According to the Toronto Star today--and how it must have pained them to write this of the autocratic, dictatorial Harper--the government has consulted 46 municipalities and 602 organizations over this budget. It's held seventy formal roundtables and reviewed 5400 emails, had 102 discussions with provinical and territorial leaders, and Flaherty has met with his economic advisory council four times. So obviously Harper's trying to please everybody, which, as we all know, means he'll please no one.
And Harper is leaking his own budget ahead of time, in bits and pieces, gauging reaction. Ignatieff calls this irresponsible, which isn't a shock: anything politically beneficial to the Harper government is ipso facto irresponsible, in Iggy's eyes.
Layton's on record as saying he'll oppose the budget sight unseen, which is my own definition of irresponsible...but again, not surprising. Jacky-boy's got coalitious dreams, and shooting down the government's the only way he can nurture them into reality.
Ignatieff, meanwhile, hasn't got the slightest interest in a coalition that will lend credibility to his rival. He will assess the budget on its merits, if any.
And so we have a triangle here: the most stable geometric shape. It's too bad politics isn't geometry.
Has Harper learned anything from having to (unexpectedly, one imagines) stave off his government's defeat? We'll see. Certainly there's nothing contentious in what's been leaked so far. Or rather, it's all contentious, when every last person has an opinion on what the government should and should not be doing in this economic climate. But there doesn't seem to be anything partisan, at least in what I've seen--which is a welcome change from a man who for so long seemed utterly unable to abandon partisanship.
A couple of billion for housing, money for seniors, the poor, aboriginals: these are not, historically, Conservative priorities. Which kind of begs the question: Does it matter why all this economic stimulus is in here? Does it matter that Harper's obviously only trying to hold power for as long as possible? If the measures are worth supporting, does it matter who came up with them? Or who stole them from whom?
When the coalition madness was sweeping the nation last month, I noticed two sides--polar opposites, really--readily formed. One side (Harper's) said the coalition was undemocratic. By the letter of our Constitution, this is patently untrue, as we're all no doubt aware by now. In spirit there are a lot of people (justifiably, in my view) uncomfortable with a government they don't get any choice in forming, no matter what the Constitution might say on the matter. The other side marvelled at how two bitter rivals, the Liberals and New Democrats, could put their differences aside and work together...which is, in a sense, as democratic as it gets, and ideally what we should be seeing from all four parties represented in our House of Commons. I'll admit my immediate thought when I first heard the world coalition was cool, now if only they can include the Conservatives in it, maybe we'd get somewhere.
A lot has changed in the seven weeks the rogues have been prorogued. The economy, which Harper had recently said was pretty much okey-dokey, went up in tokey-smokey. In everyone's defense, predicting the economy is a mug's game at this point, because we've never confronted this set of crises all at once before. There are still some people saying things will start to turn around toward the end of this year, and by 2011 we'll have forgotten this recession ever happened. There are others suggesting that now would be about a good time to start to take leave of your ass. The reality's probably somewhere in the middle, but where exactly is anyone's guess.
Anyone else still curious what Harper said to Michaelle Jean to get her to accede to his demand? And what she might have said back? I imagine the conversation went something like this:
SH: Help me, Mommy, the Big Bad Evil Coalition's come into my sandbox and they're kicking sand in my face!
MJ: And what did you do to them, Stevie?
SH: Nothing! I swear! Why would I do anything to them?
MJ: Now, Stevie, we all know you like to be King of the Sandbox. Did they want to play in the sandbox too?
SH: But it's my sandbox! I won it! If I can't play in it NOBODY CAN! *stomps his feet*
MJ: Okay, Stevie, I think it's time for a time-out. Go stand in the corner for seven weeks and think about what you just said. When you go back out to the sandbox I want you to play nice, okay?
SH (muttering) Bitch.
MJ: What was that, Stevie?
SH: Okay, Mommy.
In the interim, the Liberals went out and got themselves a new leader, a man I'd suggest is a Liberal Stephen Harper. I like Ignatieff, what I've seen of him, anyway. He sure beats Stephane Dion, let me tell you. I like that he's not afraid to hold positions contrary to his own party and Canadian orthodoxy. And he seems feisty. Dion would whine pitifully regarding the plate of shit Harper had set before him and then dig in with a pout on his face. One gets the feeling that Ignatieff would look at the same plate of shit, snap his fingers in an imperial fashion, and tell the summoned waiter this is shit, get it off my plate.
Only Layton's unchanged. So close and yet so far to those levers of power. He used to be in Florida: now he's on the moon. Which one's closer? Well, duh, says Jack, obviously the moon's closer than Florida. I can see the moon from here.
Canadian politics, folks. There's rumous of a new era of hope dawning to our south, but we'd rather snipe at each other and score political points.
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