CIVITATENSIS

The economic troubles in the US and economic worries about a similar meltdown hapenning in Canada is highlighting Stephen Harper’s record on the economy and in Economics. In plain English, as economic issues become prominent, the prime minister will have an advantage over all of his opponents. This is doubly so with citoyen Stephane Dion in light of the Liberal strategy.

The Liberals know that the economic focus advantages the prime minister and they have been trying to paint Harper as an economic neophyte. Harper may be many thing but naive about economics is not one of them. The prime minister does have an advance degree in the discipline, which is one of the things that the Liberals are probably baiting him to say. They’d love to see Stephen pull his academic credentials so that they can say that Harper is just as nerdy as Dion but with one less graduate degree. And may be Stephen is as nerdy as Stephane, but unfortunately for Dion it does not come across the national screens that way.

But back to the economy and how Paul Martin fits here. Ten advanced degrees cannot make up for common sense and the ability to communicate. As Norman Spector reminds us about Dion: “everything he knows about economics, he learned studying sociology. In France.”

Dion could not possibly match Harper on Economics so the Grits have dragged, as we’ve seen, Paul Martin to pinch hit for him. But even if Paul Martin had ten PhDs in economics, the most that Grits will succeed in doing is further making a whimp out of their citoyen leader –and may be that is the Ignatieff strategy at work here.

In their desperation, and with economic management likely to be the ballot question on Oct. 14, Liberals are talking up the idea of constituting a panel of party luminaries to advise Stephane Dion. Among the names being mentioned is that of former prime minister, and finance minister, Paul Martin.

The downside — as with the current strategy of highlighting Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae and other members of the Liberal team — is that Mr. Dion will be [further] diminished by the comparison.

The more Canadians would see of the economic advisory panel, the more his [citoyen Dion's] inadequacies on economic matters would be revealed.

No amount of experts can save Dion at this point. Some among the Grit luminaries has to know that. Either the Grit brass does not have a clear handle on the problem that Dion represents in the public’s perception, or they have understood it all too well.

If the latter, Paul Martin may have been called to help the party but not in the way that I originally thought. He’s back to help Iggy bury Stephane. Martin is the cleaner!! Let’s remember that Paul Martin is the party’s resident expert on regicide.

UPDATE:
Michael Moore came to Paul Martin’s rescue in the last federal election. Do I see a pattern here?

Paul Martin thrust himself into the 2008 election yesterday by launching a withering [or was it dithering?] attack on the Conservative government’s handling of the current economic crisis.

None of what Martin says is going to make much of a difference or turn the support for Liberals around. In fact, Martin’s appearances seem more a consolation to true Grit believers. If you make them remember past glories, everything will be well. They might even forget what an awful campaign the Big Red Machine has put on.

The gloom among Liberals before Mr. Martin and Mr. Ignatieff arrived at the breakfast speech was so pervasive that this reporter almost felt the urge to put a consoling arm around one or two and tell them: “And this too shall pass”.

“It’s too late this time,” said one who appreciates the full extent of the Liberals’ woes. “We’ve moved to the left of the NDP. This party is broken.”

Indeed, they are. Michael Ignatieff is just a rookie MP who has accomplished nothing as an MP and Paul Martin’s reign as prime minister hardly represents past Liberal glory. Where does one go from there?

Saying climate change may result in his two sons never seeing polar bears in the wild, a star NDP candidate from British Columbia called Thursday for the shutdown of Alberta's tarsands [Newflash: if a kid actually got to see a polar bear in the wild, he'd probably end up being the bear's meal]. "We have to do something to address the climate change crisis, we need to do so now," said Michael Byers, the New Democrat hopeful in the key battleground riding of Vancouver Centre [Oh, yes, the Crisis!].

"We need to go after the big polluters, we need to shut the [Alberta] tarsands down."

Byers is not advocating that oil production be shut down anywhere else in the country –in Atlantic Canada, for example. His reference to the tar sands is a not so hidden code calling for the destruction of Alberta’s economy.

Liberals figure they can tax the Alberta economy into destruction. The Dippers are after the same goal, but they want to take a shortcut. That’s NDP efficiency.

Liberals are resurrecting a muted Paul Martin and his “economic legacy” to throw against Stephen Harper. It is likely an attempt at slowing down the erosion of voter confidence in Liberal economic abilities.

