In praise of Ruth Ellen Brosseau

You know how politicians like to rhapsodize about the "common man" and how democracy only works when the people govern themselves? Liberals and conservatives alike are cheered whenever they mouth platitudes like that.

Well, it just so happens that they're magnificently, hypocritically full of shit. Most of those assholes wouldn't know the truth if it blackjacked them in an alley, sodomized them roughly and took their fucking wallets before leaving them in a pool of their own goddamn blood.

How do I know this? Well, I saw it firsthand in the treatment NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau received from Liberals, Conservatives and the ghoulishly stupid media during the last couple of weeks of the last election campaign. On the matter of Ms. Brousseau, all three displayed the charm, grace and intellectual consistency of Robert Mugabe.

In any given federal campaign, there are only ever maybe a few dozen races that are truly competive. The parties, however, want to show us all how important and "national" they are by running candidates everywhere. Most of them are what are commonly called "ballot placeholders" or sacrifical lambs. No one really expects them to win, so nobody thinks of their qualifications to govern.

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter if you're qualified these days, not unless you're a party leader (and only occasionally then), a "star candidate", or someone destined for Cabinet. Even if you win, you're only going to be a backbencher. And everybody knows what they are. Pierre Trudeau, prime minister of this good land for sixteen years, referred to backbenchers as "nobodies." They vote how the party leadership wants them to, and if they don't, they very quickly find themselves thrown out of the party. Trudeau began the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office, and its only gotten worse over the last forty years.

That being the case, who really gives a shit if Ruth Ellen Brosseau is a bartender that lived outside the province she was elected to represent, doesn't speak the language, had never set foot in her riding and jetted to Vegas in the middle of the campaign? What possible difference does it make? She's just going to wind up doing whatever Jack Layton tells her to anyway. Christ, Stephen Harper could have a backbench loaded with unrepentent child molestors and not only would they still vote for his backward and silly crime omnibus bill, they'd do it with a non-ironic smile. Is a friggin' astronaut any more or less qualified to do what some well-heeled special interest asshole tells them to do than a bartender?

Look, if you shot your average politico or journalist full of sodium pentathol, they'd tell you that to be a player in democracy you need to either be an asshole lawyer, a union thug, a criminal banker or scumbag lobbyist. Anyone else who applies is ruthlessly mocked and easily marginalized. Sometimes an academic like Stephane Dion or Michael Ignatieff will accidently win a position of influence and they inevitably prove the politicos and journalists right.

But if you're Ruth Ellen, you had better watch the fuck out, particularly if you win. The lobbyists and lawyers, so eloquent about the "little guy" during campaign season, will go out of their way to ridicule you. All you've got to do is read what the professionals have been saying about her in the press and on their vanity blogs for the last couple of weeks. Sure, they'll pat you on the head and lie right to your face, but they know what time it really is. They know who's pouring the drinks and who's drinking them. And to them, Ms. Brosseau is always going to be on the wrong side of the bar.

But she's a pretty cute girl who I'm willing to bet has a tight little body, which is more than I can say about the 99.9% of Parliament that isn't Rona Ambrose.

And in the great sham that our democracy has become, that's more than enough for me.

About last night: Harrowing death rattles and a pathetic requiem for the Liberal Party of Canada

Remember how I spent the last few weeks saying that I lived in one of the safest Liberal ridings in the country and if my MP lost, it would be a harbinger of doom for the Liberal Party of Canada?

Yeah, about that ...

The battle of Willowdale wasn't supposed to be a battle at all. This is a dynasty riding friends, represented by Liberals since my childhood, with only a four year interregnum when Brian Mulronrey won the biggest majority in Canadian history. And the Liberals returned Jim Peterson to Parliament just four years later, in the midst of another Progressive Conservative sweep. And when Big Jim found himself on the wrong side of Paul Martin's fall in the eternal Grit civil war, Peterson deftly handed his fiefdom off to former leadership candidate Martha Hall Findlay.

It's true that Findlay never won with Peterson's astonishing margins, but old Jim was an institution in my neighborhood. His baby brother was premier of Ontario, for Christ's sake. He helped Mikhail Baryshnikov defect from the Soviet Union. Jim Peterson is nothing short of a legend around here. His political dick swung so low and hard that it scraped the concrete. But Martha had margins in the two 2008 contests that she fought here that most politicians would be proud enough to their grandchildren about.

Over the last two weeks, I had been getting incessant phone calls from Conservative candidate Chungsen Leung. So frequently was my phone ringing that I finally stopped answering whenever I saw the area code 647 (which usually denotes a cell phone in these parts) on my call display. I wrote off Leung's persistence to an excess of money, high hopes and stupidity. As it happens, I was wrong. That happens from time to time. Findlay lost by a bare two points, but it may as well have been a million, given what this riding means to the Natural Governing Party of Canada.

By the time Martha's loss was announced, the streets of Toronto were already running red. But unlike in normal elections, that red didn't symbolize the hubris of Hogtown Grits spilling over and defiling everything it touched. Oh no, brothers and sisters, this time it was blood. running so freelt that children recoiled from it And when blood spills from the Liberals' Greater Toronto Area head, it's a matter of biological certainty that the body is being drained white across the country.

Your friend and mine, the great and good Jay Currie, has often referred to the Liberals as "the Toronto Party." Well, no longer, dear Sir. See the map to the right? Just a decade ago, it was a solid impenetrable Liberal red. Those red spaces are now reduced to mere pockets, spotted and spread apart, much like Solzhenitsyn's fabled Gulag Archipelago of old. They are little more than penal colonies now, a place where perverts are sent to ponder what they've done and consider the consequences their twisted fantasies.

And as of this morning, there is no fantasy more pervese than a Grit restoration. By the end of the week, the membership of NAMBLA will dwarf that of the once proud Liberal Party of Canada.

416 and 905 became Killing Fields on an almost Cambodian scale for the Liberal dynasty last night. But there is no reeducation for them, dear friends, only a long starvation that leaves them pleading for the sweet relief of death. You can count the surviving Liberal hidey-holes with your fingers and still have a couple to spare. They won't long survive the Conservative buldge in the north and cental parts of T.O and the NDP sweep of the south and west of the city. As the remaining Grits commit suicide or flee, those weak redoubts will be mopped up in by-elections.

No, as of this morning, we in in the GTA answer to a new massa, son. His name is Stephen Harper and we will plow his newly acquired fields as the fruit of his majority ripens and takes shape, hoping that in his benevolence he gives us just a drop of water while we do his hard work under the hot sun. Our blood, sweat and tears are now devoted to the task of picking his cotton, boy. And don't you forget it! We only pray that He's a merciful God, and that we someday come to earn his favour. Maybe a smile and a light pat on the head will be our Great Reward for currying His favour.

An impenetrable wall of blue surrounds us now, and it has penetrated deep within the city itself, This is even more like the fall of Berlin than I suspected it was last Thursday. The surviving partisans of the once proud Grit machine have fled under the umbrella of one Jack Layton. It's now his orange drapes that circle my city. Only Bob Rae and Carolyn Bennett hold pathetic pockets of Resistance downtown that serve as a denouement line between the Tories and the Dippers. The Liberals are now known in the ruins of their once mighty bastion as the Gods That Failed.

No one in their right mind would have described Michael Ignatieff as a God, and no one failed more spectacularly than did he. The fact that he maintained enough pride to avoid giving his concession speech in a gimp suit only speaks to the stratospheric heights of his previous hubris.

He is now not only just the third Liberal leader not to serve as prime minister, he is the first to lose his own seat since William Lyon Mackenzie King. King made a habit of losing his seat, but he was also largely distracted with battling Hitler and communicating with the Hereafter. And his governments survived for a period that will remain unmatched in the history of the Dominion. Only Ignatieff, despite running a much better than expected campaign, could make Stéphane Dion look like William the Conqueror.

