We're All Neoliberals Now. Let's Change That.

One thing that struck home during our extended election campaign was how our mainstream political parties have become deeply invested in neoliberalism. While it has several descriptions, reflective of its insidious vagueness, neoliberalism is the merger of political and economic ideology most often called "free market fundamentalism." It is a sort of merger of political and commercial/corporate powers usually born out of the surrender of incidents of political sovereignty through multi-national financial and trade agreements.

It's a process akin to the tactics of a boa constrictor whose victims often fail to realize the severity of their predicament until its too late. That's an apt analogy for how we have, for decades, been conditioned to our role as prey.

Neoliberals have been very successful in conditioning a large segment of the electorate to see themselves as 'taxpayers' rather than 'citizens,' a feat that isolates them from public debate beyond how government impacts their wallets and readies them to accept 'transactional democracy,' where money dictates policy for the powerful often at the expense of everyone else.

Nobel laureate economist, Joe Stiglitz, explores legislated inequality in his book, "The Price of Inequality." Modern inequality, he explains, is neither market nor merit-based to any significant degree. It is legislated and comes in a plethora of forms from tax treatment (exemptions, reductions, deferrals), to grants and subsidies, to the transfer of public resources at far less than market value. The 'taxpayer' public is particularly blind to these government giveaway programmes having been groomed to venerate the rich as the "job creators" whose success "trickles down" to the masses. In reality cooperative lawmakers ensure that the nation's wealth actually "trickles up" to those who least deserve it. It is a malignancy known as "rent-seeking."

Another triumph of neoliberalism has been in conditioning working class Canadians, white and blue collar, to support capital over labour and acquiesce to the decline of unionism. For all the legitimate criticisms of the union movement, it has been freely demonized by the neoliberals and their political minions as regressive and an economic scourge. We've lost sight of the role unions play as the cornerstone of a healthy, robust middle class, the ladder of social mobility, and a vehicle to maintain the balance between labour and capital without which inequality flourishes.

We have been conditioned, groomed, to be submissive to neoliberalism, powerless, incapable even of rallying to our own defence. Harnessed to the myths and scourges of neoliberal ideology, we are clearing the path for increasing inequality and the corrosion of social cohesion and it's a road that leads to illiberal democracy and a gradual rise of economic feudalism.

The legacy of Stephen Harper will be how well he moved us down this path during his decade in power. It's a legacy he shared with his collaborators, Layton, Mulcair and Ignatieff.

It's time we charted a new path while that option is still open to us.



I strongly urge you to watch this Days of Revolt interview.

Will We Get It Right This Time? Do We Dare Get It Wrong?

David Cameron is adding his voice to the chorus warning that we're nearing the brink of another global economic meltdown.  The British prime minister, whose failed austerity programmes have done so much to bring Britain low, penned a lament for The Guardian following the G20 summit.

Cameron  generously pats himself on the back and proclaims that what Britain needs now is more Cameron than ever.

As I met world leaders at the G20 in Brisbane, the problems were plain to see. The eurozone is teetering on the brink of a possible third recession, with high unemployment, falling growth and the real risk of falling prices too. Emerging markets, which were the driver of growth in the early stages of the recovery, are now slowing down. Despite the progress in Bali, global trade talks have stalled while the epidemic of Ebola, conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s illegal actions in Ukraine are all adding a dangerous backdrop of instability and uncertainty.

Cameron's op-ed is blatant electioneering.  That said, what if he and all the other voices are right?  What if we are heading for another global economic collapse?  What if?

A bit of risk assessment would seem in order.  Remember Harper's completely disingenuous excuse about how "no one could see it coming" to explain his inability to see the Great Recession of 2008 until it had already overwhelmed us?  Harper, being a chronic lying shitsack, was of course wrong.  Plenty saw it coming.  People like Krugman ("The Great Unraveling", 2005), Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini saw it coming but Harper likes his economics at the undergrad level where ideology reigns unchallenged.

So what is Harper doing to ensure that he 'sees it coming' this time around?  What is he doing to position Canada to meet another seismic hit to the economy?  Apparently nothing.  His focus is on persuading Canadian voters that he's balanced the budget and set Canada on a path to perpetual budget surpluses forever and ever, amen.  Harper wants his base to believe that you can cut taxes, defund government and yet magically leave the country economically robust enough to weather whatever the future throws at us.  That's the sort of thing that appeals to the stupid, the gullible or those with 'faith based' minds adept at magical thinking. 

Canada got through 2008 relatively unscathed but it was thanks to the prudent fiscal policies of previous Liberal governments who handed Harper a government in surplus and a hefty 'rainy day' cash reserve.  Harper immediately set out to defund the government, slashing the GST, and setting Canada's banking industry on the path to emulating America's madness.  Fortunately the Great Recession arrived before Harper could leave us totally exposed - as he has this time.

