Oh Yeah, ... So, Ignatieff's Election Talk ...

I got distracted by the extended yammerings of some US-American wingnut during my blogging hours and haven't commented about Michael Ignatieff's election threats. And I'm deeply sorry to the progressive blogging community for being so dilatory about commenting because I know that everyone has spent the past few days shrieking "Yes! But what does 'thwap' have to say about it?!?"

Well, wonder no longer people! Here is my take on it. This appears to be a very bad idea. Not because the harpercons don't need to be removed as soon as possible. They do. But because Ignatieff is coming out of nowhere with these threats and it seems that the electorate will be more annoyed with Ignatieff than with harper. Even more disgruntled usually Liberal voters will stay home and we'll be at risk of a harper majority.

Ignatieff has to BUILD a momentum towards defeating this government. Instead, he's capitulated on everything and sold himself for a meaningless consultation on EI reform (restoring eligibility to the hundreds of thousands of workers that Chretien and Martin had kicked-out in the 1990s) that was supposed to be his make-or-break issue. As NDP and other leftist commenters pointed out, this agreement to discuss EI was entirely meaningless and while Ignatieff appears to have been blindsided, harper wasn't. He appointed Pierre Pollievre, one of the most obnoxious, obstructionist of harper's yapping beeyotchs to head the harpercon delegation, guaranteeing a fruitless exercise. Essentially, harper took a dump and then they shoved Ignatieff's nose in it. Unfortunately for the Liberals, the polls didn't show a great anger at the harpercons at this display of government intransigence. Embarrassed and angry, Ignatieff held a strategy pow-wow where they discussed polling results and forecasts and then emerged bloviating about elections and how he was going to balance the budget without new taxes (!?!?) to an indifferent public.

Why am I not too excited? Because 1) The Liberals haven't come up with a strong alternative to the harpercons despite having had years to do so. The reason is that they agree with harper's centre-right policies for the most part. (Meanwhile "progressive" Liberals have been drying their eyes over betraying their principles so long that they don't even cry anymore.) and 2) The Canadian electorate appears quite content to wallow in apathy and ignorance to the extent that disturbingly large numbers of them see fit to vote for both these pieces of shit. Even worse, numerous ignoramuses awaken from their stupor only long enough to chide one opposition party or the other for not working together to govern the country, having missed entirely, harper's entire PM-ship of bullying and stonewalling. At best, some self-righteous doofus will say that "they're all jerks" as if that's going to stop harper from being the complete asshole that he is.

So, our only realistic hope of getting rid of harper is the Liberals who are almost as bad as he is, but we have a tone-deaf leader of the official opposition who has failed to rouse the country too many of whom believe incoherently that Parliament's power to remove a minority government that has lost the confidence of the House of Commons is a "coup." We have too many Canadians who believe the Bloc Quebecois should be outlawed but who will settle for simply not allowing it to JOIN WITH OTHER MPs to remove a government unpopular in Quebec AS WELL AS across Canada.

I'll have a job until December. There's nothing I can do now for the people hurting in this recession right now. Our political and media system is too debased. The NDP should get over its fear of its own shadow and turn up the volume about the murderous incompetence of this racist party of oil and insurance industry hacks and its Christian-fundamentalist nutbar grassroots that is the "Conservative" Party of Canada. Given the dismal failures of neoliberalism, this shouldn't be all that difficult.