“Paul Martin’s record as finance minister is something that everybody in this country, Liberals in particular, should be really proud of,” said [James] Maloney.

Jean Chretien has a very different version of how the deficit was slayed, by whom and whose idea it was, of course. But Michael Ignatieff is not mentioning Chretien. Nor is Professor Ignatieff reminding us that Paul Martin was a cabinet minister and Montreal MP when AdScam figures circulated paper bags filled with money for their friends right in front of him but Martin never noticed.

Typically, Liberals have used former PMs to battle in election campaigns, but they don’t usually bring out the most recently defeated one against the very guy who defeated him. The Grits replaced Martin, presumably for someone who could beat Harper. Bringing Paul Martin to the scene, even if only as a mime, is more a reminder to voters and to Stephane that he “didn’t get it done.”

Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe wants to reduce Quebec’s dependence on oil by half within 10 years.

Mr. Duceppe has been saying since the beginning of the [election] campaign that oil impoverishes Quebec while making Alberta rich [Apparently we are the only people in the world --let alone the country-- who sell oil!!!].

“It’s a real drain on the province’s economy,” Mr. Duceppe said Saturday during a news conference in Montreal.

Once again, Quebec separatists are promoting greater animosity toward Alberta and Albertans in order to get votes. Oil makes Alberta rich on the backs of Quebeckers, don’t you know.

Duceppe is welcome to buy his oil exclusively from Hugo Chavez if he wants. But let’s be fair: if wants nothing Albertan, he should also petition the feds to stop sending Alberta’s money to Quebec?

Heather Mallick is far too quick with the gratuitous insult. Those who find Palin appealing are white trash, and those who do not are nice Dems or enlightened Canadians.

Supposedly, Mallick has received tons of hate mail for the column. I bit self-important, perhaps. I don’t see what the fuss is about. Alas, to me her ‘white trash’ appelation and all the rest say something real about Mallick more than they do about Palin.

It’s not as if Americans are going to get their electoral cues from someone writing for Mothercorp, whose name they’ve never heard.

What an interesting election campaign we’ve had so far.

A leader in an opposition party is imploding, but the bulk of the press is dancing around it largely pretending that it is not happening. This is a story that mixes mice running, a cat hiding, and ships sinking.

The media have played up various “gaffes” by the Conservatives - tasteless jokes, pooping puffins and the like. To pump up the drama, they need to create the illusion of a horse race. But what we have here is a train wreck. It’s the wreck of the Liberal Party as we know it.

“He is totally unprepared for the job of national leader of the Liberal Party,” says one veteran observer. He talks like a professor, sometimes unintelligibly. He has no sense of audience. He knows nothing about putting a campaign together, and he doesn’t like to take advice. Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, his two chief lieutenants, complain that he has never made an effort to make friends with them. “Nobody I know has any real relationship with the guy,” says the observer.

Under normal circumstances, the party in power would be bouncing all over the moribund opponent. Cats get most animated after they caught the mouse and they want to play with the captured rodent for a little. But the ruling party can’t. They are afraid of a repeat from the last election in which, the pundits have interpreted, the early perception that the Conservatives might win a majority made electors pull away from supporting them. So, we are left with a ruling party that wants to take advantage of the Liberal implosion but can’t be seen to be taking advantage of it; we have a party that wants to climb in the polls and solidify its position for a majority on election day, but they don’t want to do it too visibly and certainly not too quickly.

It has become a game of cat and mouse. The mouse is chasing the cat in this game. The mouse is already tired, and the fulminating feline feigns fatigue and slows down for the rodent.

Secondary players, the rest of them, are buoyed with enthusiasm as Liberals supporters jump off ship faster than they can find life jackets. They’re in the water waiting for a rescue ship, though they have not decided which rescue ship they will hold on to. Enough of them, however, are latching on to the NDP and the Green, perhaps until they get to shore on election day. Under normal circumstances, this would be good for these secondary players. But unless there is a total collapse of the Liberal party, a collapse of Kim Campbell proportions, they will not benefit significantly from the main mouse’s misfortunes. There is no danger, that is, that either the NDP or the Greens, to say nothing of the Bloc (another ship that’s taking water) can form a government.