The people of Etobicoke-Lakshore banded together as one and stomped Iggy like he was a narc at a biker rally. His electoral limbs were shattered so badly that his being able to stand unassisted at the podium last night to deliver his Roberto Durán-like cries of "no más" speaks to his almost animal stupidity. A true beast never knows when it is truly beaten. If Ignatieff was even halfway smart, his final political address would have ended like R. Budd Dwyer's.

A five point loss for a party leader in his own garden is so humiliating that Count Michael will forever be remembered as a cautionary tale for anyone that fancies themself "too smart for the room." Etobicoke is an industrial wasteland of unpronounceable surnames that swamped and broke the Lord of Yorkville by way of Harvard Yard into, as James Frey would call it,  a million little pieces. And unlike Frey's fantastic fictional opus, Iggy's ordeal is all to real and now a matter of public record.

The Good Ship LPC is well and truly sunk. It is is ugly and sad that the lifeboats outnumbered the survivors. Most of them just surrendered to their fate and drowned willingly. For the first time since Confederation, they don't even hold Opposition status. Their almost sexual humiliation is mitigated by the total collapse of the Bloc Quebecois. But the Bloc was only born two decades ago. It was never revered as the most successful political machine in the history of democracy itself.

As of last night, they exist only as a morality play, and Michael Ignatieff is the Icarus that symbolizes the ruin of the Liberal brand. The fact that his leadership survived even twelve hours of the closing of the polls is nearly enough  to make an atheist like me believe in miracles.

I laughed out loud when I saw a poll over the weekend that gave the New Democrats over a hundred seats. Well, the joke's on me. I'm not laughing now, and neither is anyone else. Especially not on the center-left of the political spectrum, which is lining up to shine the shoes of Jumpin' Jack Layton and lick the pimp end of his walking stick today.

Layton began this campaign with a ruined hip and a prostate the size of a Datsun, but he strides upon the organized Left this morning as a colossus. He is nothing short of monument to everyone who has ever considered the political benefits of masturbation for hire. Jack gives us hope, each and every one of us.

Every Canadian to the left of Mussolini himself is lining up to pay him tribute and kiss his ring today. Dark rumours persist that defeated Liberals across the country are laying virgin brides at his feet so as to ensure that they live another day. They see the throne that he has built from the skulls of their brethren and they hope to avoid a similar fate. Jack Layton is Conan, and today he hears the lamentations of formerly Liberal women. No one on the Left has a stronger pimp hand than he. His is the only game in town and if Buzz Hargrove is smart, he's boarding a slow boat to Thailand as I write this. Siam, I'm told, is lovely this time of year.

Last night was a transcendent moment in Canadian history. More important than our combing together to give the Harper Conservatives the unquestionable right to destroy the economy was the tranformative shift on the left. The socialists are ascendent and the Liberal Party of Canada is now Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.

And Mistah Kurtz? He dead.

"Process stories" and the ghost of Craig Bromell

I planned to post a whole lot more here yesterday than I actually did. I was also thinking of writing an election round-up for The Volunteer, which I never got around to, but hope to get done tonight. Sure, I've been at the computer all weekend, but otherwise occupied.

You see, Twitter exploded Friday night when Sun News Network broadcast the story about NDP leader Jack Layton's adventures in a Dundas West rub and tug way back in 1996.

I follow about 300 people and the reactions to the story were fascinating. Blogging Tories and anyone associated with Quebecor (which owns the Sun chain of newspapers and Sun News Network) were doing victory laps, and pretty much everyone on the left were denying the obvious and contending that Layton was just having a regular old massage, which strains credulity when you put even a minimal amount of thought into it.  A number of Sun personalities there were and are almost giddy about the Layton takedown, which actually serves to undermine the journalistic credibility of the whole story and makes it look like a hit job, regardless of its merits. Some people don't seem to know how not to overplay a good hand.

Ultimately, the story's out there and the voters get to decide what weight they give it tomorrow. If the NDP places first or second in as many ridings in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes as polls indicate they will, the story will have had either no effect or actually generated a sympathy vote for Layton. If their vote collapses in English Canada, we'll pretty clearly know why.

As for me, I don't think that Layton having his pud pulled is the interesting story here. Sure, it's hysterical and everything, but that's about it. I'm not as convinced that it will have the political impact that I initially did when the story broke Friday night. I love a freak show, and I tend to get carried away whenever I see the beginnings of one.

Now, the process story here is downright fascinating. And I don't think that just because it drives the Sun types up the wall, although that has a certain appeal as well. The way this story came together resurrects a particularly dark history involving the Toronto Police Service, their union, and local politicians. It also exposes, yet again, a terrifying axis involving cops, political hacks and journalists.

As soon as l'affaire Layton literally squirted into our collective consciousness, I knew that the federal Liberals were behind it for reasons that I explained in detail on Friday night. Given the logistics of the story being planted in the English Canada media; the fact that the Conservatives had a lot more to lose than to gain from their role being exposed later; and the tried but true concept of means, motive and opportunity, all roads of logical deduction lead to political team at Stornoway.

This was confirmed this weekend by Jonathan Kay of The National Post, who revealed on Twitter that a Grit operative pitched the story to him on October 12, 2008, which happened to be the home stretch of the the last federal election. Kay takes pains to point out that this happened before Michael Ignatieff's reign, but it stands to reason that if the party was willing to go to that well in the last campaign, they would try again in this one. And every single public poll in the last two weeks shows that they have an even greater motivation to do it again.

Having said that, one can hardly be surprised when sleazy political hacks act like sleazy political hacks. Just as you shouldn't blame a dog for licking its own balls, people become party operatives precisely because they're amoral and subhuman. That's why I love it so much when they get caught sucking a hooker's toes.

Besides Mr. Kay, Andrew Coyne of Macleans has said that he heard about this story two months ago and a former Liberal spin doctor associated with Michael Ignatieff has said that he was given the information two years ago. This story has gotten around quite a bit. The fact that Sun Media granted the source anonymity is routine, but not reporting the probable involvement of Liberal operatives in disseminating the story indicates that they're more interested in damaging the NDP politically than gathering news.

And surprise! It came from the cops. The source of the story detailing Jack Layton's extracurricular activities is a retired Toronto police officer from the Asian Gang Unit. The officer, who conveniently remained anonymous in the Sun story, illegally kept his notes for fifteen years and may have broken three laws - Breach of Trust, the Police Services Act and the Privacy Act - in handing those notes over to The Toronto Sun and Sun News Network. Yesterday, Police Chief Bill Blair asked the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate the Toronto Police end of the Layton story and it's publication in The Sun.

Do you think that Sun reporter Sam Pazzano and editor Lorrie Goldstein are willing to go to jail to protect their source? I don't.

In the absence of an arrest or criminal charges, the police are not supposed to be discussing their interactions with the citizenry, irrespective of their station. And that's doubly true when it comes to releasing that information to the media. There are police procedures and laws that specifically prohibit it.

There's a long history of this kind of thing happening in my city, although it hasn't been this flagrant. The cops here have long bridled against the idea that they're actually accountable to civilian oversight of any kind. And that phenomenon is even worse when the ideologies of their political masters don't match their own.

From 1996 until 2003, the head of the Toronto Police Association was a gentleman named Craig Bromell, and he had a rather colourful history of political involvement and resisting investigations by the province's Special Investigations Unit.









If you watch those videos from The Fifth Estate, it's noteworthy what Bromell was willing to actually admit in public and that should encourage you to imagine what he wasn't. Compiling dossiers of dirt against political opponents is a tactic made famous by J. Edgar Hoover, who was said to have used them to stay in charge of the FBI for almost a half century.

If the police can thwart the Special Investigations Unit and can terrorize not only the Deputy Chief of Police, but the elected councillors on the Police Services Board without consequence, the police are effectively without oversight and are accountable to no one. Members of the armed forces are precluded from public political involvement because anything else would undermine public confidence in the military, and the police should be no different. Section 46 of the Police Services Act is supposed to minimize the political reach of the police, but politicians are generally too afraid to enforce it and the media seems determined to ignore it.

Yes, Bromell is long gone, but there's no evidence that the culture he created ever changed in this city. If anything, the Layton saga indicates that it's alive and well.