Harper not only failed to foresee the Great Recession and prepare Canada to meet it, he absolutely bungled the recovery.  Iggy's Liberals also did their full share to fail Canada. Remember Steve & Mike's "Pinata Budget"?  By December, 2010, then parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, delivered a damning assessment, concluding that the Conservative/Liberal budget had utterly failed to produce the jobs that sort of stimulus spending could have created.

I have never forgiven the Liberals for Ignatieff.  When the recession sent Canada reeling and Harper had to prorogue Parliament, Ignatieff did nothing to answer the country's call.  Instead he treated the extended Christmas break as an opportunity to finish a book on his maternal family's history.  If he wasn't such a goddamned dilettante, Iggy could have forged a shadow, stimulus budget proposal and then pounced on Harper, forcing Harper to either adopt the Liberal budget or face the voters with their competing visions.  Instead Ignatieff returned empty handed save for an obscure book no one could be bothered to read.

Would Trudeau the Lesser do any better than Iggy if Canada was, yet again, caught by surprise by another global recession?  Or would he place the country in the same mess as his party did in 2008/2009?  A big part of the answer is whether the Liberal Party remains lashed to the lunatic ideology of neoliberalism that is wracking the world economy again.  Because the past six years have taught us that the responses to these calamitous meltdowns will not be found in any neoliberal playbook. 

While We're Focused on Chemical Warfare

It's interesting how selective the United States can be about weapons of mass destruction given that the U.S. continues to be responsible for widespread and ongoing death and destruction from its own chemical and nuclear weapons.

The gas that Obama-Kerry are blaming on Assad appears to have killed somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand or more Syrians.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the locals are left to live with the radiation hazard created by American depleted uranium (DU) shells and bullets.  D.U. is known to cause cancers, birth defects and stillbirths and D.U. contamination is believed to persist for decades, if not generations.  D.U. dust particles can be inhaled and then embed in the lungs.

And American chemical weapons are still killing in Vietnam and could be for centuries to come.   Agent Orange, generously air delivered as a defoliant, is estimated to remain lethally effective for up to six centuries.  It gets in the soil and in the ground water.  It too causes cancers, birth defects and stillbirths.  Hang in there, Vietnam, only 500 years to go.

Where was our righteous indignation and call to arms when Israel blasted Gazans with white phosphorus rounds and bombs?  The Liberal leader of the day absolved Israel for that and one of his former aides now demands that Syria be attacked.

How do we explain our indifference to the cluster bomblets that litter southern Lebanon, taking lives almost daily, that were fired into that area by Israel in the hours prior to ceasefire?

This is not an apology for Assad.  He's a brutal, murderous shit in a region full of brutal, murderous shits, among them a number we consider friends.  This is about us and it's about our hypocrisy that undermines any credibility we have in denouncing Assad and calling for strikes against Syria.

When do the Vietnamese, the Iraqis or the Afghans get to retaliate against the Americans for the use of WMDs against them in their homelands?

Chris Hedges Takes Down Intellectual America - Iggy's On His List Too

To Chris Hedges, America's intelligentsia are a pack of sell-outs who showed their true colours when they lined up to support George w. Bush's war on Iraq.   And Hedges is naming names:

The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as  Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman,Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late  Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it. 

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. ...Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. ...The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

You may recall that the Liberal's own annointed one, Ignatieff, supposedly admitted he had been wrong about Iraq but then smeared those who opposed the war as having been disingenuous and actually opposed just to Bush/Cheney.  And nobody in the Liberal ranks took Ignatieff down for that either.  Speaks volumes.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. 

...Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.

A Warning for Post-Mulroney Canada

The Conservative heavens aligned and brought us the magic of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney.   The Gang of Three then introduced us to the era of free trade, outsourcing and the wonders of the "knowledge economy."  In the new era we wouldn't toil with our hands any more but with our minds and endless riches would befall us.

Like all conjuring tricks it seemed to work well enough, for a while, but not forever.

America's manufacturing economy has been gutted, shelled out, lifted up and transported across the seas.   Easy money and low, low interest rates made it possible to extend the illusion of prosperity for decades as real wealth was transferred quietly out of the blue and white-collar middle class and to the richest of the rich.

New wealth did not come from foundries and shipyards and assembly plants but from computer entries and slips of paper passing back and forth.   New wealth was to be bubble wealth, grand illusions of immense prosperity.

Former Republican insider, Kevin Phillips, in his book American Theocracy explored how economic superpowers go through this process of crafting their own demise by outsourcing the manufacturing base that established their wealth and shifting, in its stead, to a knowledge economy, a FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) economy, generating huge returns in the short and mid-term by using their wealth to grow their eventual successor's manufacturing economy.

