"The Smell of Death's Around You" : Rob Ford & That Poll

Note to my non-Toronto readers: Look, I know that there a lot more of you here than my fellow denizens of Hogtown. over half of you aren't even Canadian.

I never thought that I'd writing a blog primarily focused on local politics, and for years you wouldn't have known where I lived at all. That changed with the rise, spectacular fall and possible resurrection of Mayor Rob Ford.

It's a pretty compelling story, and one I can't easily ignore. Everything about the man perfectly fits into this blog's narrative of what's happening to conservatism. I'm horrified by it and in love with it, all at once.

I'm getting quite the reaction from my musings here, but I understand how it can be a little "inside baseball" if you don't actually live here. As always, I appreciate your continued patience.

Thanks,

skippy

They say that the numbers don't lie, and I generally believe that. I spent the better part of two months pointing out that Republicans were kidding themselves with "skewed polls" in this month's presidential election. Polling, for the most part, is generally right and a useful tool. Were it not, nobody would use it. And political and journalistic types pay obscene amounts of money for polling.

Having said that, I do take issue with hypothetical political polling.  Politics is far too fluid a game to reasonably make judgements on hypotheticals. In Toronto's last mayoral campaign, for example, Adam Giambrone was supposed to clear the liberal field early, take on either John Tory or Rob Ford and save the day for David Miller's strange legacy. Then we learned of his love of hot. strange pussy and his campaign folded within days of it beginning. But, for about ten minutes, he was the Golden Child, at least on paper.

We don't know that there's going to be a by-election to fill the judicially created vacancy in the mayor's office. I prefer that there isn't, and every right-leaning member councillor that isn't named Ford seems to agree with me.

As is true with most things, it depends on what the liberal plurality on City Council chooses to do. If Ford isn't granted a stay, they can either force a by-election, which is clearly in their interest, or they can bypass Doug Holyday and create open warfare.

As indicated by this morning's Angus Reid poll, Mayor Ford's numbers are nightmarish. Contrary to everything I've heard since Monday, both here and elsewhere, there is overwhelming support for getting rid of Etobicoke Slim once and for all. Not having poked around the internals of the poll, the numbers look even worse than I ever expected them to be.

In an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll conducted after Ford was kicked out of office on Monday — he is now appealing — 69 per cent of respondents said they supported Justice Charles Hackland’s decision, 49 per cent of them strongly. That’s compared to 27 per cent who opposed the ruling, 16 per cent of them strongly.

Ford may not be permitted to run in a byelection. If he is, he will have to face an electorate that has solidified in its antipathy to him. Fifty-seven per cent of poll respondents said they would “definitely” not vote for Ford in a byelection. Another 11 said they would “probably” not vote for him.

Though Ford is renowned for his “nation” of devotees, the poll suggests that his opponents are now more enthusiastic than his supporters. A mere 16 per cent of respondents said they would definitely vote for him, 11 per cent said they would probably vote for him.

Ford’s favourability rating was also dismal. Only 28 per cent said they had a positive impression of him, 67 per cent a negative impression. NDP MP and potential candidate Olivia Chow’s numbers were nearly the opposite: 60 per cent had a positive impression of her, 24 per cent negative.

(Since this poll was published, Mr. Justice Hackland struck "the current term" language from his ruling, therefore qualifying the Mayor to run in a by-election.)

Ouch.

For two years now, I've been making the case that the supposed "Ford Nation" doesn't exist. His election was based entirely based on a heavily divided field opposing him and his ability to (falsely) portray himself as a conservative.

This poll should divided into two parts: The removal of Ford (along with his personal numbers,) and the hypothetical horserace.

Nearly three-quarters of those polled (69%,) to one degree or another, supports removing him from office. His re-elect numbers are better by a single point.

Here's the dirty little secret of populism: you need to actually be popular for it to work. Absent a strong personality cult, populism - on either the left or the right - is a hodgepodge of nonsensical policies that actually work against one another.