By the way, tomorrow's election isn't the only game in town. There's an Ontario election this fall, and I'm pretty sure that the Ontario Liberals are taking notes on how the Jack Layton story plays out. I somehow doubt that Sun Media or any of the Blogging Tories would feel the way they do today if police notes about any of Tim Hudak's Progressive Conservative candidates started showing up in more liberal-leaning publications. As a matter of fact, I can assure you that they would very much want to make this a "process story" and be screaming from the rooftops about a "police state." It's never as much fun when it's your guy that takes the hit.

Well, I would be as outraged by such an eventuality as I am about this, mostly because I'm not a hypocrite. I understand politics better than most, and this only a primarily political story if you're an idiot. This is about the proper place of the police in the political food chain. Law enforcement has greater powers and resources than any political hack or news outlet ever will. And once you bring them into the process, you'll find that they'll very quickly take it over.

Today it's their guy that takes the hit, but eventually it's going to be yours. While you might think that you're riding the tiger, you just might find out that the tiger has different ideas about your destination.

Craig Bromell might be gone, but his political ghost haunts us still.

Well, that's done: How the Liberals dodged a bullet

Remember how George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000? Everybody in the campaign along with anyone with common sense attributed that to the revelation that he had been arrested in Maine for drunk driving. the story broke on the Friday night before the election and may have been responsible for keeping as many as three million evangelical voters home.

Funny how that works, innit? Amazingly, it never happens to a campaign that isn't doing well. You only ever see it happen with very credible candidates. Well, something very similar happened with the last hour. Jack Layton's career just ended.

Sun News Network is on the air as I speak reporting that NDP leader Jack Layton was found naked by Toronto police in a rub and tug back in 1996. Layton wasn't arrested and no charges were filed. None of the major newspapers have anything online yet. Sun News is citing an anonymous retired cop as their source.

Of course, that's horseshit. Retired cops aren't usually noted for their political or media savvy. This is political and I'm pretty sure that everybody knows it. This was leaked by an opposing campaign. The officer didn't just go to Sun Media, somebody sent him. I know this because stories like this are always leaked by an opposing campaign, especially when they make the news on the closing weekend of an election and you have no time or resources to properly respond.

The way to properly analyze stories like this is too very calmly and cynically ask who benefits the most from the story. Not only will it lead you to the truth 99% of the time, it's almost always a great deal of fun.

It's really easy to conclude that, because Sun News is a Tory echo chamber, the story came from them. I don't buy it because Layton isn't a particular threat to Harper. The Conservatives aren't in any danger of losing any more than five or six seats at best to the NDP. Moreover, the NDP surge potentially divided the center-left vote in English Canada and could have let the Tories win more seats than Layton could have take from them.

The Dippers are, of course, completely annihilating the Bloc Quebecois. That's where most of the NDP's support is coming from. It's so bad that two prominent former BQ staffers today endorsed the NDP. But this coming from Duceppe's people makes no sense. First, because they have no history of operating that way that I'm aware of. Second and more important, if they were behind it, they'd leak it to the Quebec French media.

Gee, I wonder who that leaves .... Who benefits? Who has the political infrastructure to capitalize on something like is in a way that works for them?  Where will disasffected or offended women go on Monday if this story plays the way I think it will? Who's known for being so evil that they practically glow in the fucking dark?

Of course, Jack's crying "smear," but that's not going to work, especially in the NDP, which is so reliant on the feminist vote. He's right and everything, but he's not contesting the facts of the story. Not that it matters. The truth isn't going to just pop out over the weekend. And if it does, nobody will hear it. That's why stories like this always break on Fridays.

And that means that he's done. The Layton campaign cannot and will not survive this so late in the day, if only because they won't have the opportunity to respond. This story is going to dominate every political conversation over the weekend, and polling and advertising a legally obligated to go dark at midnight.

I expect that the NDP is still going to do well in Quebec, because the French generally tend to reward politicians that get their dicks wet. But their support in English Canada probably went into free fall an hour ago.

Stephen Harper may yet get his coveted majority. But more importantly, the Liberals live to fight another day. And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this story.

Update 2:53 AM EST:  As I indicated in the comments, I’m reconsidering the impact if the story a little.

I tend to look at these stories as how they play in American politics because there’s really no precedent for it here, especially not this late in a campaign. It’s too late to respond to, and too late to find out who did it before election day. It’s a very effective, very American, tactic. Ask both Presidents Bush.

But this isn’t the United States, and as I was writing and watching Sun News run the story, I didn’t consider the very real possibility of a strong sympathy vote for Jack. Because there’s no further polling before Monday, we won’t know if it’s coming, but this could theorectically drive Layton’s numbers up.

This is easily the weirdest fucking campaign I’ve seen or even read about in this country’s history. Who can say what’s going to happen anymore? But I’m sure the NDP braintrust is thinking this came from exactly the same place I do, which I think kills off a coalition rather nicely.

Uppderdate - Saturday, 8:05 PM EST They called me mad on Twitter! They even called me mad on my own blog! Now we shall see ....

@jonkay


For those who care, someone tried to shop me the Layton-massage story 2 yrs ago (without docs). It was a Liberal fixer

Who's your goddamn Daddy now? Who, I ask you! It is I! I am your Daddy and so I always shall be!

Special thanks to Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet for the tip.

Stephen Harper thinks you're an idiot

I've explained my political philosophy and my discontent with Stephen Harper's Conservative Party over and over again. But given the response yesterday's little essay about the decline and fall of the Liberals, I have a ton of new readers out there. They haven't been following me through this campaign, or through the last five years of the Harper regime.

Philosophically, I'm really conservative about the things that matter, meaning the economy and foreign policy, and libertarian on the things that don't, which is everything else. For example, I support gay marriage, if only because I can't think of a reason that I shouldn't that doesn't make me feel like a goddamn goober. "Because homos are icky" is hardly a compelling case for the government to do anything other than mind its own friggin' business. A small government does not exist to pat you on the head and give you a cookie you when your precious values feel violated because it would very quickly cease being small.

I couldn't bring myself to vote for the Tories in 2004 and '06 because I had no confidence that Harper would be able to keep his social conservatives in line, which I freely admit that was wrong about. I pointedly refused to support them in 2008 because it had become crystal clear by then that they were Bush Republicans on fiscal policy. Anyone who didn't know that they had already blown through the $13 billion surplus by then just wasn't paying attention or was engaging in factually insupportable wishful thinking.

Once they had held off the then-terrifying specter of an opposition coalition, Harper engaged in stimulus spending that was well to the left of Barack Obama's in the United States and considerably more expensive. If you add up the Conservative deficits from 2009 to today, you find yourself in the neighborhood of about $120 billion dollars - and that assumes that the government is even telling the truth, which is something that they're not famous for when it comes to the economy.

In October of 2008, a full month after the crash of Lehman Brothers precipitated the End Times, Harper publicly stated that he would "never" engage in deficit spending. In fact, he has spent more money in a shorter period than even Pierre Trudeau did at the height of his power and has less to show for it. Brian Mulroney, who I cast my first vote for, spent a lot of money, too, but he also raised more than his share of revenue with the Free Trade Agreement and the GST. Without those things, the deficit wouldn't have been eliminated as easily as it was under Chretien.

Yet many of those who shudder at the memory of Trudeau and Mulroney, and shake their fists at the mere mention of Obama's name want me to reward Stephen Harper for being demonstrably worse than both. Sorry, I've spent far too long establishing my credibility on these matters and I refuse to piss it away just because my favorite colour is blue. And the fact that the Conservative banner matches my eyes is pretty much the only reason I'd have to vote for them.

Worse still, the current Conservative platform is riddled with tens, if not hundreds of billions in new spending and social engineering boutique tax credits (which are basically the same thing) that he has no plausible way of paying for.

And those are just a few of the reasons that I found the most recent Tory ad so entertaining and enraging.



That ad is so riddled with outright lies and willful ignorance that I'm actually impressed that the Tories managed to fit it all in a 30 second spot.

