Beating a Dead Horse

Stephane Dion, go directly to an election, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, do not abstain from confidence motions. A mediocre budget, Cadscam, Brodiegate, what does it take? Does Stephen Harper need to defecate on the flag in the middle of the House of Commons while giving the finger to a Mountie? What? The Bloc and the NDP are ready, your own people have grown impatient. You can bring down the government, Stephane, as Rob Schneider says, you can do it! I've sort of sat on a progressive fence for a long time now, but damn it, I'm so tempted to explicitly join the NDP or the Greens in large part to register my dissatisfaction with this foot-dragging and equivocation.

What Keen's Firing Says About Harper's Tories

I think the most straightforward lesson to take away from the tarring of Linda Keen as a Liberal hack and her subsequent firing is that we have yet another example of how the Conservatives view everything as a partisan opportunity. This is the Karl Rove strategy perfected in the US.

What I'm going to suggest to the Liberals and the NDP and the Greens is that, by Harper's rules, everything is fair game. Every time you can score partisan points, recognize that, if Harper was in your position, he would not hesitate. I don't know that this is the most tasteful way that politics is done, but you've got give as good as you get, right?

Stand Up For Canada*

*Ontario not included.

The Star's editorial today is spot on about Ontario getting cheated out of representation by population. It seems that the job of raising concern over this has largely been left to Queens Park. The Liberals and the NDP need to be more vocal about this issue.

In general Ontario goes along to get along as they say. And sure, as long as we had all the money and a great deal of political power concentrated here, that was fine. Now though we have a Western-based party obsessed with non-renewable resources at the apparent expense of manufacturing and we need to stand the hell up and assert ourselves. We want our democratic rights, we want our votes to count! Stop trying to silence us!

Parties that pussyfoot around this issue for fear of losing votes elsewhere should not expect Ontarians' votes in the next election.

Some Personal Firsts and More on MMP

In my new neighbourhood, I'm represented politically by a woman for the first time ever at the federal or provincial level. Also, both my MP and MPP are NDP members here - firsts at both levels for me.

What does this have to do with MMP? Well, for years I lived in a riding where the only parties with any hope of electoral success were the Liberals or the Conservatives. Even if I had ardently believed in the platform of the NDP, it would have mattered nothing if I had voted for them as they always ran a distant 3rd or 4th.

In Trinity-Spadina the situation is only different in the roles that each party plays, here the hypothetical Conservative supporter is left not being able to support the party of his or her choice.

Of course there are probably many more ridings in which the Liberal-Conservative duopoly exists. One wonders if those in the Liberal Party who oppose MMP (but to their credit, not all Liberals do oppose it) are worried about losing the soft-NDP voters who vote Liberal to stop the Tories.

Terminate the Terminators

The NDP has tabled a sensible piece of legislation on the banning of so-called terminator seeds. There is simply no reason to bring such seeds into being other than to enrich the agribusiness giants at the expense of farmers.

Who is at "fault" if May does not win her seat?

I'm not a member of any political party (and I'm really not planning to change that) so I've sort of treated the Dion-May alliance/fiasco as a kind of spectator sport (albeit one with potential long-term consequences). Naturally all kinds of opinions have been flying, particularly between Grits and Dippers. My attention was caught today though by something that Jason Cherniak said:

"...if Jack [Layton] were smart he would agree to not run a candidate against Elizabeth May. Then Dion would gain much less from his deal and May would no longer be able to attack the NDP. As things now stand, if May loses and MacKay gets less than 50% of the vote, then Layton will be solely to blame. How many non-partisan progressive voters will like that one? I suspect May understands that she needs to take down #3 before she can even think about Green Party government."

I suppose, given Jason's roll in the Liberal party, he's just doing his job. That said, let me give a response to his rhetorical question about what "non-partisan progressive voters" (like me) would think about May losing Central Nova. First of all, it's one seat. I don't see how Layton would be "solely" to blame anyway. If May runs a mediocre campaign is that Layton's fault? What if the NDP candidate finishes ahead of May, is it then solely May's fault that the NDP lost? Moreover, the NDP never insisted that May run in Central Nova - a riding where the NDP was competitive (at least more so than either the Greens or the Liberals).

Now I don't want to sound like someone who's adopted NDP talking points or anything, so let me just reiterate: I don't think that anyone could point to a single individual and say that they are at fault for an undesirable outcome in an event as complex as a Canadian election.

This is starting to remind me of the bickering liberation fronts in Life of Brian, remember, what the "non-partisan progressive voter" (i.e.: me) wants is for Harper to go away.

Desperate hook-ups and the sad man with the dog

Well, he of the sad dog is probably staying put. I hope he's not pouting for photo-ops today. Stephane Dion and Elizabeth May (it's everywhere in the Canadian blogosphere, I'm too lazy to link to it) have forged a little alliance against MacKay but I doubt it will unseat him. (Go to the results and do the math yourself.)

I can't help but feel as though the Dion-May thing was set up like a last-call one-night stand, all bets are off after the next election I suppose. That's not to say that such an agreement couldn't work - it just comes off as, I don't know, a tad desperate for both of them. I doubt it will have the longevity of the Harper-MacKay shotgun wedding of a few years back (an up-and-comer married into a storied old family for some respectability - and connections), and I'm not sure what, if any, results it will produce for either party at the ballot box.

In extending all these relationship metaphors, the NDP is playing the part of the sanctimonious single type - disgusted by its skanky acquaintances but secretly really REALLY hurt that no one asked it to roll in the hay. Even if it would have totally said "no" such an offer.