The lot of them - Harper, Ignatieff, Layton, they're all in it for themselves and the electorate has had its fill of them. According to the Toronto Star's Jim Travers, these hustlers know it and that's why none of them is anxious to pull the trigger and force an election:
A new Nik Nanos poll exposes the bottom line. Only about one in 10 Canadians is happy with what’s happening here.
Surely that 10 per cent is delusional. A confluence of forces — more than six years of vicious minority bickering, the continuing, decades-long concentration of authoritarian powers in the Prime Minister’s office and the ritual sacrifice of national interests to party advantage — is distancing a dysfunctional political system from the people it’s supposed to serve.
Always a place apart, the village huddled below the Peace Tower is less and less like, or connected to, the rest of the country. Insulated from the worst of hard times and obsessed with scoring partisan points, the national capital has lost touch with Canadians focused on more pressing personal and local issues.
That gap between solitudes is measured by voters who stay home on election day and by public opinion. Of the two yardsticks, it’s the second that now threatens to beat at least a temporary behavioural change into federal politicians.
For most of the past six years Canadians have been turning thumbs down on all federal parties. The result is Conservatives and Liberals are deadlocked, Quebec’s parochial support for the Bloc Québécois continues to make a majority for either of the two dominant parties mathematically problematic and the NDP remains mired in the teens.
I'm convinced Travers is right. Personally, I cannot imagine voting for any of these clowns except as a way of voting against someone else. Michael Ignatieff? Oh please. Layton? Some other time, now get off my property. Helmet Head? Oh no, no, no. No, no. No. The reality is that not one of those dogs will hunt. It's best you put them down and start again. This time find somebody who can connect with the Canadian people, someone who has some vision to offer them that they can embrace and support. That rules out the current crop of duds.
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After the next election, Iggy & Layton will be forced to cooperate, and in working together on a relatively progressive agenda, will inevitably raise the level of discourse in the House, and unwittingly improve the image of poiticians in Ottawa.
After the next election Iggy will either be prime minister or he'll be toast. It takes a certain aptitude to be a successful pol and Ignatieff, despite his many qualities, just doesn't have what it takes.
To maintain the illusion that working people make decisions, it is useful to have two parties that pretend to be different while representing the same folks at the top. Liberals and CRAP, both the Business Party. They need each other more than they do the voters. Supporting a lesser evil only leads to more evil. What to do?
Well Anon, I think the Liberal rank and file need to do a bit of soul-searching. Under Iggy they've tried being "Conservative Lite" and it's gotten them nowhere. If they can't return to a moderately progressive stance they can rot as far as I'm concerned.
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