Ford's 2010 campaign was a perfect example of that. He ran on the idea that you could build a $100 billion subway system and pay for it by cutting $75, 000 of gardening at Nathan Philips Square. Not only did he promise during his campaign that he wouldn't cut city services, he said that he might actually increase them.

That was horseshit, and all but the most delusional Sun Media mavens now know it. And Ford's numbers haven't exactly been great for over a year now.

I'm not going to pretend that 69% of the city supports the points of law on Hizzoner's removal, or even knows what the facts of the case even are. I'd guess that half of them have no understanding whatsoever about either. Nor does it matter. Ignorant assholes decide elections all the time.

They just want Robbie gone.  And in the big, bad world out there, that's all that matters.

I'll grant you that there is a path to victory for the mayor, but that relies almost entirely on the kindness of his enemies.

Rob Ford begins any hypothetical race with the support of the 20% of people who also believe that supermodels will blow them if they only get to know them. They will buy anything the Ford family has to say. You don't get more rock-solid than that vote. If it was found that the Mayor was butchering prostitutes and burying them in the park he wanted to buy, they'd applaud him for "cleaning up the streets."

These people really do think that taking TTC buses out of service for his dopey football team or demanding to fix the road in front of the family business was perfectly justifiable. That's the personality cult of populism talking. (See also Long, Huey.) Who needs a "gravy train," when you can comandeer a couple of city buses?

If the left acts like the left and runs a half dozen "bitter-ender" candidates, it's at least conceivable that Etobicoke Slim runs up the middle and wins. That's basically what happened the last time. Former provincial health minister George Smitherman was also a less than ideal main opposition candidate, even though he was backed by the brains and the money of the institutional Conservative parties of both Ontario and Canada.

And that, my friends, is where Olivia Chow comes in.

Chow isn't going to run as herself. That'll never work. Instead, she's going to run as the anointed spiritual successor to the recented sainted Jack Layton. I can't imagine her giving a speech where her late husband's name isn't invoked at least a dozen times. If you think that's not going to carry some serious weight, you're kidding yourselves.

That begs the question; how do liberal candidates run against the ghost of Jack while remaining committed to liberal orthodoxy. Olivia also benefits from the fact that liberals hate Ford far more than they hate one another, the exact opposite phenomenon from what have saved Stephen Harper over and over again.

Then there's what Richard Nixon called the "nut-cutting" of politics.

Rob Ford got beaten in the Old City of Toronto and won with concentrated support in the suburbs. But the northern and eastern rings of the city are heavily Asian. Off of the top of m head, there are probably a half-dozen wards that Chow could win with the support of the Chinese community alone, mine included.

In a clean head-to-head race, I can't see how Ford beats Chow. And after 2010, I don't see a bitter ender like Joe Pantalone staying in the race through election day.

So here's the question for conservatives: Do you love Rob Ford more than you fear Olivia Chow?

If she runs, (which is a significant if,) my guess is that she'll probably win on the basis on her name, who her husband was and the demographics of the city.

The only way to plausibly stop her is by "bigfooting" Ford out of the race.

That means John Tory. If you combine Tory's vote with Ford's, you have 44%, which is more than enough to win under almost any scenario. And given how the right feels about Olivia Chow,  I can't imagine that they wouldn't vote for Tory.

But given the Angus-Reid numbers, I can see a whole lot of Tory's voters going to Chow, if only to get rid of Ford.

That being the case, I think that if Tory indicated his willingness to run, Ford's money and support would evaporate overnight. I for one wouldn't vote for a Ford, except in a recall. I very much would vote for John Tory, especially if that meant stopping Olivia Chow.

But would I be more comfortable with Chow than Ford? Probably. I wouldn't vote for her, but at least I know that her administration wouldn't be best with personal embarrassment, personal entitlement and constant court appearances.