So, unless all of the Liberal ship jumpers go to the Greens and NDP permanently –a scenario that would also require the complete collapse of the Conservative vessel, the pay off for these secondary parties will be small.

In the meantime, we will continue quietly to skirt the near collapse of the Red Machine, and the Blue Machine will continue to hide / downplay its own gains for the sake of not giving the media the impression that they are a Paul Martin-style juggernaut. To keep mixing the images, the cat does not want to show that his role in the game is that of cat. The only one who gets to pretend out in the open that he will be prime minister (surely a mouse posing as a cat) on October 14 is Jack Layton. He gets to have all the fun! Go, Jack Go!!

For years Quebeckers have so ignored Jack Layton that he now looks new and fresh to them. That’s just a little bit funny. Good for them, I guess. Jack’s fortunes seem to be on the rise in the province the more they see of him.

Stephane Dion, on the other hand, has the opposite trouble. The more voters learn about him over the country, the less they like him. It doesn’t matter who is standing next to him.

But for all of Layton’s popularity in La Belle Province, he may not win much in Quebec, except to funnel away from Liberals and left-leaning Bloc supporters getting a few more Tories elected. Go, Jack Go!!

I just finished watching a short report with Anderson Cooper on CNN (Certainly Not News) about the shrinking northern polar ice cap. They are sounding the bell about the end of the ice cap as we know it, and predicted that the northern ice cap will be gone in five years. Cooper just nodded: “That would be extraordinary.” Not a single word was said challenging the outrageous claim.

I really wish I were a betting man. I’d take that bet gladly. Something tells me that in five years, not remembering what they just said today, the same folks will be arguing that the expanding polar cap is killing the cute polar bears.

When science ceases to allow the possibility of doubt and dogmatically shuts down questions or other points of view, it has ceased to be science.

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

September 20, 2008 at 12:37 AM EDT

At least Galileo was afforded the benefit of a trial by the Inquisition. No such process was observed by Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific body, when it summarily dismissed its director of education for saying that creationism should be treated as a "world view" and not simply a misconception.

The culprit, Professor Michael Reiss, who is also a priest in the Church of England, made some remarks that are sensible enough, except to those who adhere, dare we say, religiously, to scientific dogma. Prof. Reiss was not preaching creationism from his Royal Society pulpit; he strongly defended evolution. Indeed, his main point was that children from religious upbringings should be engaged in science lessons, rather than dismissed out of hand as cranks: "There is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts that they have – hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching – and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion." This is a perfectly lucid argument, one to which you would think the Royal Society would gladly adhere. When children raise questions based on what they have learned at home or in church, synagogue or mosque, they should be respectfully engaged. Their minds will not be changed by outright dismissal or ridicule, but possibly by respectful and dispassionate debate.

Some of the eminences who serve as Fellows of the Royal Society, however, mounted their lecterns to enthusiastically condemn Prof. Reiss. His enlightened views were then adamantly rejected by the Royal Society, which claimed they had "damaged its reputation." Its dismissal of Prof. Reiss makes it clear that, when opinions diverge even slightly from accepted scientific wisdom, they will be met with ruthless suppression. This says something sorry about the state of scientific enquiry as practised by that august body. Prof. Reiss has not been forced to recant or placed under house arrest. He has only been packed off to his old job at the Institute of Education. But the loss of a job over such a minor heresy suggests a new inquisition has been convened, absent a certain due process of the old.

As we head into week three of this federal election campaign, the media are convinced that goofy gaffes disguised as scandals are what the voters want to hear most about.

If this election turns out to be as boring as the media are claiming, it will be largely their doing. Things in Quebec are heating up and the Bloc may be on the rocks, the Greens are picking up steam and have the potential to influence the outcome in some ridings where the tally might be tight, the dollar tally for campaign promises is skyrocketing, Citoyen Dion’s wimpy image has become unshakable. Exaggerated demands for the political hanging of one government minister with a questionable sense of humour are repeated ad nauseaum. LSD and pot, LSD and pot: Jack Layton should have done more of both while driving drunk. Dion backtracks on the promised Green paradise only to skate right back to where he was at the start. Tomorrow, Dion is likely to attempt a repackaging of the Green Shaft right here in Alberta.