Firstly, Harper didn't "cut taxes," at least not in any real way. What he did do was riddle the tax code with credits, which rewarded you if you spent your money the way the government wanted you to. Oh, and he wanted to give your babysitter a tip. Prior to the Bush-Harper-Obama age, none of these things were considered conservative practices, yet the Tories couldn't be more proud of them. And please don't blame any of that on Harper's minority because all of it was in his 2005-06 platform.

If you ask anyone who knows anything about economics, they'll tell you that consumption taxes are the least productive cuts imaginable. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that you could design a worse tax cut than reducing the GST. It barely saved consumers pennies on the dollar, which helps paying the bills not at all unless you happened to be buying a house or a car with cash.

But it did cost a fortune in government revenue, which is fine if you match the revenue loss with spending cuts. And that's something that the Harper government pointedly refused to do. As a matter of fact, he campaigned on increased spending in both 2005 and '08. Indeed, he grew the government by nearly a quarter, much of it in 2006, when the Liberal Party didn't have a leader to "force" him to do much of anything.

I'll grant you that all of the above were fantastic politics, but spectacularly bad economics. And Harper pursued it even after it had become clear what similar policies had done to the U.S budget. But let us not forget that this was actually how he won government. Fiscal conservative bitching aside, he wasn't lying about spending, nor do I think that he is now.

But the ad is almost supernaturally dishonest about paying for that spending. When the Tories mention paying for stuff at all, they assume that economic growth and attrition in the public service is going to finance his spending sprees, which is ahistorical nonsense in that it assumes a level of growth that we haven't seen since World War II.

Yes, feel free to mock "tax and spend" all you want, but it's good and goddamned time that somebody points out the Harper-Bush-Obama fiscal model of "borrow and spend" is several degrees worse. It is nothing more than a deferred tax on people that didn't get to vote on our moronic priorities and the accumulated interest almost guarantees that it is going to be a significant tax increase which will retard economic growth at some point and limit the options of future governments.

Look, this election isn't about fiscal responsibility, despite the fact that the Tories would like to pretend that it is. It's a contest to see who can blow through the most money the fastest and have the least to show for it. And under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for not only making that possible, but continuing to encourage it.

Both here and elsewhere, I'm getting quite a bit of blowback for announcing my intention to vote for the NDP. Firstly, it doesn't matter given the riding I live in, where the Liberal cannot lose. Secondly, I'm voting specifically to destroy the Liberals forever. Once they're removed as a ballot option, I believe that you greatly moderate the behaviour of both the Conservatives and the NDP, who no longer have to engage in fringe nonsense to separate themselves from the Grits. Third, I'm hoping that a good trip to the woodshed will teach the Conservatives to start acting like conservatives.

Frankly, I'm not pretending to be particularly influential and I'm not trying to convince anyone to do anything that they aren't going to do anyway. If it were up to me, I'd continue my practice of voting for independents and minor party candidates, but that option has been denied to me this time out.

Having said that, I'm not going to pretend that the Harper Conservatives aren't electioneering hacks with a notable ignorance of basic math. Too many conservatives have pretended that the Tories were something other than what they said they were as far back as 2005. And if I had any interest in rewarding that kind of politics, I'd vote for the Liberals who never pretended to be anything else. I simply have no interest in replacing the Liberals with a Conservative Party that acts and governs exactly as they did in the 1970s.

If nothing else, this promises to be the most interesting election this country has had in twenty years.

Serenity and denial: Michael Ignatieff and the fall of Berlin

So I got a robocall yesterday evening from Micheal Ignatieff his own self, a first in this campaign. I live in one of the safest Liberal constituencies in all of the Dominion. If my MP loses, the Liberal Party of Canada will be well and truly annihilated. There will be, simply put, nothing left. All will be lost and there will be nothing to rebuild.

Professor Ignatieff was kind enough to invite me to a rally at the Montecassino Hotel in the adjoining riding of York Centre tonight. And he's bringing a friend, the Right Honourable Jean Chretien, 20th Prime minister of Canada and the last guy to secure himself a majority government. That riding is represented by former leadership candidate and legendary goalie Ken Dryden, who is in deep, deep trouble.

Some history might be necessary here for my foreign readers. Chretien owed his reign to a divided Conservative movement that allowed him to dominate Ontario and win roughly half of Quebec's seats. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for him not to win a majority under those circumstances, although he nearly pulled it off in 1997. Even after the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Reform Alliance parties merged under the Conservative Party banner in 2003, the Grits still managed to hold all but two of Toronto's (area code 416) 24 ridings and the majority of the 905 belt surrounding the Center of the Universe.

If nothing else, that kept the Liberals competitive in Ontario. Even the hapless Stephane Dion managed to hold the Greater Toronto Area, which allowed the party to focus its resources elsewhere, although to little effect. Nearly a third of their seats are in 416 and the rest are in 905 and Montreal.

Long story short, if Ignatieff feels it absolutely necessary to bring Chretien into 416, they are fucked beyond repair and they know it. The apocalypse is upon them and there is no escape. Their bones are being crushed into dust nationally and there is little to no chance that they'll even remain as the Official Opposition in the next Parliament. Even when Paul Martin and Dion were busy losing, they kept the le petit gars de Shawinigan as far away from Toronto as possible. Chretien himself rarely campaigned here as prime minister, since his presence was wholly unnecessary and therefore a giant waste of time and resources.

They're fighting for their lives in 416 itself now. Reasonable people fully expect the Grits to lose both Dryden's York Centre seat and the neighboring riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. This is the political equivalent of the final defense of Berlin from marauding Soviet troops in April of 1945 and I now expect it to end about the same way. Once those ridings fall, all that's left is the Hitler's bunker of downtown Toronto, and the NDP Power Twins, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow, already hold two of those seats. Not only do the Grits have to worry about a Tory incursion into the north west of 416, the NDP could very well retake Parkdale-High Park. If that happens, Iggy's own riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore could be at risk. I'm actually shocked that the Ford brothers haven't been working their backyard hard for Harper. That could start a pincer movement that could drive the federal Liberals directly into Lake Ontario in the very near future.

Besides bringing Chretien into Fortress Toronto, Iggy appears to have written off British Columbia, leaving it for the Conservatives and New Democrats to fight over. The map is finally too daunting for anyone to ignore. Worse, Canada's most reliable pollster, Nik Nanos, has (albeit belatedly) confirmed the NDP surge (PDF.) Layton's New Democrat's are ahead of the Liberals nationally and well within the margin of error in Ontario, jumping four points here over the weekend.

So how is the national Liberal campaign responding? By pretending that it isn't happening is how.

Despite a surge of NDP support in Quebec and an apparent decline in Liberal support in Ontario, the head of the national Liberal campaign has informed top strategists the party will execute its original campaign plan even though there are reports of nervous party troops and indications Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff remains unpopular at the doorsteps in some regions of the country.

In the aftermath of two public opinion polls that had by Tuesday found the NDP passing the Liberals nationally and surging past all three main parties to take the lead in voter preference in Quebec, a senior member of the party’s campaign in Ontario told The Hill Times that—other than strategic changes to its arsenal of attack ads and normal adjustments to campaigns in close riding races and swing ridings—national campaign director Gordon Ashworth told top levels of the Liberal team the battle plan remains the same.

“Obviously the campaign team is engaged every day and so there are phone calls, but I can tell you Gordon Ashworth, who is in charge of the campaign, he put very aptly, ‘Some time ago we developed a plan, we put that plan in place and we’ve executed it well and we continue to execute the plan because it really is about bringing forward a platform that addresses the needs of middle-class Canadians, the average Canadian, and we’re not deviating from that,’” Jeff Kehoe, one of the party’s three co-chairs of the Ontario portion of the campaign, quoted Mr. Ashworth as telling the campaign overseers following the stunning events over the past week.

If the Liberal campaign is feeling what The Hill article quotes as a "feeling of serenity on the ground," they're in full-blown denial. Hitler knew that the jig was up by the time he was driven into the bunker, but Gordon Ashworth apparently doesn't.

