Knives out

The Maple Syrup Coalition isn't even formally announced yet and the knives are out for Harper. He is going to experience the reality of Conservative loyalty, AKA "those who live by the sword..."

The Maple Syrup Revolution

Skdadl calls this the Maple Syrup Revolution.
So we could call the Conservative exit "sugaring off"?

Absolutely correct

Curiosity Cat says it's time to clear the air:

. . . if Ignatieff or Rae or Lebanc oppose any reasonable coalition terms which will allow a progressive government to replace the Tories next week, then they will not – repeat not – become leader of the Liberal Party. Liberals will rise up in wrath against any candidate who spoils this chance to install a government which will work with the other two opposition parties to protect Canadians against the gathering storm of the recession.

They're baaaak!

NDP, Liberals reach deal to topple minority Tory government
Wow! I guess they'll just be waiting now for a chance to vote.
I've been reading comments to the effect that Alberta should not interpret this as an attempt by Quebec and Ontario to reassert themselves and to dictate the national agenda again.
And basically I would agree, in that the regional component, so far at least, has not been a deciding factor in the drama of the last few days.
But I wonder if there might turn out to be a some truth to it, in this sense:
A few weeks ago, Ontario was deeply, deeply upset when they became a "have-not" province in terms of Canadian equalization formulas. To those of us who live in provinces whose economies ebb and flow, the degree of angst we heard from Ontario was surprising. Radio hosts were babbling, and op-ed writers were outraged -- it seemed like Ontario thought the sky was falling, and the rightful and natural order of the universe had been overturned.
So it was in this context that Harper produced his contemptuous, insulting, do-nothing economic statement, demonstrating he could care less about Central Canada's economic troubles. And thus he made it much, much easier for Ontario and Quebec to support the return of the Liberals to power.

They aren't impressed

Over at Macleans blog there is a post by Aaron Wherry titled Eulogy for a government? and the first comment is this one:

I donated 1000 dollars to the Conservative Party of Canada this year, and 400 to my local campaign.
What has transpired in the last 72 hours has absolutely disgusted and disillusioned me. At the first Conservative Party Convention (in what seems like a lifetime ago), we were told, and told each other that we would do it better than the other guys. Accountable government, no tricks, no slimy games, just good governance and a United Right.
We, the grassroots of the CPoC have told ourselves that the compromises in policy were simply a temporary condition necessary to achieve power.
We the grassroots of the CPoC told ourselves that the misgivings of this government in its campaign spending, were simply trumped up allegations, created by vengeful officials at elections Canada and members of the left wing media.
We the grassroots of the CPoC turned a blind eye when government grew under Harper, not shrank as promised.
We of the grassroots watched with awe as the facade finally came crashing down this thursday, and the people we placed in power, were exposed as lying, conniving, inept opportunists, just as bad as the people we removed from power 3 years ago.
I will never donate or volunteer on a campaign so long as Stephen Harper is the leader of the Conservative Party.

Ouch!

Thanks, Steve

If there is one thing which threatens a continuation of the PC-Reform coalition government, it is a Liberal-NDP coalition government.
Because more Canadians actually voted for the Liberals and NDP than for the PC-Reform.
So what is the first thing the new Harper minority government does?
Introduce a so-called economic plan so inadequate, callous, cynical and ideologically rigid that the Liberals and the NDP are now on the brink of creating a coalition government.
Thanks, Steve -- there was no way these folks were going to get together otherwise!
The Conservatives made the classic mistake of thinking that the other parties were just like them -- short-sighted, partisan, and incapable of taking any action that would serve the best interests of the country rather than the party. Now the Cons are gobsmacked - and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
Here's the buzz tonight -- Far and Wide writes:

There will either be more concessions from the Conservatives, namely a serious stimulus package, or we will see a coalition government that introduces exactly that. Despite the rather feeble spin attempts by Conservatives and their reeling supporters, you've already lost, it's just a matter of who makes the ultimate call.

Glen writes:

For a man who, until recently, made everything into a confidence motion to strong-arm his way through Parliament, this has to be one of the most humiliating and cowardly things he's ever done.

Aaron writes:

There are 305 elected members in the House of Commons. In our democracy, you either find the support of more than half of those elected representatives to form a government and pass legislation or you do not and are defeated. There is not a lot of ambiguity about that.
You have to work with the other parties in a minority. Harper chose not to. What I find bizarre about all this is: the Conservatives seem surprised.

WesternGrit writes

It will get ugly, but we need to fight back.
67% of the Country didn't vote Conservative, and now they are ALL uniting together to overthrow Harper who is only a small angry minority. Canadians are speaking through their MPs - which is the way a Parliamentary democracy works.
This is not the American Republic - where the President rules... The elected MPs ARE THE PEOPLE, and they are speaking.