The fact is that I don't see Olivia Chow being any better than Rob Ford on mt priorities, but I don't see her being any worse, either. The difference is that I can see conservative governance coming back after Chow, and that's a fool's errand with Ford.

Again, I will go absolutely apeshit if a monstrously expensive and essentially meaningless election is forced on the city that puts in a mayor that basically has six months to do nothing at all. Not only will I refuse to support any candidate that does that, I will never vote for them again and agitate against them to the fullest extent of my ability.

But, as of this morning, the Ford brothers should start being awfully careful what they wish for. They just might get it, and I suspect it won't end the way they think it will.

Book Review - "How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot: The Inside Story Behind the Coalition" by Brian Topp

The fall of 2008 was magical time, if by "magical" you mean "the world was ending."

Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15 and the year-old recession metastasized into a full-bore, balls-out financial panic. More than anything else, this was responsible for electing Barack Obama president of the United States. From that moment on, John McCain made to many stupid unforced errors for him to ever be taken seriously again.

Oh, and Canada was enjoying it's 42nd federal election in 20 minutes. Nobody does democracy like Canadians have over the last decade. I vote almost as often as I masturbate, and I masturbate plenty! It's actually pretty annoying.

Because of spectacularly bad political decisions on his part, Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government was reelected, but didn't yet win his long lusted-after majority.

How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is what happened in the aftermath of the 2008, during what Canadians call "The Winter of Our Discontent." The author, Brian Topp, was the New Democratic Party's campaign director and a key player in what subsequently happened.

After a campaign riddled with incredibly dumb mistakes, Harper consciously chose to begin his second mandate with even dumber ones. When the House of Commons resumed sitting in late November, Harper's jerk-off finance minister, Jim Flaherty, introduced an economic statement that basically said "Everything's fine" just as the ruins of the world economy were smouldering around him.

But then it got worse. Harper and Flaherty decided that they were going to be Scott Walker, two years before Scott Walker was invented by the Koch brothers. Among other things, the Conservatives announced that federal workers would lose their right to strike and pay equity for women would be rolled back. Then they set off a political hydrogen bomb: the public subsidy to the parties would be immediately ended.

This requires some explaining for my foreign readers. In 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided that he very much wanted to cripple his successor as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Paul Martin. He did this by banning corporate and union donations to the parties, replacing them with a per-vote public subsidy. The Liberals, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks, took the biggest hit of all in this scheme and it had the effect of electing Harper, who had mastered grassroots fund-raising.

Under the public subsidy, the parties that weren't the Conservatives took out loans to pay for election campaigns and repaid them with the public subsidy. The immediate end of the subsidy would have bankrupted. And there was no way that the opposition parties were going to tolerate that.

As much as he now likes to pretend otherwise, Harper is no stranger to the idea of a coalition replacing a "democratically elected" government. During the dark days of Paul Martin's short-lived minority, he had proposed doing just that with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Now the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc proposed doing it to Harper.

The whole idea was apparently Topp's and Jack Layton appointed him as one of the negotiators to approach the Grits.

Small problem, Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals, ran an even more disastrous campaign than the Tories did and had already announced his resignation. Everyone believed (as later happened) that Michael Ignatieff was going to replace him. Ignatieff was far more conservative, arrogant, opportunistic and unprincipled than was Dion and a coalition would likely have been a dead letter under him. Time was of the essence.

Even while Dion was still leader, the Liberals couldn't stop being the Liberals and nearly sank the deal. As they have been for most of my life, they were in the midst of a vicious civil war and, all available evidence to the contrary, still believed that they could win an election on their own. Those assholes honestly suggested that the NDP just give them power with nothing in return. Breaking the Grits of that illusion took days.

The greater problem was the NDP and the Liberals did not by themselves have enough votes to defeat the Conservatives on a confidence vote in the House or pass anything as a coalition. For that they would need the Bloc.

