Anti-harper Coalition or "Fair Play"?

I'd hardly heard of John Ivison before, but I'll give him credit for one thing: He's totally unafraid to write a column that shows he's absolutely clueless and then ask to get paid for the fucking thing.

Predictions are preposterous at the best of times, but I predict Nathan Cullen will come to regret saying the NDP’s No. 1 priority is to topple the Tories.

Bang! Right off the top, Ivison reveals his ignorance about the harpercon abuses of our parliamentary democracy and their fiscal incompetence and their overall immorality and murderous stupidity. A LOT of people, for a LONG time, have believed that getting rid of this thug and his gang of cretins is priority number one.

Cullen, the MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley in British Columbia, said Liberal voters are as fed up of Stephen Harper as New Democrats and that, by losing their nerve during the coalition crisis of 2008, they made a “huge mistake” by not ousting Harper’s government.

But the tactical error is Cullen’s. By suggesting a combination of New Democrats and Liberals should bring down a Harper minority government at the first opportunity, he has opened the door to accusations the opposition parties will band together to subvert the will of voters.

Ivison is joined by other idiots who twist themselves into knots trying to explain how two parties which, combined, enjoy the support of 60% of the electorate, are subverting the will of democracy by their combination into a coalition, but their arguments are self-evidently ludicrous. Here's one "handyandy" in the comments section of Ivison's column:

The difficulty is that in that case more voters have voted for a platform proposed by the CP than by either of the other two parties. The other two parties have each campaigned on different platforms. If they form a coalition they will then be governing an a platform that nobody has voted for. So how does that represent the "will of the voters"?

What about the "difficulty" that more voters have voted against the platform proposed by the Conservative Party?  How is it "democratic" in that case, that a majority of Canadians have to sit and endure policies that they viscerally loath, from a party they absolutely despise, because that despised party has the largest single bloc of voters? How has "winner" (by hook or by crook) become an absolute virtue? Coalitions are anti-democratic. By that logic, votes of non-confidence are anti-democratic. Bah! These arguments only expose their proponent's abysmal understanding of the political system they're pretending to explain and defend!

I suspect the Harperites have clipped the Cullen comments and are in the process of producing ads that warn of “reckless coalitions” being formed between the opposition parties, to unleash in the closing days of what promises to be a tight campaign.

Well, I suspect that the harperites are busy coming up with all sorts of stupid, sleazy, intelligence-insulting campaigns against everyone, and, furthermore, when it comes to "reckless" the harpercons take a backseat to no one. If anything, the pro-coalition people should be sharpening their knives and eviscerate whatever garbage the taxpayer-funded PMO comes up with to serve their partisan criminal masters.

The course of events are similar to what transpired in the recent British general election, where the Conservatives and Labour were running neck and neck into the home straight.

In one leaders’ debate, the Scottish National Party’s Nicola Sturgeon promised to help make Labour leader, Ed Miliband, the next prime minister. In its platform, the SNP pledged to work with the other parties to keep the Tories from office.

David Cameron’s Conservatives leapt on the idea that Labour would be propped up by the separatist SNP and, despite promises by Miliband that he would not co-operate with the nationalists after the election, it produced a late swing to the Tories.

You know John, aside from the fact that the NDP is currently ahead of the Liberals in the polls, and aside from the fact that neither the Liberals nor the NDP is a separatist party (a charge that would be more suitably placed on the Conservative Party of Canada), you have a point there.

Cullen’s comments are no surprise — he has long held this position. In the NDP leadership race, he proposed New Democrats and Liberals should co-operate on joint primary nominations, to determine the best possible local “progressive” candidate and avoid vote-splitting.
Tom Mulcair, the NDP leader, has been something of a weather vane on the issue, shifting his opinion with the prevailing political winds. In less prosperous days, he talked of being “always open to working with others.”
But as the NDP has waxed in popularity, he has ruled out any co-operation with the Liberals. “C’est fini,” he told the Journal de Montreal in May.
There may be some regional politics at play here — in Quebec, the NDP wants voters to think it is the only option to get rid of Harper; in B.C., it soft-pedals the differences between the parties.
Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, has been consistent that there can be no deal, on the basis that they disagree on too many issues, from the Clarity Act to abolishing the Senate. He is aware of what happened to the Liberal Democrats in Britain, junior partners in a coalition government that received all of the blame and none of the gain during five years in power. The party was reduced from 56 MPs to eight in the spring election.