Dawg writes

By forcing a coalition dialogue to happen, Harper let the genie out of the bottle. Coalition talk has its own momentum. It takes a major event to bring feuding parties into alignment. A threat to their survival is one of those events that can trigger new ways of thinking. Now anything is possible. A paradigm shift is taking place right before our eyes.
The potential here is simply enormous--as are the risks.

Yappa sums it up:

Pressured by the IMF, OECD, APEC, G7 and G20, among others, to join the rest of the world's wealthy countries in addressing the economic meltdown, and facing increasing domestic pressure to ease the recession, the PM attempted a risky ploy: an economic statement that combined a refusal to create a stimulus package with an unrelated announcement that he was cutting all funding to the country's political parties, thus bankrupting every party but his own.
The ploy was evidently intended to tie the hands of Canada's other political parties by making opposition seem self-interested.
Counting on the Official Opposition to be ineffective until they select a new leader, expected in May of 2009, the Prime Minister underestimated the will of all opposition parties to stand up to him.
It can now be seen that the PM made a grave tactical error. Canadians are already suffering from the recession, still in its first quarter, and quickly turned on a government that refuses to lift a hand to help them. The opposition speaks for all its constituents when it says that the government must fall and a coalition must take its place. The man who staged a successful hostile takeover of one of Canada's founding parties, a man long known as one of Canada's craftiest politicos, is poised to be toppled.

Ian Welsh writing at POGGE looks at the long view:

Harper's strength last election was primarily in two places: the praires and non-urban southern Ontario. Oil is going to drop below 50 dollars soon, when it does the oil sands in Alberta are going to become unprofitable and the good times in Harper's western base will end. Likewise, southern Ontario has been taking it on the chin for sometime, and no matter what happens to Detroit, that's not going to end. While Alberta will vote Conservative no matter how bad things get, the rest of the prairies are not nearly so dedicated, and southern Ontario might well remember that the Liberal party was much better for them than the Conservatives, who have refused to do anything meaningful to help Canadian manufacturing.
If the Liberals and NDP decide to do this, then, they have to be in it for the long term—they need to expect to govern for at least four years. An election in the middle of the recession will doom then, they have to put in place policies to get through the recession and out the other side, or they will be slaughtered.
If they are willing to work together, are willing to commit to stick this out for four years, then they should grasp the nettle and defeat the Tories.

How stupid does Harper think we are?

Harper thinks that he can get us to focus on the party funding issue, so nobody will notice that he doesn't know what is he doing when it comes to the economy.
Well, its not going to work. We actually can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we know when we're being flim-flammed:

The true horror wasn’t in the let’s-pretend numbers contained in the much-dreaded fiscal update from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. Those were fluffed to give the delusion of deficit-free, rising-revenue fiscal stability, subject to so much imminent change as to be almost meaningless.
It’s the nightmarish aftershock from a sneaky, ill-timed, irresponsible government move to eliminate the $1.95 annual per-vote public subsidy to political parties which, given the united lineup of opposition parties that instantly formed Thursday, sets up Canada for another federal election.

And NabWeekly makes a good point -- the people who are being penalized by the Cons political funding bait-and-switch plan are the Canadians who did NOT vote Conservative in the election:

Isn’t it just like the Conservative government to use the world’s and Canada’s financial crisis to undermine Canadians who didn’t vote Conservative but voted Liberal, NDP, and the Bloq . . .When you tally up the Canadians who didn’t vote for Conservatives in my opinion tells us the majority of Canadians didn’t want a Harper government. Taking away funding to other political parties that Canadians taxpayer money goes towards is just a fiscal farce to gain strength in the Conservative Party for fear of his defeat.

Iggy!

Yes, I agree with what Steve says.
I can't pretend to have studied Michael Ignatieff as much as Steve has.
But I do believe that Ignatieff will be the leader that Canada needs -- particularly now when the 2009 Depression will give the Conservatives the excuse to try to jettison our important social programs.
Ignatieff will be able to convince Canadians to vote for him because he will articulate a vision for Canada and engage Canadians to support it. Ignatieff can, I think, "close the deal" with Canada.
It was this basic task, I am sorry to say, that Stephane Dion never was able to achieve.
I was one of those who believed two years ago that Michael Ignatieff didn't deserve the leadership of the Liberal party because he hadn't worked hard enough or long enough for it. Now, I believe, he has. He has proven his capacity to grow, and this has enhanced his ability to lead.
I was also one of those who questioned Iggy's judgment in supporting the Iraq war. But as Steve explains it:

. . . Unlike the neocons, unlike Harper, Ignatieff had INTIMATE understanding of Iraq, he knew the Kurds and Shia, he worked within the human rights horror that was the Saddam regime. Ignatieff's view started with a consideration of human rights abuse, it wasn't about oil or some misguided militarism, so we can rightly look at his perspective in a different light. Was Ignatieff right in his view? Obviously not, from my point of view, but that rejection also allows for a consideration as to the thinking, there was actually a noble thought process at the core, even if misguided. When Ignatieff admits a mistake, I take him at his word, and we move forward.

