Dump Dion, Install Iggy

Because that video is a disgrace. Give him his gold watch and tell him bye bye.

Get it done before Parliament returns in January. Tell Bob Rae he's wasting his time and money.

As for Iggy, he hasn't looked bad on TV recently. Mind you, I've watched a lot of it with the sound off, but at least he hasn't accidentally stapled himself to anything, and that in itself is an improvement. Tell him to shave his eyebrows so he doesn't look so much like Spock.

Democracy? Fuck democracy. The party needs to be able to fight an election by the end of next month, whether there is still a coalition to belong to at that time or not.

The Possibilities

Harper backs down.

From Wells comments (Jeff Jedras, I think):

Harper will back down. He’s not leaving 24 Sussex any time soon. He’ll carve the party financing stuff out into a separate, non-confidence bill, throw in a little earlier stimulus to mollify one of the opposition parties, and live to fight another day, his bluff having been called.

Some Liberals catch a flu:

Liberal finance critic Scott Brison said it would be "premature" to discuss the prospect of a coalition or even to firmly state that all Liberals will vote against the update on Monday. He was happy, though, to attack the Conservatives.

As I argued yesterday, if the point is to kill the subsidy cuts, this might work. There has to be legislation introduced, it has to go through various committees, to the Senate, etc. At some point it could all die in the night. And, as Kadey notes, there is no sign of this legislation in the update or elsewhere:

According to the Man in the Striped Tie who is in charge of explaining stuff to confused journalists, the legislation will be introduced “soon”. How soon? Well, before the House rises for Christmas, although he admitted that it was unlikely that it would make it through Parliament before the break — which means that we may not have an election showdown until the New Year. Oh, and remember all that stuff about belt (or, depending on your perspective, noose) tightening beginning at home for all political parties? The specifics of those cuts/freezes/whatever to MP and ministerial salaries are also left to the imagination; presumably that, too, will be in the magical mystery Bill C-2. (I’m assuming it will be C-2, since there’s no indication that the government plans to break its perfect record of not introducing legislation between now and whenever the bill is finally tabled.)

Now, I am not one of those who thought the Lib's abstaining did them much harm last election. At least it did less harm than Dion's trying to explain the Green Shift in garbled English. And with respect to any number of contentious bills (C-6, C-10, C-484), the process worked. In this case, however, the optics may be too awful to contemplate.

Weird Shit Happens

If the Liberals do the right thing and oppose these cuts, along with the rest of the opposition, I suspect we are more likely to see an outcome such as this:

Canada’s constitutional law dealing with minority governments was altered in 1968 when Pearson’s government was unexpectedly defeated on a matter of confidence. While this should have led to an immediate dissolution of parliament, none of the parties were ready, and Pearson was in the process of being replaced as leader of the Liberals. By mutual agreement among the party leaders, a new motion was passed that retroactively declared that the budgetary matter on which the government was defeated was not a matter of confidence, setting a new precedent.

As a final note, if these sudden events inspire the Liberal Party to get a new leader in place on the cheap and before May '09, then some good will have come of it. At this point I don't give a crap who it is. If its Iggy, hopefully Kinsella will make a man out of him (teach him to drink beer and say eh), and I will always be around to provide character building ridicule on occasions when he says things like "The Spotted Boa is a noble animal, which consumes its prey head-first and eats it whole, later excreting it in compact pellets and thereby reminding me of me."

Update: Tories take option number 1--They Cave!

Why Libs Shouldn't Walk Away From Green Issues

...because people haven't, although though here in Canada they have walked away from the Green Shift in particular.

...which is why Iggy's answer here isn't bad, if a bit rote (from James Curran's notes):

Iggy: proud of Stephane's leadership on it. (Should be he wanted a carbon tax shift). Must remain faithful about enviromental sustainability. Gotta get the retail politics of this issue. Gotta figure out how to sell it. Has to work in the air, on the land on the sea where deisel fuels are used. We have to listen to cdns.

I have only vague memories of Ignatieff's 2006 green plan, but I recall it as involving a fairly aggressive cap & trade system. More generally, I think it was a good exercise for all the 2006 candidates to have been required to produce a fairly extensive statement of their environmental principles, and I hope that the same expectation applies this time around (although of course nobody expects them to lean as extensively on their environmental creds as Dion did).

Hint: it might make Iggy more palatable to Left wing of the party, who often look upon him as a Conservative in Liberal dress.

Link to Iggy's old platform paper. Thanks, James Curran.

Kinsella's Going With Iggy

He hasn't said anything for sure yet, but I can just freakin' sense it.

This is weird, man. Its like when Captain Picard joined The Borg.

Keep Dion

Very little has changed, popular vote wise, though the seat totals have (although not so much to affect the basic situation--three parties must band together to defeat Tories in a Commons vote but they still dominate the committees).

A new leadership race now means no effective opposition for another year, means the new Lib leader has to abstain as often as the old, means the party remains broke and divided. Do people really want to go through this all again just to feed Iggy and Rae's voracious ego?

And, Iggy, if there is a leadership race and you choose to run in it, I will hound you to the gates of Hell.