In essence, the legacy of Thatcher/Reagan/Mulroney has been the utter selling out of their own nations in pursuit of a deeply flawed ideology.

Now Britain is discovering, quite painfully, that this ideology inevitably leads to a nation in decay.

Britain has been finding it difficult to recover from the financial crisis not just because of its austerity policy but also because of its eroding ability to engage in high-productivity activities. This problem is most tellingly manifested in the country's inability to generate a trade surplus despite the huge devaluation of sterling since 2008.

Compared with its height in 2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.

Despite the devaluation, Britain's service exports have fallen – average annual service exports for 2008-11 were 8% lower than for 2005-07. This may be understandable, given the poor state of its financial sector – rocked by one scandal after another and hemmed in by a slow tightening of global financial regulation.

However, manufacturing exports, which were supposed to make up the shortfall created by the services sector, also fell by 8% after the devaluation. This is highly unusual. For example, back when South Korea had a devaluation of similar scale after its 1997 financial crisis (the won, its currency, was devalued by 35% against the dollar), the country's manufacturing exports were 15% higher (comparing the 1998-2001 average to 1995-97).

The only reason the British balance of payments situation has not been worse is the large increase in primary commodity exports – oil, minerals and food. These were on average 22% higher in 2008-11 than in 2005-07. In other words, since the crisis the British economy has been moving backwards in terms of its sophistication as a producer.

All of this means that, without addressing the underlying decay in productive capabilities, Britain cannot fix its ailing economy. To deal with this problem, it urgently needs to develop a long-term productive strategy through a broad-based public consultation involving not just the government and private sector firms, but trade unions, educational institutions and research institutes.

The strategy should first carefully identify the industries, and the underlying technologies, that will be the future motor of the economy and then provide them with the necessary support. This could be in the form of subsidies for R&D, loan guarantees for small firms, or preferences in government procurement, and should be targeted at "strategic" industries, although they could also be in the form of policies that are apparently not industry-specific.

For example, infrastructural investment needs to be co-ordinated with the broader industrial strategy. Infrastructure is by definition location-specific, so depending on the industries you want to promote, you will have to build different types of it in different places. Similarly with education and skills. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce, and for potential students to know what professions to study for.

Now, ask yourself what is Canada's industrial strategy?   What are we doing to align infrastructural investment to a broader industrial strategy?  Where lies the future motor of our economy?

If you haven't got a clue, well, neither does Stephen Harper and the same goes for the Liberals and the New Democrats.   That much was obvious as far back as 2009 when the Harper Cons, supported by Iggy and the Libs, passed the farcical stimulus budget, the Pinata Budget.  Remember?  That was the one where the government and opposition, instead of focusing stimulus spending in support of a broader industrial strategy, recklessly squandered it on giving you tax breaks to put a new deck on the family cottage, putting the cost on the tab for your kids to repay.

A study by the Pembina Institute concluded for the mountain of borrowed cash Harper & Iggy tossed haphazardly into the Canadian economy, they could have (and should have) generated 238,000 jobs.  Instead they achieved just 84,000.

Like Britain, like the United States, Canada too needs a healthy industrial economy.  We've become reliant on fossil fuel exports.  We've seen how that has wracked Alberta's economy through boom and bust cycles.   Why would we want to import that vulnerability and instability to the national economy?   Yet that seems to be all Harper can come up with.   He can see no further and he doesn't even try.  He is the embodiment of the One Trick Pony.

Forget this nonsense that's been drummed into our heads about the evils of duties and tariffs.  As former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, has pointed out in The Failure of Free Market Capitalism and the Dissolution of the West,  

"The U.S. economy did not develop on the basis of free trade.  If the costs that free traders attribute to trade protection are real, the costs did not prevent America's economic rise.   Indeed much historical research concludes that trade protection was the reason for America's rises as an industrial and manufacturing power."

It's now becoming increasingly accepted in America and in Britain that the way forward from here may be the way back.   

They Are Not Of Us

An interesting essay from George Monbiot today on the grooming of oligarchs and why, even though they govern in our name, they don't rule on our behalf.   They rule as they were born and raised to rule.   An excerpt.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France "did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots".

Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: "the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact, it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Ignatieff was clearly of this ruling caste.   He never demonstrated a real grasp of the country or our people.   Harper, despite his more middle-class upbringing and his fondness of hockey and cats, may not be a member by birth of the ruling caste but certainly shows himself its eager water-carrier and thereby may hope to earn his rightful place among them.   Such are the aspirations of those who govern a petro-state.

Iggy Comes Clean, Redeems Self - a Bit

Michael Ignatieff has a warning - parliamentary democracy is in big trouble and may fall victim to today's authoritarian prime ministers.