(All horse-race talk that doesn't interest me.)

But Mulcair and Trudeau’s protestations are not going to matter. Cullen’s comments are enough for the Conservatives to claim that the will of the voters would be overturned; that the second- and third-placed parties would orchestrate the demise of the winning Conservatives and ask the governor-general for the opportunity to form government.

Wait for it ...

This is quite a legitimate constitutional manoeuvre.

THEN START DESCRIBING IT AS SUCH!!!

In fact, Harper tried to pull the same stunt in 2004 ...

IT IS NOT A FUCKING "STUNT"! IT IS AN ACCEPTED, LEGITIMATE ACTION WITHIN A PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM!

The only thing that made it a "stunt" when harper did it was the utter hypocrisy with which he utilized it.

...when he signed a letter with Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe that said if the Paul Martin government was defeated, the governor-general should look to the leader of the second-placed party to run the country – i.e., one Stephen J. Harper.

Right. And what made that hypocritical was the way harper screamed blue murder when faced with being ousted by a coalition himself. (Whereupon he shoved a splintery broomstick up the ass of the Westminster System of Parliament by convincing a weak-kneed Governor-General to prorogue Parliament before the majority of the people's representatives could make their will known.)

But it goes against the prevailing sense of fair play felt by many Canadians — that the winner should win, not be brought low by a coalition of the losers.

This sentence is abysmally stupid for two reasons: 1) That Ivison writes that after the harpercon party of Canada used fraud to steal their majority (which I'm sure upsets the sense of fair play felt by many Canadians more than a "legitimate constitutional manoeuvre" such as a coalition government, and 2) That politics is about competitions between ideas and demographics. It's not a fucking running race to a finish line where the first person across is clearly the winner and any attempt to say otherwise is incoherent nonsense. In proportional representation systems, where many parties, representing many different viewpoints compete, smaller parties are not referred to as "losers." They're voices of smaller groups of people.

Representative politics can go from bullshit democracy, where two right-wing business parties compete in a rigged system, such as the USA has (and which Canada would have but for the NDP and Quebec nationalism), all the way to dysfunctional systems with too many extremist small parties always toppling governments and producing chaos. And then there's Canada. Where, for some reason, the idea is that there are "winners" and they get to take everything. Somehow a majority of the people's representatives coalescing against a minority government isn't "fair" or "democratic."

(And all of this drivel is said within the shadow of the most cynical, contemptuous and contemptible, anti-democratic thuggish government in our nation's history!)

This all sounds like typically Machiavellian hard-ball politics by Harper. But I have few doubts that in this case, he would be correct to point out the determination of many progressives to overturn the election result at the first opportunity, if the Conservatives win a minority government.
One of the most senior Liberals in the land told me to ignore Liberal and NDP leaders who dismiss coalition or merger talk. “They will change the day after the election,” he said. “Minority means a change of government.”

This should be the case. harper has renounced any claims to be taken seriously as a legitimate politician. he is an abomination. The sooner that evil mediocrity is thrown from the public stage, the better.

As such, the closing days of the 2015 campaign may look and sound much like the closing days of the race in 2011, when it was only the prospect of a “stable, secure majority Conservative government” that could stave off a “reckless coalition” (is there any other kind?), 

Imbecile ...

bent on ushering in an era of higher taxes, reckless spending and zombies.

Actually, I can't tell if he's trying to channel harper's scare-mongering, or just regurgitating the editorial positions of the National Post. But whatev's.

Never make predictions, especially about the future, they say. But you can take that one to the bank.

And, so, that's what happened.