Mr. Ashworth's strategy was always half-crazed and premised on his perception that voters are even dumber than I  think they are, which happens to be plenty. The strategy, as far as I can determine, was to run against the Harper record, unify the left-leaning vote and peel off enough soft Tory support to deny the Conservatives a majority. If the Conservatives had a reduced minority government and if the Grits picked up a dozen or so seats, they could then defeat the government in a confidence vote this spring and form an accord with the Layton New Democrats.

That was flawed to the point of absurdity because, as I've mentioned before, Harper's record is the Liberal record. Dion and Ignatieff kept the Conservative minority afloat several hundred times in the last five years. It appears that the voters concluded that if they absolutely must unify around an opposition party, it may as well be one that actually opposed something from time to time, which is how the NDP surge was born.

If the NDP displaces the Liberals as the Official Opposition, or even comes close to it, the Liberals are effectively finished. If Ignatieff winds up losing seats, especially in Toronto, he'll be beheaded by his own party on election night next Monday, which leaves the Grits leaderless and in the throes of a leadership campaign.

Assuming that there even is a Conservative minority (which is getting harder to do every day,) defeating them on a confidence motion would require the Governor General to decide whether to invite a coalition or an accord to assume government or to hold yet another election. That would require some kind of assurance that said coalition could hold for at least two years. I don't know how a leaderless Liberal Party can make such an assurance to David Johnston.

There are also large swaths of the Liberal Party that want nothing to do with the NDP, and that segment of the party can be expected to run for the leadership. Or there might be sufficient opposition in caucus to defeat the idea outright.

Barring a coalition or an accord, another election would utterly break a bankrupt Liberal Party and English Canada would be divided up between the NDP and the Tories, almost certainly resulting in a massive Conservative majority.

After spending weeks asking the question, no one has been able to tell me why Jack Layton would even want to get into bed with the Grits. As I've explained before, it isn't in his strategic interest. Harper's fear-mongering about a coalition is adorable, but it assumes that Layton is stupid enough to still be afraid of the Liberals at this point. He pretty clearly isn't, and seems to know that if he just waits a few months, the Grits will collapse all on their own, leaving him as the only credible alternative to the Tories.

Regardless of Monday's outcome, the Liberals won't be able to raise money (which is already a giant problem for them) or recruit halfway serious candidates (which they haven't focused all that much energy on anyway.) By Tuesday morning, anyone with any brains will see the future of the left in this country, and it isn't going to include the Liberals.

The Liberals who were behind or endorsed the merger or strategic cooperation talks last year never really thought through the consequences of what they were suggesting. Strategic cooperation, meaning that the two parties wouldn't run candidates against one another, would ruin both financially because they would be denied millions in the per-vote subsidy from Elections Canada.

Moreover, the merger idea was framed under the almost unbelievably arrogant Grit premise that the NDP would renounce all of their principles just to join a Liberal Party that was incapable of winning an election on their own and only got 28% of the vote in the previous campaign. And for their trouble, Jack Layton might have been named junior minister for dildo training, but only if he promised not to talk about dildos that much. It was such an insulting offer that it only could have come from a Liberal.

No, it had to come to pass this way. Even during their ascendancy, Reform-Canadian Alliance weren't so fucking haughty that they believed that they could merge with Progressive Conservative rump on their own terms. In fact, it was the Alliance that was crumbling, with a dozen of their members sitting as Independents because of Stockwell Day's reign of error. The Grits, on the other hand, honestly believe it is their natural birthright to govern this country, and they only grudgingly tolerate elections. There could never be a working agreement with the NDP so long as the Liberals thought that they had any kind of future at all.

Well, as of Monday, the window closes on that future. The Liberal Party of Canada will be halfway in the grave, and even they won't be so dumb as to not notice it. If these polls hold up for the next five days -  and there's now no reason to believe that they won't - the Grits will enter their final death spiral and likely won't survive the next election.

And you know what? I'm going to help bury them. I live in a riding where it doesn't matter who I vote for, and I've been denied my usual luxury of voting for an independent or minor party. So I'm going to do something that I never seriously thought I would.

I'm going to vote for the NDP.


Update: Welcome Small Dead Animals and Trusty Tory readers. My, but there's a shitload of you out there, isn't there? By seven AM EST, I had already beaten my total daily average of hits, which is certainly not something I expected from a post that I threw together in about half an hour.

And that's what makes me a shitty blogger. I never know what you folks are going to respond to.

God, the Conservatives are dumb

This might be the strangest Canadian election that I've ever seen. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party is running an almost blindingly shitty, strategy-free campaign. Worse, their main message of stopping a Liberal-NDP coalition supported by Bloc Quebecois, could potentially backfire and actually legitimize a coalition if the Tories fail to win their precious majority. Having said that, watching the fake outrage from every Tory politico and asshole blogger is going to be hilarious if and when it happens.

But the awfulness of the Harper campaign isn't reflected in the polls. The Conservatives have maintained a double-digit lead consistently throughout. Because of the concentration of their vote in western Canada and the lack of any upward movement in Quebec, I still think that they're shy of a majority and could possibly lose seats. But they really have no business doing as well as they are. Of the four elections that the Tories have run with Harper, this is far and away their worst. Oddly, it might also be their most successful.

Michael Ignatieff, as hopeless as he is, is running a far better campaign than anyone believed was possible, as close to fuck-up free as any Liberal campaign in recent memory. However, he's not getting any traction with voters. It's just as likely that he'll lose seats as gain them, regardless of how their popular vote turns out. And the Grits can't afford to lose many seats and remain a credible national force. Their seats are so heavily concentrated in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, that any erosion in those centers calls their continued political viability into serious question.

The real story of this campaign is what makes it truly bizarre. Jack Layton and the NDP are rapidly becoming the heroes of this story. This week, their polling exploded, pulling into second place nationally and actually leading in Quebec, where they've won a grand total of one seat in their entire history. If Jack's numbers hold over the next ten days - and I'm not sure that they will - this race becomes impossible to predict. Depending on where that support is concentrated, they could conceivably become the official Opposition in the next Parliament and effectively destroy the Liberals forever.

Destroying the Liberals forever is something that Stephen Harper has been thinking about his entire adult life. If you can eliminate the Grits from the political equation, the thinking goes, and reduce the influence of the separatist Bloc in Quebec, you wind up with an ideologically binary electorate. Without the Liberals as a factor, both the NDP and the Conservatives move closer to the political center, where most of the country is, to fill the void the Grits leave behind. It's a fine theory, and one that I think is ultimately going to be a reality in this country, regardless of how this election plays out.

Now, if the Tories' long-term goal is to finish off the Liberals and ensure that they never return, they need the NDP to do that. No Conservative, particularly one as personally divisive as Harper is, is going to draw away enough Grits to wipe their party out. But the NDP can. And by the looks of it, they are.

So what is Harper doing? Attacking Jack Layton is fucking what!



Whoever came up with this ad shouldn't just be fired, he or she should be killed. In front of the rest of the staff, so they'll know not to do anything this goddamn dumb in the future. If Harper has any brains at all, he'll round up everyone that had anything to do with this monstrosity, slit their bellies open and feast on their warm innards as the horrified survivors look on and worry about the fate that awaits them as Bruce Carson and his harem of comely whores laugh and cheer from the VIP section. That kind of thing worked in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and there's no reason to believe that it won't work in the Conservative Party of Canada.

The very last thing Team Harper should be doing is going negative on the NDP. First, they're knocking down the Bloc several notches and threatening the very survival of the Liberals. Second, the Dippers don't threaten as many Tory seats as they do the Grits and the Bloc. Third, the county has pretty clearly fallen in love with Jack Layton, and why shouldn't it? He started this campaign three-quarters of a goddamn corpse, both politically and physically, and he's risen to kick ass, take names and save federalism in Quebec. He's become the happy ending in every fucking Bruce Springsteen song you've ever heard.

Harper gains nothing from attacking Layton and reinforces his own negative impressions that he's an angry prick that sold his soul to some Calgary ward-heeler in 1985. This is about as far from Blue Sweater Steve as we're ever gonna get, folks.

