Wow
So. The only good thing I can find to say about this Conservative majority is, if things look as bad in five years as I'm afraid they're going to look, Harper won't be able to blame it on coalitions or the Opposition.
I mean, he will, or at least he'll try, but let's be serious.
I'm worried about social issues, obviously, but I'm actually equally worried about the economy, because conservative governments (large or small "c") always boast that they're the ones who can handle money, and they just can't. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect--in fact, since they seem to convince voters of their financial acumen despite the fact conservative governments always lead to economic disaster, there must also be some sort of Dunning-Kruger-by-proxy effect. It's happened throughout my lifetime on both sides of the border: conservative governments lead to poor economies, which the conservatives claim they are the only ones who can fix (and they don't mean in the sense of "we made this mess and we are morally bound to clean it up," which would be accurate.) And voters fall for it until they're desperate, and Paul Martin has to figure out a way to balance the books. (At the moment, Obama is dealing with an inherited mess so bad his administration probably can't fix it in one term and he'll take the blame, which may mean the party that created the mess in the first place gets back in power and I just don't want to think about that.)
Ahem. Make no mistake here: the reasons our economy is paddling along now are: Harper inherited a system in pretty good shape, and the fact he had minority governments kept him in check. He's going to go out there and do all the things conservatives do, like cut taxes to corporations, which never work, and then be surprised when they don't work. I think that's in the DSM IV somewhere.
With that said, the swing toward the NDP is interesting, especially in Quebec. I suspect the Bloc will be back but they've got a long old road.
The Liberal disaster has been in the making for a very long time, and I don't think the leadership fandango has helped at all: after Martin, the party really did set Stephane Dion up to fail so they could get their electoral disaster out of the way and give Ignatieff a clean slate. I'm sure that's what happened. Only everyone else was sure as well, so the Iggy disaster (I don't even say he'd be a bad PM) is as much about cleansing fire as it is about him. I don't know where the party can go from here, but they may need to do something entirely new.
(Dion, incidentally, is one Liberal who held his seat. Unlike Ignatieff.)
Incidentally, there is talk about how the Tories were wiped out in the aftermath of the Mulroney years--which gets blamed on Kim Campbell, but come on. That was a reaction to too much Mulroney--and now they're back, but the thing is: they're not. The Progressive Conservatives, the party of Stanfield and Diefenbaker, died years ago. Peter MacKay, that snivelling weasel, won the leadership on a promise not to form a coalition with the far-right Reform party, and then he did, and the party we see now is not your parents' Tories by a long shot. And there's no one for the Liberals to form such a coalition with, so they may be in the wilderness for a while.
This post is strictly me venting, so comments are turned off. I'm probably going to unplug for a few days as well, at least from politics.
Next time around, though, I might have to think of something more concrete to do than just vote. Because I foresee a bunch of changes ahead, unless the economic collapse I'm worrying about distracts the Tories from whatever retrograde social agenda they may have.
Oh, hell.
I mean, he will, or at least he'll try, but let's be serious.
I'm worried about social issues, obviously, but I'm actually equally worried about the economy, because conservative governments (large or small "c") always boast that they're the ones who can handle money, and they just can't. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect--in fact, since they seem to convince voters of their financial acumen despite the fact conservative governments always lead to economic disaster, there must also be some sort of Dunning-Kruger-by-proxy effect. It's happened throughout my lifetime on both sides of the border: conservative governments lead to poor economies, which the conservatives claim they are the only ones who can fix (and they don't mean in the sense of "we made this mess and we are morally bound to clean it up," which would be accurate.) And voters fall for it until they're desperate, and Paul Martin has to figure out a way to balance the books. (At the moment, Obama is dealing with an inherited mess so bad his administration probably can't fix it in one term and he'll take the blame, which may mean the party that created the mess in the first place gets back in power and I just don't want to think about that.)
Ahem. Make no mistake here: the reasons our economy is paddling along now are: Harper inherited a system in pretty good shape, and the fact he had minority governments kept him in check. He's going to go out there and do all the things conservatives do, like cut taxes to corporations, which never work, and then be surprised when they don't work. I think that's in the DSM IV somewhere.
With that said, the swing toward the NDP is interesting, especially in Quebec. I suspect the Bloc will be back but they've got a long old road.
The Liberal disaster has been in the making for a very long time, and I don't think the leadership fandango has helped at all: after Martin, the party really did set Stephane Dion up to fail so they could get their electoral disaster out of the way and give Ignatieff a clean slate. I'm sure that's what happened. Only everyone else was sure as well, so the Iggy disaster (I don't even say he'd be a bad PM) is as much about cleansing fire as it is about him. I don't know where the party can go from here, but they may need to do something entirely new.
(Dion, incidentally, is one Liberal who held his seat. Unlike Ignatieff.)
Incidentally, there is talk about how the Tories were wiped out in the aftermath of the Mulroney years--which gets blamed on Kim Campbell, but come on. That was a reaction to too much Mulroney--and now they're back, but the thing is: they're not. The Progressive Conservatives, the party of Stanfield and Diefenbaker, died years ago. Peter MacKay, that snivelling weasel, won the leadership on a promise not to form a coalition with the far-right Reform party, and then he did, and the party we see now is not your parents' Tories by a long shot. And there's no one for the Liberals to form such a coalition with, so they may be in the wilderness for a while.
This post is strictly me venting, so comments are turned off. I'm probably going to unplug for a few days as well, at least from politics.
Next time around, though, I might have to think of something more concrete to do than just vote. Because I foresee a bunch of changes ahead, unless the economic collapse I'm worrying about distracts the Tories from whatever retrograde social agenda they may have.
Oh, hell.