Slim Chants

The so-called opposition (now that’s an oxymoron) Liberals voiced their strong objections to the minority governing Harper Conservatives’ immigration bill (actually a part of the budget bill, though it has no place there), tabled for third reading in the House of Commons today. John McCallum said they would repeal it when they formed a government.

Liberal MP Maurizio Bevilacqua (Vaughan) told reporters, “We don’t support the direction in which the government is going and we will have ample time in an election campaign to in fact illustrate that the Liberal plan for this country is much better.” Dion said earlier in the day, “We want to go. We want to go. “I feel that more now than it was the case some months ago, and it’s good because indeed we need to replace this bad government.” There are several things wrong with this logic. The first and most obvious is that in order to have ample time in an election campaign, you have to have an election campaign. I need not remind these Liberals that they failed in great numbers to show up for the vote.

The Liberals have employed this tactic time and again saying that Canadians do not want an election. Bullshit! I want one. I thought perhaps they just don’t know. So I went to Karen Redman’s office and made my feelings known. Three times I went in there. I suspect a lot of other people did the same because the Globe & Mail reported that party whip Redman, along with Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff tried to convince Monsieur Dion to meet with them Sunday evening so they could convince him to bring down this aforementioned “bad government”. He elected instead to spend the weekend “at the cottage”.

The problem is, this was the Liberals last chance to bring down this government. Come fall Harper, if he is low enough in the polls to please the Liberal nervous nellies will likely prorogue parliament, depriving the Liberals of any opportunity to vote them out. In the meantime the planet cooks. The Harper minority, cash rich, continues to trash Dion in ads, and carries on tearing apart any semblance of social infrastructure in our cherished Canada.

Dion should have early on gone to the man that drafted him into this career and asked for advice. Like him or not, Jean Chretien had razor sharp political instinct. I’m sure he is shaking his head now. He would have told Dion not to be afraid to start an election campaign when you are down in the polls. Especially when you have such good issues to run on as the environment, foreign policy and the economy, stupid, the economy. Canadians may prefer a passive approach but we sure don’t back down from a fight. Dion, and all Liberals have lost a huge amount of respect for not standing up for the things they believe in and which Canadian hold dear. They have certainly lost mine.