Besides, while Harper can go negative on Layton, Ignatieff has no other choice but to. Unless Iggy starts ripping apart Jack's swollen prostate with a sharpened bamboo poles in the next week, he's dead. So for Christ's sake, let Ignatieff do the dirty work and carry the risks of blowback that come with it. As John Ibbitson and Stephen Chase point out in today's Globe, these are as follows;

But Mr. Ignatieff pays a price in three ways by taking on the NDP. First, every minute and dollar spent pointing out the contradictions embedded within the NDP platform is a minute and dollar diverted from the effort to close the yawning gap between the Liberals and the front-running Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

Second, accusing the NDP of making reckless promises that could damage the economy and wreck government finances simply echoes the criticism that the Conservatives level at the Liberals.

Finally, and most importantly, the more Mr. Ignatieff takes on Mr. Layton, the more he renders the NDP chief credible as a potential leader of the official opposition.

An Ignatieff-Layton battle royal is a contest that Iggy was born to lose. More important, it's one that he's completely unprepared for. He went into this race expecting to take on Harper from the left. Finishing the campaign by fending off Layton from the right throws whatever strategic planning the Liberal war room did right out the fucking window. I'll bet you anything that Liberal national headquarters is the very picture of panic, chaos and the scene of even more brutal than usual infighting right now.

If I was soulless and stupid enough to be working for the Conservative national campaign, I'd be telling them to make Stephen Harper Jack Layton's very best friend in the goddamned world. Each and every Harper speech would include a section about how inspiring Jack Layton's story is and how well his political and medical comeback speaks of his character. If Harper actually has functional human tear ducts, I'd see if I could talk him into getting a little misty while doing it. Maybe I can get him to remember how War of the Worlds didn't have the happy ending he was hoping for, but I'd get him to look like a reasonable facsimile of a human being when talking about his pal, Jack.

Sure, I'd let the candidates and some of the sleazier Cabinet ministers assassinate Layton at the constituency level, but nothing negative would come out of Harper's mouth and I sure as fuck wouldn't attack him by name on national television. Unlike our American cousins, Canadians have a long history of voting for vicious bastards, but that's no reason for the Tories to push their luck, particularly when they only make negligible gains for their trouble.

Michael Ignatieff is going to look like a desperate and sleazy son of a bitch going after Layton next week, but he's doing it out of necessity. Harper, on the other hand, wants to look that way because it seems to be his natural default setting.

And from a long-term strategic perspective, that's an almost mechanized form of dumb. For Harper to attack Layton only helps Ignatieff. And the sooner the Liberals get put out of everybody's misery, the sooner the Conservatives come to a long-term, sustainable political realignment in this country that benefits them more than anybody else.

What I saw at the reformation: Jack Layton's 115th dream

Just for giggles, I decided to check the Elections Canada website last week to take a gander and the independent and minor party candidates running in my riding in next month's federal election. As I've said before, I haven't voted for a major party since 2000. This is because the Conservatives aren't very conservative, I'm genetically incapable of voting for the Liberals because they're swine and I'm not a socialist, which precluded my supporting the NDP.

Small problem. There are no independents or minor parties running in my riding this time out. Not even the Greens. Which means that I'm screwed. Under no circumstances will I reward Stephen Harper for his economic reign of error over the last five years and I'm almost certain that I can't biologically re engineer myself enough to support the Liberals.

That leaves me with the devil's choice of voting for the NDP or not voting at all. And you know what? I'm not as uncomfortable with either option as you might think. I've publicly mused about voting for the Dippers before, if only because I have long thought that they would be the ideal opposition to a Tory government, be it minority or majority. This is because they actually oppose things from time to time. And when they have dealt with Harper, they've usually gotten something out of it, which can't be said of the Grits.

In opposition, the Liberals have been the single most useless motherfuckers ever to walk the earth. For all of Stephen Harper's endless lying about the dangers of a coalition government, he neglects to tell you that there already has been one for the last five years. The Grits under both Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff have voted with the government hundreds of times. They have enabled Harper at almost every turn.

This has turned out to be problematic in that it's hard to run against the record of a government that they've supported so frequently. For all intents and purposes Michael Ignatieff's record is Harper's record. And the fact is that the Grits supported the Tories so often because they were too cowardly to force an election. This was made easier by the fact that the Liberal Party of Canada doesn't actually believe in anything other than political positioning. They're nothing more than an odd hybrid of the Conservatives and the NDP, and they have been for nearly fifty years. They exist only to steal policies from whichever party seems to be polling well at any given time. The Grits are whores, and singularly cheap ones at that.

Historically, that worked out for them because Canada didn't tend to have an ideological electorate. We tend to be far more pragmatic than Americans are, and our elections tend to be more issues-oriented. Canada doesn't often have campaigns built around nonsense like "restoring honor and dignity" or the fucking pledge of allegiance.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, that's less and less true and the electorate has been slowly becoming more rigidly ideological. I don't necessarily like it, but I can't pretend that it isn't happening. The result of that is that the Liberals are being frozen out and the NDP is eating their lunch.

A campaign that has until now been on “auto-pilot” is suddenly turning into an electrifying run to the finish with a change so dramatic for the NDP that it could be in reach of becoming the official opposition, a Forum Research poll done in collaboration with The Hill Times suggests.
The NDP has made its largest gains in Quebec, with an astonishing surge past the Bloc Quebecois in decided and leaning voter support, but the party has also moved up in British Columbia, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where a rise in support can turn into new House of Commons seats for the party.

(...)

Nationally, the survey gave the Conservative Party support from 36 per cent of decided and leaning voters, 25 per cent for the NDP, 23 per cent for the Liberal party, and six per cent each for the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois. A separate Forum Research analysis, based partly on ridings won and lost in the 2008 election, suggest the survey results would give the Conservatives 149 of the 308 Commons seats if an election were held today, with 71 seats for the NDP, 64 for the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois would have 24 seats.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Jack Layton started this campaign with a busted hip and a prostate the size of a canned ham. His political obituary was being written by everyone in both the blogosphere and Serious Journalism. Just two weeks ago, Liberal commentators - admittedly some of the dumbest assholes on the planet - were openly mocking the NDP. From what I've been seeing this afternoon, they're not laughing now.

My instincts still tell me that the Dippers won't overtake the Grits in the next Parliament, but I have nothing solid to base that on. The arc of this campaign since the debates and all of the data indicate that my instincts are wrong. And if I'm wrong and the NDP becomes the Official Opposition in the next Parliament, you're witnessing the beginning of an irreversible trend and the Liberals - the most successful party in the history of democracy - will begin its final death rattle in the very near future.

In a non-ideological electorate of sheep, the Grits won simply because they were seen as winners. And even that was largely an illusion. In the last fifty years, only Pierre Trudeau won in the face of any kind of opposition, and he almost lost to Bob Stanfield and actually was beaten by Joe Clark. Lester Pearson won three minorities because of the collapse of the Diefenbaker government, and Chretien was handed three majorities because of the fracturing of the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell.  Since 1958, the Grits only clearly won under their own power in 1968, 1974 and 1980.
Mulroney reduced the Liberals to forty seats in '84 and Stephen Harper steadily reduced their share of the popular vote for three consecutive elections.

Even with Michael Ignatieff running a much better campaign than anyone expected he would, the Liberals just aren't seen as winners anymore. With that dynamic now clearly evident to anyone that's been paying attention, the progressive vote is shifting to the NDP.

Am I surprised that this is happening? No, I've actually been predicting it for over two years now and most of you thought I was insane for doing it. But I am surprised that it's happening this quickly and that the epicenter for it is in Quebec. Not only has the federalist vote coalesced around the NDP, the socialist wing of the separatist Bloc Quebecois has begun to, as well.