All these are exciting. Yet, it seems that the media are determined to bore us to death with the disjointed and trivial; kill us by a thousand gaffes they want. There is never a shortage of gaffes and when gaffes are all you look for, that’s all you’ll find.

Most Albertans are convinced that Stephan Dion wants to rip them off with his Green Shift, or the Green Shaft as it is better known in this end of the country.

Liberal politicians like David McGuinty (there is a name that Albertans truly trust)

argue that the tax could help Alberta solve many of its environmental and image problems related to the oilsands, while still treating Albertans in a fair manner.

Did you read that correctly? Liberals are going to help Alberta!

As they relieve us of our money, they will help Alberta to solve its environmental problems. That would be largely the problem about which CBC, the Red Star, David Suzuki and Jack Layton have convinced the simple minded elsewhere: oil companies are turning Alberta into a wasteland (twice the size of New Brunswick!!!). We have gone from a province in which these same dumb people believed that we paved our streets with gold to one whose natural settings have now been devastated. The reality is even if Alberta’s environment looked like the surface of the moon, the last person Albertans would trust to fix any thing for them would be a liberal, let alone an Ontario liberal. Most Albertans are aware of what Ontario and Quebec fixers can do.

The second is that they will help with our image. That may as well be an open threat. The same people who bad mouth our province now claim that they want to help with our image. The translation in simple: give us your wealth and we will stop bad mouthing you. That’s their version of help. These are the same people who have been unable to dispel the image of their own leader as an incompetent university egghead! And they want to help us with our image? In truth, not even Alberta Liberals would want to receive public relations advise from Stephane Dion’s “dream team.”

Last but not least, they claim that Liberals are going to treat Albertans fearly. Out here, we can all trust that it will be the opposite. Thanks, but no thanks. It was not all that long ago that Ken Boschcoff made clear who their plan was aimed at and said precisely what the Liberals mean to do with the Green Shaft:

Ontario Liberal MP Ken Boschcoff has plainly stated that the Green Shift is a way to transfer money out of Alberta into the rest of Canada, with roughly $9 billion of the $15.3 billion collected each year returned to Canadians with annual incomes of less than $40,000.

Boschcoff called it “the most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years. The shift will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians.”

The McGuinties, Dions, Ignatieffs and Raes have momentarily confused us with Ontario voters.

You know it’s bad when even the Glob rebukes the mercurial Danny Williams:

Mr. Williams’s shenanigans have represented the very worst in federal-provincial bickering, and have taken it to levels that would have made Ralph Klein wince. Mr. Williams, himself a provincial Conservative, has registered his own "ABC" ("Anything But Conservative") political party. He has staged a press conference in which a man in a puffin costume emerged holding an "ABC" sign. He has said that "a majority government for Stephen Harper would be one of the most negative political events in Canadian history." Mr. Williams is not only embarrassing himself; he is also doing a disservice to Newfoundland and Labrador, deliberately soiling relations with the party likeliest to hold government after the election even as he attempts to exact revenge for perceived equalization slights in the past.

Pundits and pollsters have been remarking that the Canadian campaign is yet to gel around issues, one or a couple of issues. Pollsters notice that many things are grabbing the public’s attention at once.  The current developments in the American and world financial markets, however, are now focusing attention toward the economy.

If that is so, Harper has the advantage. No one expects Jack Layton to preside over much other than his rump, let alone the national economy. Gilles Duceppe is a former communist. His economic platform is informed by his former beliefs. The people who make the money should give it to those who want it. Citoyen Dion has also demostrated his lack of economic competence: he already demonstrated that his Green Shaft will cost us all dearly. That Green issues will consume his attention, that a Dion government is interested in playing the shell game with our money instead of allowing us to keep it, and that his plan, as he has laid it out, would pump carbon dioxide into the economy’s engines forcing them to stall.

That leaves Harper as the guy with the graduate degree in economics, the one with the most credible economic knowledge and experience. If the minds of voters are directed to the economy, most reasonable voters (not members of the League of the Perpetually Scared) can see the difference.