One of the great lies of the "Coalition Crisis of Ought-Eight" was that the treasonous Bloc would actually be partners in it. They weren't. They wouldn't be part of the government or hold any Cabinet seats. All the Bloc would do was pledge to support the NDP-Liberal coalition on confidence measures for roughly 18 months.

But Layton and Dion made a magnificently stupidly optical error: They publicly had the Bloc's leader, Gilles Ducceppe, join them in signing the coalition document and for the press conference announcing it. More than anything else, as Brian Topp himself concedes, killed the very idea of a coalition in the minds of English Canada.

The Harper Tories engaged in almost Herculean levels in lying in response to the coalition proposal. It was an unconstitutional power-grab against the wishes of the people, we were told, despite the fact the Westminster parliamentary system specifically allows for it.

The presence of Ducceppe and the Bloc only made matters worse. This, Harper screamed from the rooftops, was Stephane Dion "getting into bed with separatists," which was a shot well below the belt. As Mr. Topp points out in his book, the only person that Quebec separatists despise as fulsomely as Pierre Trudeau is Dion. More importantly, Harper wanted to do exactly the same thing only three years earlier.

Because Canadians aren't very bright, the whole thing was public relations clusterfuck of immense proportions. And it was going to get worse. Oh, it would get so much worse.

On the evening of December 3, both Harper and Dion delivered pre-taped addresses to the country. The Prime Minister surrounded himself with flags and lied his ass off. The Leader of the Opposition, who on top of being only barely functional in English, looked as though he was starring in a Hezbollah hostage video. And Dion could barely even get his hostage tape to the networks on time.



It was nothing less than the single greatest political disaster I had ever seen. Dion, who in many ways was a stronger champion of federalism than Harper, was so thoroughly discredited and humiliated that he immediately resigned the next day.

Ignatieff was named interim Liberal leader and the Grits' already formidable arrogance and stupidity went into hyperdrive. He fucked around, using the coalition as a meaningless threat before ultimately supporting Harper in Parliament for nine months.

In a way, it's actually too bad that How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot ends in the fall of 2009 because that's where the real fun started. What followed in the two years after the book was the complete disintegration of the Liberals, the almost forced deportation of Michael Ignatieff and the rise of the NDP as a genuine political force in Canada. Brian Topp's analysis of everything that happened after September of 2009 would have been fascinating to read.

Whether you agree with the NDP on policy (and I don't,) How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot is a much better than average contemporary political history. You see, in real time through Blackberry messages, how the negotiations built and how everything ultimately fell apart.

If you like your political books to grab you by the crotch before head-butting you, I can't recommend Brian Topp's book enough. How We almost Gave the Tories the Boot is instructive in the fine art of what Richard Nixon called nut-cutting and shows you not only where the bodies are buried, but almost lets you hold the shovel.

If you can, I suggest you pick it up.

"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.

"I got another confession to make" : The continuing saga of Jack Layton and one desperate blogger's cry of love

I can't stop watching the video of Sun News Network's Krista Erickson talking about the surreptitious and legally questionable handjobs that Jack Layton may or may not have received 15 years ago. No matter how hard I try, I just can't tear myself away from the computer monitor. I was like that when the story broke on television last night, but that only lasted for about 40 minutes before they returned to a re-run of The Source with Ezra Levant, already, as they say in the business, in progress. Ezra's a very nice man and all, but no one can kill a painful erection faster than him.

I haven't been able to sleep during the 13 hours since the the story broke, so haunted am I by Krista talking about it. In my mind's eye I keep visualizing her, with her golden tresses and banging little body, walking away from me, saturated tissue in hand. Perhaps she gives me a smile and a little wink as she turns to leave the room, just before the infernal police ruin everything. I can't even look at the Kleenex box beside my monitor without hearing the distinct sound of rattling coming from my groin. It's as if there are maracas in my jammies and I can't make the sound go away. I think that I'm getting double vision and I have an irresistible compulsion to shave my palms.

