Category: CPC

Um… I have NO idea WHAT the hell to make of this. I don’t even know how the hell this managed to happen, let alone what it means or what to say about it.

And I’m willing to bet my left nut that none of YOU out there saw this coming either. Nope. No way in hell.

Okay, alright; I suppose I should tell you just what the hell I’m going on about. It’s simple: SES reasearch had themselves a little poll in Ontario — yes, that Ontario. The one with all the liberals in it — that asked folks a simple little question:

Thinking about the federal party leaders – those being Stephen Harper for the Conservatives; Stephane Dion for the Liberals, Jack Layton for the NDP, Gilles Duceppe for the Bloc Quebecois and Elizabeth May for the Green Party – who do you trust the most to safeguard our environment?

I know; not exactly earth-shaking stuff, is it? What baffles me is the results. No, bonehead, Harper didn’t win by a mile. 🙄 What he did manage to do is tie. You’ll NEVER guess who.

According to Ontariens, Harper is equally trustworthy on matters of the environment as . . . Green Party leader ELIZABETH MAY! 😯

Don’t take my word for it. Click here and see for yourself.

[It seems worth noting that this post took two days to write. I wanted to think about it first -Dennis]

I like Steve; really, I do. Everybody who comes by here knows that. But sometimes, just sometimes, he leaves me shaking my head, wondering “just what the [bleep] is he thinking??” This is one of those times.

As most of you already know already, HMPM Harper basically put Ping and Pong on either side of the third rail of Canadian politics yesterday when he rose in the Commons to take what could well be the biggest political risk that we have seen any politician gamble on since… well, I can’t think of when. Just what did he have to say that could be so risky? Well, amongst other things:

“Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the Bloc Quebecois will present the House with an unusual request that we here at the federal Parliament define the Quebecois nation.

“As a consequence, with the support of the government and with the support of our party, I will be putting on the Notice Paper later today the following motion:

“That this House recognize that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.

“Once again, the leader of the Bloc and his separatist friends are not concerned with defining who Quebecers are but rather what they want them to become, a separate country.

“The separatists do not need the Parliament of Canada to define what is meant by the sociological termination. My preference has been well known. I believe that this is not the job of the federal Parliament. It is the job of the legislature of Quebec, but the Bloc Quebecois has asked us to define this and perhaps that is a good thing, because it reminds us that all Canadians have a say in the future of this country.

“Having been asked by the Bloc to define the Quebecois, we must take a position. Our position is clear. Do the Quebecois form a nation within Canada? The answer is yes. Do the Quebecois form an independent nation? The answer is no and the answer will always be no, because Quebecers of all political persuasions, from Cartier and Laurier to Mulroney and Trudeau, have led this country and millions like them of all political persuasions have helped to build it.

“With their English- and French-speaking fellow citizens and people drawn from all nationalities of this earth, they have been part of making this country what it is, the greatest country in the world.

“To millions more who live in a dangerous and dividing world, this country is a shining example of the harmony and unity to which all peoples are capable and to which all humanity should aspire.

“I say to my federalist colleagues and I also say to the separatist side that we here will do what we must, what our forefathers have always done to preserve this country, Canada, strong, united, independent and free.”

Call me whatever you like (and I’m sure some of you can think of plenty), but this whole idea gives me nebulous but implacable sense of unease. It’s like hearing the sound of a distant siren and finding yourself wondering, for no good reason, if your house is on fire.

Sound silly? Fine. It feels silly; but it still isn’t going away. That’s why I’m trying to take as much time as I can to try to digest this before shooting my mouth off, instead of just shooting from the lip as usual.