The now typical Liberal flogging of a “hidden agenda” notwithstanding, according to most polls the Tories are inching toward the finish line at a steady pace. The slow pace will get the “league of the perpetually scared” Ontario voters more and more used to a potential Harper majority. What is more, Ontario voters are used to mimicking Quebec in the federal scene. As Quebec becomes more comfortable with Harper, most likely so will Ontario. Chances are that Newfoundlandes will also demonstrate that they are not Williams’ sheep.

There is no great Tory surge in the polls. That’s true. But that means that there is no great monster with which to scare CBC viewers and latte-sipping central Canadian urbanites.  In true conservative fashion, just slow and steady advance that is less likely to be shaken by electoral mood swings.

Michael Coren has chosen to be charitable in his interpretation of how Quebec journalists, politicians and members of the intelligentsia in general are reacting to the news that some of the candidates in the present election campaign have Christian beliefs of one sort or another.

Coren thinks that Duceppe is stupidly going after Opus Dei caricature, disingenuously detaching it from the Catholic Church.

 But Dan Brown is evidently big in Quebec and, much to the chagrin of the Bloc, so might be the Conservatives. Accordingly, Gilles Duceppe announced that the Tory candidate in Saint-Hubert-Saint-Bruno, Nicole Charbonneau Barron, was an Opus Dei member. Then Raymond Gravel, a Catholic priest and outgoing Bloc MP, opined that, “Social conservatives such as members of Opus Dei may be running for office in order to change policies concerning abortion and same-sex marriage.”

Earth to dotty separatist: It’s not Opus Dei but the Roman Catholic Church that teaches that life begins at conception and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. You might know that if you weren’t suspended from almost all priestly duties. Indeed it is entirely likely that in a less liberal place than Quebec in the 1980s, this former prostitute who worked in Montreal’s gay leather bars would never have been ordained in the first place.

They are not at all detaching it from the Roman Church. They know very well that their smear of an Opus Dei candidate is also an attack on the Church. They also know well that there will be no backlash. Quebec is the same province in which a bunch of radical feminists desacrated Mary Queen of the World cathedral but the police refused to press charges.

Among journalists, academics and politicians of most stripes in Quebec it has for long been fashionable to ridicule Christianity, and Catholicism in particular. It is the bigoted fetish of their Intelligentsia to claim that the Christian faith renders one incapable of occupying and exercising public office. It’s what passes for intellectual enlightenment and sophistication. It’s as fashionable in Quebec as their anti-semitic cousins were in the nineteenth century. Quebec’s anti-Catholicism has become the last refuge for ‘enlightened’ scoundrels.

See also here for a peak on how Le Devoir reports the presence of Christians on the ballot as though they were announcing that candidates have cancerous moral failures (en francais). Barbara Kay examines the double standard.

It’s hard to dignify the risible but effected indignation of Citoyen Dion over Ritz’ tasteless joke, but we are in the middle of an election. In what was a semi-private conversation, Ritz cracked jokes. He has offered sincere apologies. That should be that.

Has there even been a Grit that didn’t make pseudo-comical remarks about their political opponents to their peers? So let’s get off the soapbox. Ritz apologised, but he doesn’t owe anyone his first-born daughter. Le citoyen francais says that

…Mr. Harper has no choice now but to fire the Minister.

“But now, Mr. Harper has no choice. He must fire this man because of his complete lack of sensitivity that he expressed himself by these unacceptable remarks. He must be fired right away,” Mr. Dion said.

There was a time when I could at least respect Professor Dion’s academic opinions. The professor of political science ought to know well that “sensitivity” or the lack thereof is not a recognised category of ministerial responsibility.  Neither is bad humour or lack of comedic ability. If it were, Dion himself could never have become a minister of the Crown.

In a similar contexts, Dion has probably said worse of others. We all have.

Jean Chretien’s legislation governing political donations left the Liberal Party of Canada plagued with money problems. It was Chretien’s parting gift to Paul Martin.

Besides money, now it turns out that the ethnic vote is also moving away from the Grits.

Immigrants, once a bedrock of support for the Liberals, no longer automatically vote for the party, loosening an allegiance that dates back to the Trudeau era.

Fifty-eight per cent of visible-minority newcomers supported the Liberals in the 2006 federal election, down from 71 per cent in 2000, according to an analysis of the Canadian Election Study, a survey of voting behaviour undertaken by academics.

Pollsters, researchers and politicians predict the dramatic 13-point drop in Liberal vote share among visible minorities will continue on Oct. 14.

