(no subject)
Ignatieff chickened out, at least for now. There's still a slim chance he'll vote it down on amendments, but it looks like Flaherty is pretending to be reasonable and they're going to reach a compromise.
The budget is less evil than usual for Harper, but that's not saying much. It does nothing for Employment Insurance. It combines tax-cut-focused supply side economics with the infrastructure spending of Keynsianism in a way that could bankrupt the government.
(Supply side should be dead by now, but Harper's nothing if not a fanatic.)
Of course, the better aspects of the budget probably won't help. The Conservatives' bag of dirty tricks is endless, and they'll find ways to negate the positives, I'm sure.
It really illustrates how lost the Liberals are. They're so trapped in their bubble that they don't understand what's going on. Canada is polarized between increasingly extreme conservative and progressive sides, in which no compromise is possible. One-third of this country want to be Reagan Republicans, the other two-thirds want to be the Netherlands at its best. And while the Conservatives command only one-third of the vote, they have an electoral system flaw on their side -- the first-past-the-post system.
The Liberals, meanwhile, have been operating under the assumption that people really want to vote for them. That used to be true. But they've spent the clout and respect they earned during the age of Trudeau. Their base of Trudeau-era Liberals is ageing or growing disillusioned, and they're going to run out of those eventually.
What they're left with is a small army of career politicians who don't have any kind of vision but who all want to be prime minister some day -- a recipe for infighting -- and a small base of the few remaining centrists. These are largely fiscal conservatives nervous about the Conservatives social conservatism. The rest who vote for them do so mostly out of fear of a Conservative majority.
But the Liberals are running ahead on the assumption that people want to vote for them, and with enough funding and a charismatic leader they'll get there. They think their problem was Dion. But they've been shedding support since Chrétien's second term. Their problem is that the party no longer represents anyone in a country where there is no longer a centre, just mutually exclusive extremes.
(That and no one trust them, because they've destroyed themselves with too much Realpolitik strategy and greed, and not enough vision.)
Now Ignatieff is propping up Harper to buy time. Time until what? The Liberals aren't going to survive unless they pull their head out of their bubble, and talk to people outside the party. Even if they raise the money for another election, their support base is still draining away. If they get out of debt in time for time next election, getting out of it the next time will be even harder.
And now that Ignatieff has adopted Dion's tactic of vociferously critiquing and then voting for Harper's budgets, nothing much is going to change.
I shouldn't complain too much -- after all, all Liberal leaders get a honeymoon in the polls just after their election, and the NDP is always at its lowest support right after an election, so every month of stalling works strategically in our favour.
But I really did hope for the coalition, and for the chance that things were really change.
Now I just wish that the Liberals would fold up and go home, because they do nothing and represent nothing now. The best good they could do for the country is cease to be.
The budget is less evil than usual for Harper, but that's not saying much. It does nothing for Employment Insurance. It combines tax-cut-focused supply side economics with the infrastructure spending of Keynsianism in a way that could bankrupt the government.
(Supply side should be dead by now, but Harper's nothing if not a fanatic.)
Of course, the better aspects of the budget probably won't help. The Conservatives' bag of dirty tricks is endless, and they'll find ways to negate the positives, I'm sure.
It really illustrates how lost the Liberals are. They're so trapped in their bubble that they don't understand what's going on. Canada is polarized between increasingly extreme conservative and progressive sides, in which no compromise is possible. One-third of this country want to be Reagan Republicans, the other two-thirds want to be the Netherlands at its best. And while the Conservatives command only one-third of the vote, they have an electoral system flaw on their side -- the first-past-the-post system.
The Liberals, meanwhile, have been operating under the assumption that people really want to vote for them. That used to be true. But they've spent the clout and respect they earned during the age of Trudeau. Their base of Trudeau-era Liberals is ageing or growing disillusioned, and they're going to run out of those eventually.
What they're left with is a small army of career politicians who don't have any kind of vision but who all want to be prime minister some day -- a recipe for infighting -- and a small base of the few remaining centrists. These are largely fiscal conservatives nervous about the Conservatives social conservatism. The rest who vote for them do so mostly out of fear of a Conservative majority.
But the Liberals are running ahead on the assumption that people want to vote for them, and with enough funding and a charismatic leader they'll get there. They think their problem was Dion. But they've been shedding support since Chrétien's second term. Their problem is that the party no longer represents anyone in a country where there is no longer a centre, just mutually exclusive extremes.
(That and no one trust them, because they've destroyed themselves with too much Realpolitik strategy and greed, and not enough vision.)
Now Ignatieff is propping up Harper to buy time. Time until what? The Liberals aren't going to survive unless they pull their head out of their bubble, and talk to people outside the party. Even if they raise the money for another election, their support base is still draining away. If they get out of debt in time for time next election, getting out of it the next time will be even harder.
And now that Ignatieff has adopted Dion's tactic of vociferously critiquing and then voting for Harper's budgets, nothing much is going to change.
I shouldn't complain too much -- after all, all Liberal leaders get a honeymoon in the polls just after their election, and the NDP is always at its lowest support right after an election, so every month of stalling works strategically in our favour.
But I really did hope for the coalition, and for the chance that things were really change.
Now I just wish that the Liberals would fold up and go home, because they do nothing and represent nothing now. The best good they could do for the country is cease to be.