If that trend in Quebec continues, the Liberals are going to die more rapidly than even I previously expected them to. They could form governments by winning roughly half of Quebec's seats and dominating Ontario, with scatterings of seats in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia. Since 2004, they've been ruined in Quebec and lost over half of their Ontario seats. Effectively, they've been reduced to a rump in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. A national NDP surge, combined with Harper's singular focus on the 416 and 905 area codes of the Greater Toronto Area, threatens even those Grit electoral fortresses.

If these numbers hold, and I have no idea if they will because the Dippers could be peaking too early, we could be witnessing a fundamental reformation of Canadian politics. Everything I know about the history of the Liberal Party tells me that they won't be able to rebuild. Their MPs and strategists will all start publicly blaming one another for what happened (and if you look around, you'll see that already happening) and their next leadership campaign will be nothing less than a very public, balls-out, scorched earth bloodbath. The LPC's decades-long civil war will finally bury them in a very public ceremony. There won't be any rebuilding from a debacle like this.

A potential coalition in the event of a defeated Harper minority is going to be even more humiliating for the Grits. Even if they have more seats, the NDP has the momentum and now everybody knows it. The days of the Liberals arrogantly demanding that the Dippers renounce much of anything will be long over. Any coalition or accord will be on Jack Layton's terms or it won't happen at all.

As a matter of fact, it will be in the NDP's long-term strategic interest to let Harper govern and envelop himself in waves of progressively worse scandals while the Liberals destroy themselves in public. If I was leading the NDP in a minority Parliament with an even weaker Liberal Official Opposition, I'd let the Grits continue to support a scandal-ridden Conservative government to highlight the distinction between the progressive parties and swallow gradually greater shares of its support.

In the end, it is much better to be an ever more viable national alternative to the Conservatives than it is for them to be the junior partners in a coalition with a Liberal Party that's busy destroying itself. If the Tories start to crumble under the weight of their own Keynesian spending and obvious corruption, and Liberals are finally destroyed by their own hubris and opportunistic stupidity, who's left?

If the NDP surge splits enough ridings to produce a Conservative majority, Layton will almost certainly be the leader of the Opposition, which will consign the Liberals to eternal irrelevance. Either way, the NDP would be crazy to have anything to do with the Liberals before they're well and truly finished.

Will I vote to hasten that process along? I haven't decided yet, but I just might. This election suddenly got a whole lot more interesting than it had any business being.

And to anyone who thought I was insane to predict the decline and fall of the Liberal Party, which I may have been altogether too conservative about, I guess I should have listened when you said this;




Extra-special shout out to The Tiger on Politcs

Much ado about nothing, unless ...

Stephen Harper is running among the very worst campaigns that I've ever seen, and the Goddamn Liberal Media is finally saying what I have been for months now: that if he only wins a minority, he's finished.

But even with an awesomely shitty campaign, Harper's still ahead by nearly ten points. That says more about what nutless wonders the opposition Liberals are than it does about the skill of the Tories. However, that ten point lead doesn't constitute a majority. The fact is that a good share of Harper's support comes from the Prairies, where they already hold most of the seats, meaning that support is effectively wasted. Given that, I don't see how a Tory majority is elected with less than about 43% of the vote, a level they have yet to hit even for a day.

So Harper's doing something so incredibly stupid that I'm amazed that no one in the party tried to stop him. He's running against the uber-scary Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois "coalition." That must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but it isn't working. I've already noted the inherent danger in this strategy. If you make the coalition that ballot question, you essentially legitimize it if you fail to win a majority. Of course, that won't stop the Conservatives from trying to have it both ways after the election, but that's only because they were born without shame.

There's one thing that my international readers need to understand about a parliamentary democracy. The only thing required of the government is that it enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. It matters not at all who won the most votes if that party cannot win that confidence. To Americans, the nearest applicable equivalent would be the Electoral College. As they may or may not know, four presidents lost the popular vote, yet wound up living in the White House.

And because Michael Ignatieff is singularly unserious about actually winning an election, he's now openly talking about that, despite having ruled out a coalition as recently as last week.

Michael Ignatieff is saying clearly for the first time that he could defeat a minority Conservative government and make a case to the Governor-General that his party could govern with the support of others – and without another trip to the polls.

Until now, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has only said the party that wins the most seats on May 2 can “try” to win the confidence of the House of Commons. While the comment carried an obvious implication, he spelled it out for the first time Tuesday.

“Let’s run it right out so we’re all clear,” Mr. Ignatieff said in a live interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

“If [Conservative Leader Stephen] Harper wins the most seats and forms a government but does not secure the confidence of the House, and I’m assuming Parliament comes back, then it goes to the Governor-General. That’s what happens. That’s how the rules work.

“And then, if the Governor-General wants to call on other parties – or myself, for example – to try and form a government, then we try and form a government. That’s exactly how the rules work and what I’m trying to say to Canadians is I understand the rules, I respect the rules, I’ll follow them to the letter and I’m not going to form a coalition,” he said.

Iggy is technically correct, of course, but absent a coalition or an accord, a minority government that holds about 80 out of 308 seats would be vaporized in no time and the party in power would be crushed into dust in the ensuing election. So, he's lying, stupid or both.

The Grits are the most arrogant people ever to walk the Earth. They truly are vicious swine and honestly believe that they are entitled to rule irrespective of how few seats they actually win at the ballot box. And, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, this is what will ultimately blow up any formal arrangement with the NDP until the NDP starts picking the meat off of their corpses.

If you look at the negotiating points from the 2008-09 coalition/merger talks, you quickly notice that the Liberals were demanding huge sacrifices from the New Democrats while refusing to give them real power or responsibility. Since the alternative for the Grits was to vote with Tory minority governments until the end of time, which would annihilate their credibility as an alternative, they Dippers would have to be nuts to agree to that. And the NDP has always suffered every time that it has supported a Liberal minority.

If it comes down to defeating a Throne Speech or a big-spending Flaherty budget this summer, I don't see anything coming from it, simply because it isn't in Jack Layton's political interest. While Ignatieff might be a political neophyte, Layton would need to be borderline retarded to support the Liberals without getting a lot more from them than they're willing to give.

But the Conservatives have set a time-bomb for themselves that could blow them up the minute Parliament resumes sitting. That would be the Auditor General's G8 report, a leaked draft of which alleges that the Tories used summit and border security money to feather the nest of Conservative ridings in the area, particularly that of Industry Minister Tony Clement, and lied to Parliament about it. The Tories political flacks have been running around the country saying that it was only a draft that leaked and the final report will clear them, even though there's no way that they can now that. This is commonly known as lying, maybe you've heard of it.

If that final report is released and says essentially says the same thing as the draft, the Harper government is finished. At that point, you're getting awfully close to violations of the criminal law. The three opposition parties will have little choice but to defeat the government at the earliest opportunity, and I don't think that the country would mind all that much. You would then have a demonstrably criminal government, every bit as bad as the Liberals were in the darkest days of the Sponsorship Scandal.

Under those circumstances, the dynamics change dramatically. If the Grits are ever to win government, that would be their best chance to do it. And that puts Jack Layton in the driver's seat. Ignatieff is half-crazed if he thinks that the Governor General will allow a party with only 80 seats to take power under those circumstances, absent some sort of written guarantee that it could survive longer than a few weeks. Failing that, the GG could opt for an election, which a bankrupt Liberal Party would be destroyed in. At that point, Layton gets whatever he wants.

And you know what? That'll be, despite his obviously dishonest protestations to the contrary, the House that Harper built. He's hoping that if he lies enough to get through the writ period, the G8 report will just go away or he can spin it out of existence. I don't think that he can do that. I think that it will be explosively bad and his allowing his flacks to lie about it makes it even worse.

I've always said that if Harper doesn't win a majority on May 2, he'll announce his intention to resign that night. If his minority is defeated by his G8 shenanigans, he'll be eaten alive by his own party. Everybody in the Cabinet thinks that they're going to be Harper's successor, but none of them wants to wind up like poor Paul Martin did, holding the bag for Jean Chretien's scandal.

In more ways than one, Stephen Harper may wind up being the author of his own political destruction.