I can already see Citoyen Dion blaming the results of election night on “money and the ethnic vote.”

Step aside Listeriosis. Here comes Bob Rae.

Mr. Dion already trailed Stephen Harper by about 2:1 before Mr. Rae’s well-publicized appearance with the Liberal leader in Halifax on Tuesday. Today, following the appearance, Mr. Dion’s index score tumbled 16 points to 32, compared to 51 for Jack Layton and 108 for Mr. Harper.

Could it possibly be that Ontario voters actually remember?

The recently dubbed Liberal campaign aircraft, Profess-Air, may be a fitting metaphore for what a Liberal government headed by Citoyen Dion might be like:

Along with crew costs, the on-board mechanics and catering and its age, it costs between $18,000 and $20,000 an hour to fly. It is about 35 per cent less efficient than the Conservative and NDP planes.

Mr. Dion had expressed concern in a recent interview that the plane is more polluting than he had hoped. But the Liberals are buying credits to offset carbon emissions.

It’d make unscheduled stops for lack of energy! It promises to land even on rocky ground even though it will likely not get to any. While there may be savings in cheaper operating prices flying Profess-Air, it is still more than one third less efficient. Offsetting the guzzling by the purchase of “green” credits does not remove the fact that it’s still polluting. The balance is an appearance of savings cum green posturing, less efficiency, more time wasting, more pollution, higher costs and frequent groundings for lack of power.

Garth Turner’s campaign (Liberal MP for Halton)  gets caught in a straight but crass attempt to manipulate the media. It’s worth it listening to Garth while he tries to peddle away.  The Grits wanted him; they have him.  See here and here.

How likely is it that Garth Turner didn’t know, as he has claimed in the interview that followed, who he was talking to? How likely is it that Turner does not know his campaign manager’s son? How likely is it even that the campaign manager’s son does not know Garth Turner?

Good for CPAC for showing Turner their displeasure.

Lysiane Gagnon’s commentary on the inclusion of Green Party’s Elizabeth May to the televised leaders’ debate is well worth reading.

Participation in a leaders debate should not be decided by emotions. It should rest on objective factors. Until last week, the rules set up by the television broadcasters were clear and perfectly fair: The party had to have proven popular support, which should ideally be measured by the percentage of the vote won in the previous election; a threshold of 5 per cent - which the Greens didn’t meet in 2006 - seems reasonable. These days, Green support is much higher (9 per cent in a poll released on Friday), but this is a fleeting criteria since surveys are not a sure way to measure a party’s real level of popularity. Only the actual vote, on election day, can do this.

The other rule was that the party had to be represented in the House of Commons. Yet, the Greens have no MP elected under the party’s banner. Blair Wilson, who recently became the first Green MP, was elected as a Liberal. So what’s Ms. May doing in the leaders debates?

It’s a disgrace that the broadcasters and the leaders of the Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Québécois caved in to popular pressure and to Ms. May’s complaint that she had been discriminated against. Her supporters’ worst argument was to claim that she was a victim of sexism and that the presence of a woman was needed in a debate among “men in suits.” This is not a healthy way to promote the cause of women in politics.

What political party Gagnon does not mention? Citoyen Dion’s. Implied in her comments is the clear notion that Dion is wrong in having supported May’s participation.

See the whole here.

We all have heard media pundits and pollsters write and comment about how Stephane Dion is losing traction with the voters in the campaign’s opinion polls.

But there is also clear evidence that Citoyen Dion may also be losing grip with reality:

Stéphane Dion is portraying his Conservative and NDP opponents as a team working together to elect Stephen Harper.

[...]

“Many times Mr. Harper and Mr. Layton are together…” Mr. Dion told reporters in St. John’s.

Traction and grip and too different things, but either way, Citoyen Dion is losing something.

More evidence yet that this politician thinks that the country is Ontario.

The NDP putting priority on family? I’d like for Jack to define that word for me.

We are almost one full week into the election campaign, and so far it has been rather bizarre. Sure we expected the attacks. Puffins and pigs have figured prominently, a Newfoundlander and a Nova Scotian leading the charge on the animal front. A majority of people believe that a leader denied participation in a TV debate should be in it, but that was before she called them all stupid. One leader announces 575 million in Green subsidies, should he become PM, but then turns around and accuses the PM of buying people votes.