As I write this, I am naked and pale, just as Jack was on that good eve in January 1996. But there are no visions of Asian whores dancing through my head, oh no. Not today, brothers and sisters. There is only room for Krista in my head, my heart and my crotch.

All my life, I've heard people discuss how a news story changed their lives forever. Usually, it's the Kennedy assassination. People say that they'll always remember Walter Cronkite tearing up with a quivering voice after he announced that the 35th president of the United States had indeed been murdered in Dallas that November afternoon. I viewed that as sentimental nonsense, but no longer.

Last night was my Cronkite moment and I'm not sure that I'll ever see journalism the same way again. It was transformative, at least below my waist.

For good or ill, I'll forevermore associate Krista Erickson with socialist groins and moist tissues. And you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. That's not too kinky, is it? I think my feelings are actually a good deal more romantic than they probably sound.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go dig up my copy of Das Kapital. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.

Video sensuously stolen from Blazing Cat Fur

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.

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

The Ballad of Iggy and Jack

There are a bunch reasons that I'm not running around making Book of Revelations-type noises about the possibility of a Liberal-NDP "coalition" government in the event of a Conservative minority being reelected on May 2.

First and foremost, I don't see it as being much worse that the "Conservative" government we've had for the last five years. If anything, the Harper Government has made the idea more palatable to fiscal conservatives, since they've already done the maddening work of spending all the money.

As a matter of fact, Harper is crossing the country right now promising to make a giant mess of both the tax code and government revenues by giving tax credits to everyone for virtually everything. Getting fat? Well, the Tories want to subsidize your gym membership! Not only is that brutally irresponsible, given their record-breaking deficits, it's also using the tax code for social engineering. Yes, a Liberal-NDP coalition would do that too, but at least they'd be honest about it.

About those deficits. Well, the Right Honourable Prime Minister is promising to eliminate them in less than three years, which is nothing short of a fantasy. More importantly, he hasn't said how he intends to do it, other than relying on economic growth. And no serious person is believes that's going to happen, particularly when you're dive bombing the economy with tax credits, which will tend to increase the existing deficit.

There's no way that Michael Ignatieff's proposed corporate tax increases will pay for his massive budget giveaway, but at least it's something revenue-related. There's a nugget of reality in the Liberal platform, however tiny and likely dishonest. Harper isn't even content to stay with white lies. He's going with the Full Monty.

I will not vote for any of the potential coalition parties, but it doesn't really make a difference to me if they assume office. The Harper Conservatives, instead of trying to hide their allergy to money, are actually proud of it and they're promising more of the same. And I have no intention of rewarding that.

My other reason for not caring at about a "coalition" very much is that it's completely constitutional. There is nothing in our Constitution that says that the government has to win the popular vote. It does, however, have to enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. You might not like the Constitution, but that doesn't change the fact that it means exactly what it says. Also, for conservatives to argue that George W. Bush was entitled to establish residence in the White House, but a coalition should be precluded from taking power in Parliament would be intellectually fascinating.

Furthermore, Canada has already had one formal coalition government before, and that was formed by the Conservatives. Feel free to look it up.

Third, I don't think there actually will be a coalition. Micheal Ignatieff has already forsworn the idea of a "coalition" and I don't think that he has the balls to renege on something that blatant that soon. This isn't a guy with the confidence or political skills of Jean Chretien, who could lie with an easiness and transparency that would take your breath away.

Ignatieff, being Ignatieff, made his denial of a coalition with such precise and legalistic language that it allowed the Tories and their toadies to come back with the idea that he must be plotting a secret "accord," not unlike the federal one in 1972 or the Ontario Peterson-Rae deal in 1985.

And that could happen ... if Jack Layton is a lot dumber than I think he is. '72 and '85 had two things in common. In neither instance did the NDP actually share power in the form of Cabinet seats, they just supported the governing Liberals in return for a few of their policies being enacted. In both cases, the NDP were nearly wiped out in the subsequent election. The Trudeau and Peterson governments were not only able to take credit for their own records, they also managed to steal the NDP's more popular proposals, as well. The junior partner of such an arrangement never does well politically in its aftermath.