In The Volunteer: Lies the left and social conservatives told me

Wherein I address the dishonest and borderline retarded hopes and fears of a "Harper hidden agenda" on both the left and right. You just might like it, but who knows? You folks can be hard to predict sometimes.

Everybody hates Helena

When Helena Guergis was unceremoniously booted from Stephen Harper's Cabinet and the Conservative caucus a year ago this week, it seemed pretty bad. But, several sentences later, when the prime minister revealed that the RCMP had been called in to investigate the matter, I knew it would be a sexy, sexy scandal. I'm not sure why I thought that, really. I guess a lot of it had to do with the way Harper kept licking his lips and winking at the camera.

I'm not going to lie to you folks, I was pretty excited about that. I have a thing for cute girls who engage in scandalous behaviour. And it's not always just about my penis! I think it's admirable when girls out-stupid the boys, instead of just thinking that they could if they weren't so goddamn dignified. And Ms. Guergis isn't just a cute girl. For a politician, she's downright hawt!

But Harper is a major-league tool. I think it mostly comes from the fact that he has no soul and sometimes murders children in the middle of the night just to feel anything at all. So he wouldn't tell us exactly what the allegations against the former Minister of State for the Status of Women actually were. That lead reasonable people like me to conclude that they must have been awfully sexy, indeed. And when the RCMP didn't leak them fifteen seconds later, that reinforced my belief.

And you know what? They were indeed sexy!

CBC News has learned that the "serious allegations" Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred to last year in connection with former Conservative MP Helena Guergis included unsubstantiated claims of fraud, extortion and involvement with prostitutes.

(...)

Hamilton raised allegations of "Jaffer and Guergis on tape, partying with hookers and doing cocaine" and that "not only does Helena tolerate Jaffer hanging out with, with escorts, and prostitutes, but there's apparently video of her snorting cocaine off the breasts of a prostitute."

You know, if I said that I wasn't fully erect reading that, I'd be lying.

But there was a small flaw with the allegations against Guergis ... they were unmitigated horseshit. I'm  amazed that it took the Mounties longer than 10 minutes to figure that out, but the Mounties have a long and storied history of incompetence. The story came from a private eye*, and the Tories, having sworn to be the most ethical government in all of Canadian (yet failing spectacularly at it), fucking bought it hook line and sinker. Or they at least pretended to.

So they shitcanned her and sent her cute little ass off to sit as an Independent. Even when she was cleared, not only would Harper not let her return to caucus, he wouldn't tell her what the discounted allegations even were.

Well, Helena Guergis - currently running as an "Independent Conservative," whatever that is, in Simcoe-Grey - is pissed. And still good at crying.

Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton, smelling blood, are all over this. Both have pointed out that Harper kept Bruce Carson, celebrated across Canada for his bankruptcies, multiple fraud convictions, illegal lobbying, and an almost poetically epic love for whores, close to his bosom with a top-secret security clearance, while Helena was thrown under the nearest bus and run over with it repeatedly. And you know what? They aren't wrong. There are also two Conservative senators that have been charged with electoral fraud in the "In and Out" scandal that are still in caucus.

Fuck Stephen Harper and fuck the Conservative Party. They need to get humiliated some, and although Ignatieff doesn't have the parts to do it, Helena Guergis does. And that's why she needs to win in Simcoe-Grey. She's in a helluva better position to beat the Tories there than the Liberals ever will be, and if they can't win that seat, a majority becomes several degrees harder for Harper to pull off. If they lose to an Independent that they themselves worked so hard to discredit, they're fucked.

Even though she hasn't explicitly promised that she won't return to the Conservative caucus if invited, Helena Guergis is the only candidate  that I intend to endorse in this categorically useless and fundamentally retarded election.

I encourage all of my Canadian readers to throw Ms. Guergis a few bucks, which you can do here (PDF link.) If, like me, you want to see those smug assholes get castrated like wild dogs in Simcoe-Grey, you should give her even more money.

“The damage is real,” she said, breaking down in tears. “It is deep and it is permanent.”

And it doesn't have to be. You folks are in a position to give her a small measure of revenge.


*Note: I just found this out, and think that it's hilarious, but it turns out that I used to work for the PI that passed the Guergis allegations onto the Tories. I never met the man, having resigned  years before the company's bankruptcy and had nothing to do with anyone there afterward. Obviously, that connection hasn't coloured my opinions on the story in any way but it's something that I felt I should probably disclose myself.

This only came to my attention when doing some research a few minutes ago. Pretty hilarious, huh?

And the winner is ... Gilles Duceppe?

I know that about a week and a half ago I wrote that political debates are the biggest waste of time in the world for anyone who knows anything about anything, but they sure are fun to watch. The worst television usually is. So I couldn't help but to watch tonight's English language Leader's debate. 

And it wasn't just a waste of time, it was a colossal waste of time. It was the most predictable thing I've ever seen, and I've been watching these friggin' things for nearly thirty years.

What actually surprised me is who the "winner" was: Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe. The man is a traitor, a Marxist, and he sounds funny ... although not as funny as the lamented Stephane Dion did two years and a half years ago. He's not even running candidates outside of Quebec. His only reason for participating in the English debates at all was to speak to a few hundred thousand people on the island of Montreal that are never going to vote for him anyway.

But he did what he was supposed to do - and what Messers Ignatieff and Layton pointedly failed to do - pin Stephen Harper to the fucking wall. This election is about one thing and one thing only, should Harper get another minority or a majority. While Monsieur Duceppe didn't score a knockout against the prime minister, he was the only one who pushed hard against him and made him look consistently uncomfortable. Okay, that's not really fair. Harper always looks uncomfortable, but that's because he's a murderous cyborg and human emotions don't compute with him.

Harper only had to do one thing tonight, press the coalition argument and he only barely did it. Yes, Ignatieff once again renounced a potential coalition and the PM even managed to fuck that up. He should have pressed on an "accord," which is going to be the natural fallback Liberal position. That opportunity is now lost to him, probably forever, since a grand total of no one is going to watch the French debate.

While I get that "indignant prick" is Stephen Harper's default setting, I don't see how he scored any points about incessantly whining about "this unnecessary election" and "bickering." You're in one and that's what politicians do during them. Toughen up, Sugar Tits. Whenever Harper started going down that path again and again, I found myself wondering why he always looks like he's wearing lipstick. And that's not me being a snarky bastard, he really does. Check the tape. Otherwise, he pretended to be Blue Sweater Steve without the blue sweater.

For a guy who spent much of his thirty-four years out of the country as a TV host or guest, Michael Ignatieff could hardly get through a sentence without sounding like he was having a stroke. There were unnatural pauses all over the place and if anyone on that stage should have been stumbling over words, you wouldn't have thought that it would be the Harvard professor.

Ignatieff also lost on substance. Instead of presenting a credible governing alternative, Ignatieff simply held his fantasy platform against Harper's wishful thinking budget. I counted no fewer than three ways that he's planning to spend the same $6 billion. Given the headlines from the last two days, you would have thought that Iggy would slam the Tories for allegedly using G8 money to feather Tony Clement's nest, but the only Cabinet members mentioned by name were Jason Kenney and Bev Oda. Problematically, only sexless geeks actually know who they are. There is a reason that we're legally obligated to call it the Harper Government.

Ignatieff also made at least two majestic fuck-ups. First he quoted Mao Zedong twice, which is never wise when you're trying to make a point about democracy. Then when Layton called him on the long history of broken promises, Iggy responded by saying "At least we get into government," which is tantamount to admitting to everyone that it pays to lie in politics. I mean, it does and everything, but who in the fuck actually says that? Ignatieff was a walking disaster.

Jack Layton was, well, he was Jack Layton. And that's hardly enough. He's a nice enough man, but his entire political career looks like the bad guys won in any given Jimmy Stewart movie.

So I'll give this debate, as much as means anything, to Gilles Duceppe. Actually, I take that back. It means quite a bit. Our politics are so pathetic and broken that the only halfway decent performance in the English debate came from the only leader who wasn't raised speaking English and isn't running candidates in English Canada.

And that says more than I ever could.