On the one hand, such a declaration smacks of capitulation to the PQ, Blocheads and the other motley assortments that would gladly rip my country apart. But if that’s so, then why is Gilles Duceppe in such a piss-up-a-rope mood over it? See what I mean:

The glum look on Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe’s red face was also worth the price of a Commons admission. His chance to boost Quebec resentment against the Liberals and put Harper in a deadly python squeeze over the Quebec nation question in the next election evaporated minutes after the prime minister started speaking.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that this won’t actually change anything, legally or constitutionally speaking? After taking a day to step back and get a good, long sniff of this, I’m more and more coming to the same conclusion that many other observers have already come to. The emerging consensus is that this is a move worthy of a master chessplayer. In one stroke, Harper has taken some wind out of the Bloc’s sails:

Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe says his party will vote in favour of the motion, which calls the Quebecois a nation within a united Canada.

…beaten the Librano$ to the punch:

The grim face of interim leader Bill Graham and sagging shoulders among Liberals even as they struggled to their feet to give Harper a standing ovation told the story of a party beaten to the punch and whacked in the head.

…and shown the Dippers to be incapable of taking a stand on just about anything:

NDP Leader Jack Layton said Wednesday his caucus would support both the Tory and BQ motions.

All in all, not a bad day. Some people have suggested one possibly huge fly in the ointment, however:

Good for a snicker, but not likely to happen. Yes, this may piss off a few people in the West but, with all three federalist parties on board, any protest vote has no place to go.

All in all, I still haven’t made up my mind about this yet. But at least I feel a little better about it than I did 48hrs ago. One thing is for certain: this is either a political master stroke worthy of some of history’s greats, or Ping and Pong are toast. There will be no middle ground on this one.

Yup, we did.

Well, it’s official, folks. London North Centre has its Conservative candidate for the upcoming November 27 byelection. Although I wasn’t able go get my hands on the final count before I left, one fellow from Tom Weihmayr’s camp, who didn’t want his name used, oversaw the counting (and was downing himself a stiff one afterwards) and admitted bluntly that “it wasn’t even close.”

I admit that I went to tonight’s meeting leaning strongly in favour of Haskett to begin with but it was still close for me, right up till the last few minutes. While I like Haskett as a social conservative, Tom Weihmayr has spent years in Canada’s military and I have always believed that it is good for someone to have served their country before playing a hand in leading it. I was actually beginning to have trouble making up my mind until the last minute or so of his speech.

Tom spoke well, with a confidence and an ease that Haskett didn’t put forward so well (she seemed a bit out of practice and stumbled a few times), and a lot of what he was saying was striking all the right notes with me. He pointed out, rightly so, that in the coming campaign, the Liberals will stoop to any dirty trick, “throw as much mud as they can; dig up old quotes to embarrass the candidate, the party and the Prime Minister; do and say anything to discredit their opponent” no matter how low it may be. And he was bang-on right.

Then, when he was doing so well and I was starting to think that I might have been leaning the wrong way, he shot himself in the foot. Saying that, if he were sent to the House and Iggy were in charge of the Librano$, he would “vigorously challenge Michael Ignatieff on his long absence from this country. How can he pretend to know the concerns of Canadians when he hasn’t even been here?” Clearly a barely concealed swipe at Haskett’s 6 year hiatus from the London area.

If Tom ever decides to try again, and I think he should because he seemed a damned decent guy when I spoke with him, foot in mouth notwithstanding, I’d like to give him a little free advice (bearing in mind that you get what you pay for, of course):

1. Don’t complain about Hypogrit mudslinging and then scoop up and fling a handful of your own and
2. If you are going to take a swipe at your opponent (and hey, politics is a rough sport), come right out and do it up front.

You almost had me, Tom. You were that damned close. And I’m not just saying that. As it was winding down, you said to me “don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

I hope so, Tom. I really do.

For those that haven’t already heard, tonight is the nomination meeting for the Conservative Party candidate for the upcoming London-North-Centre byelection. The event is being held at the Polish Combatants’ Hall at 80 Ann Street (just click here if you need a map). Hope to see as many of you as possible there. Get off yer butts, get out and vote! Here is a timetable of events for the evening:

7:00 pm – registration desks open up

7:30 pm – John Stirling – president will open meeting with O Canada

7:35 pm – introductory remarks – Jim Knowles

7:45 pm – speeches – Dianne Haskett (introduction 5 minutes, 15 minutes for the candidate)

8:05 pm – speeches – Tom Weihmayr (introduction 5 minutes, 15 minutes for the candidate)

8:25 pm voting commences

Two hundred days in office and still going.