An accord would also require that the NDP compete for influence with the Bloc Quebecois, which will almost certainly have more seats in Parliament than they will. Layton will get very little credit for the successes of such an arrangement, but will take a huge chunk of the blame for its failure. The NDP's chances of ever winning anything again in Quebec will be destroyed and they'll face doom almost everywhere else.

Given that he's been in politics longer than any of the other federal leaders, I have to assume that Layton knows that history as well as I do and would very much like to prevent it from repeating itself. And the only way to do that is a full coalition government, with the NDP as equal partners. If I was Layton, I'd demand to be made deputy prime minister and/or House leader, and have Thomas Muclair named minister of finance.

Ignatieff feels that he has to be prime minister and Layton knows that he can't be. Why then would he give Iggy everything and get virtually nothing in return? After all, Jack has been able to wring concessions out of the already quite liberal Harper Tories when he wants to, and there's nothing to indicate that he won't be able to again. Stephen Harper has proven again and again that he'd give up the store rather than lose power and I don't expect that to change. I can't think of a single realistic reason why Layton would put the Liberals in power and relegate himself to being nothing more than Gilles Ducceppe's golf buddy in the process.

I don't know that Michael Ignatieff is bright enough to take that deal, and I don't think that he could control his caucus if he was. I'm convinced that unless he breaks 100 seats in three weeks - which there's little chance of - he's finished as leader, which is why I think he forced the election in the first place. In my opinion, he just wants to get it over with and flee the country as quickly as he can. I also think the caucus went into this election preferring a Harper majority while they get a new leader to being in a coalition with Ignatieff leading it.

If you're the NDP, your first and last strategic objective is to see the Liberals annihilated forever. That obviously doesn't happen if you give Michael Ignatieff (or whoever eventually replaces him) the keys to 24 Sussex Drive.

But keeping them as the official Opposition in a minority government goes a long way in furthering that goal. Win, lose or draw, the Grits are going to be broke again on May 3. So not only are they going to have to pay down their debts, they'll also have to raise enough money to maintain a constant state of election readiness. More likely than not, the Liberals will have yet another leadership race underway, which will exacerbate their thirty-five year old civil war. And all the while, they'll be supporting the Conservatives in the House about 95% of the time, further alienating their own base and dividing the caucus.

I could be wrong, and "Canada's Natural Governing Party" can survive another three to five years of that, but I don't see how. If you can tell me how a bunch of broke people that hate one other and have no prospect of winning power on their own manages to survive that long, I'd be more than interested in hearing it.

Despite my thinking that everything they believe is insane, I actually believe that the NDP are the most honest and principled of the federal parties. But they are professional politicians, and I can't think of a single sane reason why they'd want to keep their main ideological rivals - who they hate far more than the Tories - on life support.

A possible coalition government, however unlikely I think it is, doesn't bother me nearly as much as it should. But that's due to the almost monumental failure of the Conservative Party to do much of anything that's actually conservative. Stephen Harper made the conscious decision to both campaign and govern as the Liberals did, so there's virtually no difference between the two.

'Cause Tramps Like Us, Baby, We Were Born To Writ

"Maybe I can get another teaching job. I hear Angola is lovely in the spring"

Unless a dozen or so Liberal MPs get a sudden case of rickets this afternoon, the Harper Government (which the prime minister insists you call the government of Canada because, hey, it worked for Nicolae Ceaușescu) will be defeated on a confidence motion, precluding a vote on Jim Flaherty's shopaholic budget.

Ordinarily, I'd be thrilled by this. I've wanted to see Harper's "anything-but-conservative" Conservative regime toppled almost since the day it took office.  As my friend Jay recently pointed out, if I wanted a Liberal budget, I would have fucking well voted for the Liberals, wouldn't I?

