- Liveo Di Matteo offers a reality check on the size of federal government spending - which (temporary stimulus aside) is at its lowest point in the last five decades even before the Cons promise to keep slashing billions more each and every year.
- Pogge follows up on John Ibbitson's column on Con voter suppression by pointing out another example of the Harper Cons' efforts to drive voters away from the polls:
What Ibbitson doesn't mention is all the talk about "an unnecessary election" which I think is designed to have the same effect. In our parliamentary system, when the government loses the confidence of a majority in the Commons in the manner that just happened, an election is necessary. The exception would be when an election has recently been held but that clearly wasn't the case late last month when the motion of non-confidence passed. This election is clearly necessary.- Alice notes that national polling numbers won't tell the full story of how well positioned Canada's parties are to take advantage of any opportunities - with the Libs in particular figuring to have a difficult time turning soft support into votes on the ground.
But all the claims to the contrary coming from the Conservatives — and echoed by a lot of the pundits — seem designed to encourage voters to blow the whole thing off and stay home. It's possible, in fact probable, that not all of those who have picked up that rhetoric are consciously attempting to suppress turnout. But I'd bet good money that some of them are trying to do exactly that.
- Finally, Andrew Potter comments on the sad reality that the two men portrayed (however questionably) as the lone choices to lead Canada have both reached their current positions by showing contempt for our country:
Setting aside the firewall letter, Harper has never really hidden his disdain for parts of Canada that aren’t as successful at digging oil out of the ground. He accused the Maritimes of having a “culture of defeat” and once said that Canada “appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.” Never mind his own recent boasts about the economy and his education plan: these aren’t the instincts of a man blessed with an expansive and generous view of his countrymen.
And so it is that Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper, for all their differences in world view and intellectual temperament, have both spent their careers riffing off the same underlying theme, that Canada itself is irrelevant. Given all of this, it isn’t clear why either man wants to be prime minister. Harper—who most days could win handily an angriest-man-in-Canada competition—clearly loathes his job, the press, and the daily imperatives of life down on Supreme-Soviet-Upon-Rideau. As for Ignatieff, he has certainly worked hard to dispel suspicions that he’s off to Harvard at the first opportunity, but his job application True Patriot Love is such a cloying Via Rail portrait of Canada that it is hard to take seriously the idea that he actually believes it.
So when Canadians head to the polls on May 2, it is with the rather unpleasant knowledge that whoever ends up prime minister, we will be led by someone for whom the federal government is little more than a convenient vehicle for his own snobbery, condescension and resentment. It’s a depressing choice: Stephen Harper, the alienated and embittered Albertan, who has perhaps come to appreciate the rest of the country for which he has shown such contempt. Or Michael Ignatieff, the gallivanting, sugar-spun cosmopolitan, who has finally decided he needs a country after all.
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