It’s great to be conservative these days, isn’t it? Just in case you’ve been living in a cave lately, today marks the 200th day of our latest Conservative government and despite what all the nervous Nellies from the left told us, things are moving along pretty damned good.

Can anyone seriously doubt that we have seen more leadership in the past 6+ months from Stephen Harper’s rookie government than we saw in over a decade of rule under the “natural governing party of Canada?” I would find that rather hard to swallow.

Let’s indulge ourselves (just this once) on a little smug reflection on what the Big Bad Scary Tories have managed to do for the country in a mere 200 days, shall we?

• The GST, which the Grits promised to scrap but never did, has been cut by one percent, just like Steve told us it would.
• The long running trade irritant with the US over softwood lumber is finally within sight of its end. The Grits couldn’t solve this one in over a decade but Harper and his crew managed to hammer out a deal in only months.
• Money that would have been wasted on a bloated child care bureaucracy is now being routed directly to the ultimate child care specialists (parents) who can decide for themselves how best to spend it.
• We have a government that isn’t afraid to dig in its heels and declare exactly where it stands on issues, whether politically convenient or not. The recent conflict in the Middle East is a perfect example of this.
• Our long neglected military is finally getting a desperately needed injection of billions of dollars for both equipment and manpower.
• We now have the Federal Accountability Act to help keep a leash on crooked politicians.
• We have legislation working its way through Parliament to crack down on crime and make scumbags start doing some serious time behind bars where they can’t hurt anybody else.
• With vigorous operations in Afghanistan, the myth of Canada being the “mouse that roared” on the international stage is rapidly being put down.
• Federalism has been revived in Quebec, with more and more people realising that they aren’t really stuck between the rock and hard place of crooked Liberals and rabid seperatists.

All of this, and a whole lot more, from the scary bunch that the MSM howled and prophecied would bring about the ruin of the nation.

Not bad for a bunch of bogeymen, eh?

Here we go. The doomsayers are in full swing and crying their omenous prophecies of doom, gloom, social ruin and assorted apocalyptic apoplexy to the very heavens themselves.

Okay, so just what the hell set them off this time? I’ll tell you. The screeching barnyard fowl from the left have gone nuts over Justice Minister Vic Toews’ recent musings about letting the courts step in on matter involving little criminal bastards young offenders aged 10 and 11. To listen to the handwringers, you’d think that we were gearing up to warehouse kids in the kinds of places that even Dickens wouldn’t want to write about.

Even though the Tories have stated the agenda pretty bluntly, in language that you’d think that even a Liberal would understand:

“The issue here isn’t making a bunch of changes that will throw 10- or 11-year-olds in jail. The issue here is making sure that the kids that have the potential of falling through the cracks before they turn 12 are able to get the treatment they need. If it means the courts need to step in to make sure they get that treatment, then that’s something we should be discussing,”

career Grit fearmongers like London’s Sue Barnes still try to horrify the masses:

“Lies. The bottom line is that treatment programs are required and those should be existing right now and they shouldn’t be coming through a justice system; they should be coming through a social services system. This government is going too far in their lock ’em up and throw away the key approach to justice policy.”

The Grits, in typical full spin mode, flung out a news release with the screaming headline: “Justice critic condemns Conservative plan to jail 10-year-olds!”

Just how danmed stupid do they think we are? Why is it that every time the Tories try to actually deal with a problem (especially if it’s one that the Grits ran and hid from for years), these yoyos start bleating like somebody just suggested legalizing eating babies?

Yes, we understand that it’s not like there are homicidal 10-year olds running amok (although there are some very disturbing exceptions to that generalisation) but right now, if a kid 10 or 11 years of age the system can be utterly powerless to do anything about it. At least the Conservatives are moving on the issue. The liberals had more than a decade and did nothing but introduce the YCJA, which only made things worse.