Actually, that's not fair to the Liberals, who built up shitloads of deficit-cutting credibility during the Chretien-Martin years, so much so that I now regret not having voted for them in the 90s. Chretien and Martin did what no other government has done in my lifetime - and the only thing I demand of the federal government - balance the goddamned books. I get that they only pulled pulled it off by screwing everybody and raiding the Unemployment Insurance fund, but I don't care. At this point, I'll even take the appearance of fiscal discipline. Stephen Harper is clearly unequal to the task and has governed like George W. Bush on a fucking mescaline marathon.

But Micheal Ignatieff, being Michael Ignatieff, is pissing that natural advantage away. Sure, he's pointing out Tory profligacy every chance he gets, but he's also promising shitloads new, unpaid-for, spending. Think the Conservative's babysitter tax credit just isn't enough for you? Well, the Ignatieff Liberals are practically promising to move your kids into his place, which just isn't credible because he lives in an itty-bitty condo.

Oh, and the election that will be forced on us this afternoon comes in the face of truly daunting polling numbers. Even Liberals who are famous for saying that they always want an election are backing away from that as quickly as they humanly can in the face of last night's Ipsos release. 43% approval for Harper in a four party Parliament is an awesomely tough nut to crack and the Tories have never done that well on the eve of a writ before.

As to the fundamentally worthless 1984 analogies, they're premature, at best. So far as I remember, Brian Mulroney didn't start the '84 campaign with a zillion point lead. But Kim Campabell - another sitting prime minister -  did, and she lost a hundred and fifty some odd seats in a month.

Not that it matters. Ignatieff is out of options. He, like Stephane Dion before him, have supported this government at every turn. Ignore Harper's horseshit "coalition" propaganda because there already is one, and there has for over five years now. With the single exception of Layton propping him up, Stephen Harper has governed at the pleasure of the Liberal Party of Canada. The last five years have been like World War I without the troublesome shooting.

The Count of Cambridge is screwed regardless what he does. If he forces an election, he loses badly. If he doesn't, his rivals in the eternal civil war destroy him. One way or another, his reign of error is over.

Unless, of course, he plays the coalition card. If - as I believe will happen - Harper fucks up yet another "sure thing majority," the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois will constitute a majority of House. And no one is as spooked by a coalition as they were in December of 2008.

The only things that stopped a coalition in 2008 was that the country was unprepared for it, it was a response to a bullshit issue (public subsidies for political parties)  and that Ignatieff was a coward. He was the last MP to sign the letter and refused to defeat the 2009 budget with the coalition. Now the idea is out there and I think that the country could live with a coalition.

Frankly, so could I. There isn't a blogger in the world that has better fiscally conservative credentials than I do. And I forcefully reject the notion that a Haper majority would stop burning up money, if only because Harper would very much want to keep that majority. I'm convinced that these assholes would spend a fucking truckload of money to do it. All things being equal, a coalition that doesn't pretend to care about the deficit is still better than one that can only barely be forced to admit that it exists at all, if only because they want to expand it to buy more votes.

I don't care what the polls say. The balance of power - assuming another Harper minority, which I'm virtually certain is coming - rests with the NDP. And I don't see them coronating Michael Ignatieff, who has historically been to the right of Harper himself. The Dippers have also done the hard work of opposition for the last five years, while the Grits just supported the government. It would be insane for the NDP to reward the Ignatieff for that.

There's almost no way that Michael Ignatieff is cleanly elected prime minister. His chances of winning even a minority government are close to zero. And having him installed in 24 Sessex Drive by Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe accomplishes absolutely nothing from their ideological perspective. At this point, the Conservatives shouldn't be able to call themselves conservative anymore. If I were the Bloc or the NDP, I'd think that that another year or two better than Prime Minister Ignatieff, which means that Ignatieff is finshed.

After five years, on any number of fronts, the Conservative Party of Canada has lost the right to govern. There is no conservative alternative to a coalition.