Yes, I agree.
So now Scott can add me to his list of Ignatieff supporters: Confessions Of A Liberal Mind, Far and Wide, Gauntlet.ca, Keith Torrie Today, Life In Moderation, Pierre Trudeau Is My Homeboy, Queer-Liberal, Random Noise, The Progressive Right, VijaySappani.com, A BCer in Toronto.
I'm in good company!

OK, then, let's change political party funding!

So the Cons are trying to undermine Canadian democracy and screw the opposition parties at the same time? Sounds like another Ryan Sparrow Special to me.
Maybe the Cons think they can force another election because they just don't know what to do about the Canadian economy. And before they have to battle the resurgent Liberals under Michael Ignatieff.
I think the opposition parties should call their bluff -- they should bring in a private members bill to rescind the 2003 Act which restricted corporate and union donations to parties in exchange for the public financing formula.
And they should pass it, quick.
After all, the Conservatives should welcome this, shouldn't they? It would save the taxpayers soooo much money!

Great line of the day

From Ian Welsh in Welcome To A Paper Economy:

. . . welcome to a paper money economy, where the wheelbarrows of virtual cash are trundling straight from the Fed and Treasury to the banks, to disappear into a bottomless hole.

Yes, I had wondered about this, too -- as Welsh points out, all of these supposed billions aren't actually helping the economy stabilize or improve.
I believe we are seeing another Emperor- has- no- clothes situation -- remember when Karl Rove was going to manage the rebuilding of New Orleans? Well, that's about how well Paulson is managing the rebuilding of the economy. I heard Rachel Maddow joke yesterday, "300 billion, 600 billion, gee, soon we're going to be talking about real money!" Yeah, any day now.

Simple answers to simple questions

Is there any difference between an "actual recession" and a "technical recession"?
No, there's not.

This just in

Vatican forgives John Lennon for Jesus quip. Next, they're going to endorse those new-fangled horseless carriages...

I just looked around and he's gone

I was in Grade Nine and I hardly knew who John F. Kennedy was, but I walked into the school and saw an American girl crying her eyes out. And then a boy said "Kennedy has been shot!"
I didn't realize then how much our world had changed, but Taylor Marsh describes what happened next:

Everything was different after President Kennedy died.
The American world that won WWII came apart.
The unraveling led to 50,000 dead in Vietnam, a war begun before J.F.K. that he escalated, but would likely have finished if he'd lived. The illegal bombings of Cambodia and Nixon’s perversion of secret leadership that would be the catapult for Rumsfeld and Cheney's design on the presidency we see today. The coming out of American culture, to Reaganism, Allende, Iran-contra and the secret coups, and the casualties of the culture war: two generations of gay men dead; leading to the Republican fixation with Middle East deliverance, the stalking of a Democrat president, to the attack on 9.11 that led to the rebirth of the notion that we can trust our government, because in the end we must... which led us back to foreign dangers of “urgent” threat and “mushroom clouds,” harking back to THAT TIME, only this time we were led by lies, warnings and threat levels that led us into a preemptive war in which we have lost our national soul.
The national soul embodied in the memory of the image of a youthful, vigorous and valiant J.F.K. Who, even though we now know was merely a mortal man, deathly ill, with addictions and predilections, we still mourn. Because he was the leader with passion, persistence and purpose, who when he spoke inspired us to close our eyes and imagine the impossible. A man who guided this nation at a time in history when war was the easy way out, but who instead found a way to preserve the peace.
Nothing was ever the same after J.F.K. died.

Why Harper called the election

Steve at Far and Wide highlights the story behind the story of coming Canadian deficit budgets:

There is one line from Budget Officer Kevin Page's fiscal report that Liberals should repeat ad nauseum, over and over again:

"The weak fiscal performance to date is largely attributable to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions," the report says.

And that, my friends, is why the Cons rushed to the polls in October. Before the rest of us found out.

Say it ain't so

Someday the Democrats will learn the rules:
Never play cards with any man named "Doc."
Never eat at any place called "Mom's".
And quit dissing your own supporters.
Because, you know, next time they can vote for someone else.