevent a confidence vote on which the Conservatives would likely have been defeated.

[...]

That said, I can think of no grounds on which Mme. Jean should accede to the Prime Minister’s request to appoint 18 senators at this time.

Under section 24 of the 1867 Constitution, it is the Governor-General who appoints senators on the advice of her first minister. In the current circumstances, it would be entirely appropriate for Her Excellency to refuse the advice, until such time as Mr. Harper demonstrates to her that he has the confidence of the House of Commons.

I’ve almost quoted the entire article, but it’s important to read in it’s entirety. It shows you that in the minds of many Conservatives [perhaps red ones] the moves by Stephen Harper show more partisan ploy than political prudence. After all, as Mr.Spector notes, to appoint Senators moments after the majority members of the House of Commons indicated it was going to defeat you on a confidence motion, cannot exactly be swept under the rug of ordinary political matters. More likely, it seems, is that this isn’t about Senate reform so much as it is political insurance against being toppled on January 27, 2009, stacking the Senate now in order to maintain political power there before the Liberals appoint their own. It’s been said as much by the Conservatives, that this isn’t the first stages of Senate reform, but preempting the Liberals. Like all forms of preemption, however, it often fails to live up to the scrutiny of morally altruistic reasoning. “We needed to invade Iraq because they were about to invade us” doesn’t sound as noble as “we needed to invade Iraq because they attacked us first”, for instance.

Then again, Mr.Spector’s reasoning is not iron clad. A commenter in his own blog points out that until the House has officially voted down the confidence of the government in power, the Prime Minister has every legal right to appoint Senators. Much like his broken promise of fixed elected dates, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper hasn’t broken the letter of the law, only the spirit of it.

Conservatives say this is the “chicken-egg” paradox to Senate reform, and had it been during any other time than prorogation, I might agree. After all, Mr.Harper is setting a patronage record here that, unfortunately, breaks the previous Liberal one. There are some meritorious arguments for Mr.Harper’s move within the partisan vein, however, that I can even partially agree with. Licia Corbella writes in the Calgary Herald that stacking the Senate was the only way to prevent a most grotesque abuse of power if the coalition government were to appoint separatist Senators and environmental socialists like Elizabeth May. In this sense Mr.Harper is committing a lesser of two evils, by making moves that preserve some integrity of government even if the coalition usurps power of an non consensual public. And while I deride Mr.Harper for abusing principle, it’s true that desperate times breed desperate measures.

The National Post editorial evens suggests as much:

In such a climate, throwing the threat of a packed Senate into the equation before the identity of the government is properly established in the House of Commons feels like putting the cart before the horse. If the Prime Minister does not think he can survive the January showdown, appointing new Senators is an unfair extraction of partisan advantage from the breathing space he was granted by the Governor-General last week.

So let us debate whether or not what Mr.Harper has indicated he will do is something that is in the best interests of Canada, but we should not for a moment buy the line that this is an ideologically pure motive to bring about Senate reform. Under the current political climate, that’s utter nonsense.

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I’m Already A Spoiled West Coaster

After the most mild October, November, and December I have ever witnessed, cold weather is finally coming to Vancouver. And I, as a now spoiled western inhabitant of the moderating oceanic effects to the weather, am getting upset about falling a few degrees below zero. I worked today and it was chilly enough with that wind whipping off of Burrard Inlet.

Quick, someone remind me how much colder it is everywhere else than here and to stop whining so much.

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Do You See A Correlation?

Two articles from the Toronto Star [I didn't pick them, but National Newswatch does my news browsing for me] today show me two things I have been thinking on for some time.

1. Harper Tories keep big lead in poll

According to an Ipsos Reid poll, the latest fiasco that the opposition parties pulled by trying to seize power with the most contrived coalition since the forties, has put the Tories well ahead of the Liberals and NDP and well into majority territory. Any sort of nonsense about the Canadian public having a majority stake in the “progressive” vote against the Conservatives is quickly falling by the wayside. The poll showed the Conservatives sitting at 45% to the Liberals 26%, and the NDP plummeting to 12% [no doubt on news the NDP leader was scheming with the Bloc Quebecois behind closed doors].

This tells me that the Conservatives have not only the consent of the country to govern, they quite possibly have a majority consent that exceeds the so-called “progressive” vote.

2. Ignatieff, Harper virtually tied in poll

I was quite thoroughly rebuked for suggesting Stephen Harper should step down in the near future and allow a new candidate to take this party forward. The reasons in his defence were numerous, including but not limited to his advancing the party past two Liberal party leaders in elections. Fair enough.

But with a poll that suggests Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper are virtually tied at 28% for Iggy and 27% for Harper, it tells me that there’s something dragging down the Conservative vote and keeping some centrist voters from leaving the fence. After all, if you take the above poll and assume that the Conservative party [which is not exclusively the domain of Mr.Harper, much as we've been led to feel otherwise] has a majority consent of governance from the public, and you take this poll, it would certainly appear correlative. Is Mr.Harper dragging down the support for the Conservative party?

It’s a Toronto Star/Angus Reid survey, so I would be interested to see other polls corroborate these statistics, but if other pollsters show a similar response, it would lead me to lean toward my theory that while Mr.Harper is very popular with party faithful, he isn’t helping to secure that soft voter support that seems to be indicated exists in the Ipsos Reid poll.

Thoughts?

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