The Liberal media headed by CBC have been working hard to show that the PM’s party is in majority territory while the PM and his team try hard not to climb too fast in the polls. One might imagine that the silly gaffes in the Tory campaign are deliberately designed to keep from running away from the Red Machine too fast and too prematurely. The Conservative PM is speaking like a Dipper saying that he will look into a conspiracy to hike gasoline prices, while the once-upon-a-time wishy-washy, touchy-feely NDP leader gets right down mean, determined to prove that he is not Audrey McLaugh-lin. Even the professor has taken the low road with gusto. What’s next?

The greatest irony of all is that the most valuable promise this last week, the promise to increase oil-refining capacity, was made by a man who is not even running in this election.

 It would appear that at least one of Citoyen Dion’s supporters is not content enough with just slamming Alberta in the media on a daily basis.

Kick Alberta Out Of Canada And Nuke It Until It Glows Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

It’s not Canadians that are stupid, it’s Albertans. Who are really Americans who don’t understand that in the US the federal government controls all the natural resources, so if Alberta became a state, it’s [sic] loser officials and so-called business leaders would be out of a job and dipping transfat in high fructose corn syrup at Timmy’s. Dion should change his slogan to “Crush Alberta.” He’d get millions of votes from decent Canadians who hate genocidal duck-oiling rednecks.

There is a new earth-shaking environmental policy for the Green-Red pair to proclaim! Jack Layton too would be prrrroud!

In the fantastic mind of the “stupid Canadian” (May’s words, not mine) who left the comment at TAC, the untimely and unfortunate death of a few ducks constitutes genocide (technically meaning the killing of mass numbers of human beings); all Albertans are guilty of it and should now be nuked. Anthropomorphising ducks! This youngster has been watching too much Disney.

The story began as to whether Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, called Canadians “stupid” during an interview. It has now migrated to Green political muzzling. Kevin Libin has the story here.

SDA also has the scoop here.

a federal politician in this country dares say what we all know about Bloc jobs:

Mr. [Michael] Fortier said the Bloc has achieved no real results, spearheaded no major projects and created no employment.

"The only jobs that Bloc MPs have created in 18 years are their own," he said. "A vote on the Bloc is a wasted vote – Quebecers are already realizing the Bloc can’t deliver, and are already turning their back on this powerless party," he said.

It’s about time.

At a time when more and more Canadians think that political parties have far too much power over elected representatives, Jack Layton promises to increase his own power over them, should he form a government. For the sake of scoring political points with the locals, Layton announced inVancouver that he would make floor-crossing illegal.

Later in Vancouver, Layton told an audience in Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson’s riding that he would outlaw floor-crossing in the Commons.

The result of such idea has draconian implications. It would increase the power of party leaders like Layton and undermine the power of electors as well as the ability of MPs to act according to what they believe to be right. In essence, Taliban Jack would rob MPs their ability to make decisions based on their own convictions. It would force them to tow party lines and shut up, or forced them quit triggering frequent and expensive by-elections.

I know that there is a populist appetite to tie MPs to the nebulous will of their constituents. But in situations when a party heads into political territory loathed by those who voted a member in (think AdScam, for example), an MP would not be able to abandon his party’s corrupt ways to respect his constituents’ views. This is not Recall Layton is proposing, but the shakling of MPs to party bosses.

There is a greater chance for Joseph Stalin to rise from the dead and return to power in Russia than there is for Taliban Jack to form a government in Canada. We all now that. But it’s good to see that Layton truly understands how voters, Parliament, and its rules can work to increase the power of political elites.

If we don’t trust those who represent the public, effectively we don’t trust the public.

Four former Canadian prime minister have joined in a call to arrest climate change or face the end of the world.

These political characters instilled so much fear into Canadian while they were in power that the public tossed out as soon as they a chance. As I heard Dave Ruterford say this morning, collectively (Clark, Turner, Campbell and Martin), the advising four have less time at the PMO than Prime Minister Harper. That’s almost true, but it does drive the point. Not exactly paragons of leadership, they are. When we think of Canadian prime ministers, their names do not readily come to come to mind as examples of sound political judgment.

Does any one really care about what these folks believe?