“I think something really bad has happened to parliamentary democracies all over the world — not just in my country, Canada. What’s happened is increasing power to the prime minister, increasing power to the bureaucracy, and the legislature — parliament — is a kind of empty, pointless debating chamber because it’s all stitched up in advance by party leaders,” Ignatieff said during a weekend panel discussion, aired by the BBC during its annual Free Thinking Festival.

Ignatieff told Postmedia News by email that his message at the Free Thinking Festival was that, “what is in a party leader or prime minister’s interest is not always in the interest of democracy.”
He added that a “loosening of the party whips may be necessary to keep our democracy from suffocation.”

“Honesty requires me to say I was a party leader once,” Ignatieff quickly acknowledged, “and my instincts were always to shut those people [dissenting Liberal MPs] down wherever I could. So I’m completely, flagrantly contradicting what my interests were not two years ago.”

Kind of makes you wonder where was this Ignatieff during those years he spent in Ottawa?

Iggy, STFU. You Buggered Up the Liberals, Don't Bugger Up Canada.

The Liberal Party's celestial fuckup, Michael Ignatieff is at it again.  Not content with consigning the once great Liberal Party to a rump, he's now stirring up Quebec separatism.

In an interview on BBC Scotland, His Igness opined that a victory by Scottish nationalists in their 2014 referendum will ignite separatist renewal in Quebec.

"He also said Quebec and the rest of Canada have little to say to each other and that the two are already “almost” separate countries.
Ignatieff told BBC Scotland that devolution of central powers, whether from London to Edinburgh or from Ottawa to Quebec City, will likely be only temporary.

“'It’s a kind of way station.  You stop there for a while, but I think the logic eventually is independence – full independence,” Ignatieff said in an interview in his home last month.

"Asked by interviewer Glenn Campbell if he was referring to Quebec as well as Scotland, Ignatieff replied:  “I think eventually that’s where it goes.”

And who ever thought this dipshit was fit to lead Canada?

Iggy Calls Out Captain Weasel - Again

Poor Captain Weasel.   A couple of days back this jumped up excuse for a prime minister was struttin' his stuff, challenging the Liberal leader to a one-on-one, man to man, showdown at the OK Corral - to the death, winner take all.   Didn't old Uncle Lardass look all manly and all as he threw down the gauntlet?

Well Mr. SHarper didn't look too manly for too long after Mr. Ignatieff picked up that gauntlet and said, "anywhere, anytime."   It was the classic Bully Boy moment when the kid in the schoolyard has had enough and stands up to the punk and the Bully Boy takes off running as far and as fast as his stubby little legs will carry his pudgy torso.  "No, no, can't spare the time.   Best I get back to campaigning."  What kind of greasy punk is this guy, our prime minister?

I expect Steve was hoping that, like so many of his gaffes and scandals, it would quietly fall away and quickly be forgotten.  Maybe not this time.   The Liberal leader isn't letting Captain Weasel off the hook.   He's chasing him down.  Today Mr. Ignatieff issued an open letter telling Bully Boy, "I will meet you at a time and place of your choosing."

“I don’t understand why you have gone back on your word, or why you would wish to disappoint Canadians,” he said.

“As you stated, there are only two people who can be Prime Minister after May 2 – you or me. Canadians truly deserve to see us go face to face in a contest of ideas, values and very different visions for our country. That is what democracy is all about,” the Liberal leader stated.
 “There is no need for complicated or convoluted debate formats. Just two podiums – and you and me. A true, honest-to-goodness battle of ideas and visions,” he said.

It looks to me that the Weasel Man is cornered.   He can either take his chances with Ignatieff or wear this one every day for the rest of the campaign.  I don't think Bully Boy has much choice now but to debate Iggy one on one.  Harper's advisors have probably already figured out the point spread from what would almost certainly be a "no lose" event for Ignatieff.   For Harper, the best possible outcome might be foreclosing all hope of a majority while the worst possible outcome could just be the unthinkable.

Dear Iggy

Well buddy, it's time to grow a pair.   You've got an election coming and the John Kerry routine isn't going to cut it.

You want to win?  It's really not that difficult.   Get your staff to round up every news report they can find from the 1974 campaign - the Trudeau/Stanfield/Lewis runoff.

All you've got to deal with is Stephen Harper.   Trudeau had to defeat Bob Stanfield, a really good guy even though he was a Tory.

Trudeau understood campaigning but, then again, he was a lawyer.   He knew you've got to fight to win and fighting means taking apart your opponent.  It wasn't the Liberal Party's finest moment but Trudeau knew he could take down two birds with one stone by nailing Stanfield on his wage & price controls proposal.  He bloodied Stanfield and siphoned off much of the NDP base in one fell swoop.

Trudeau knew that campaigning required passion.   You've got to wear your heart on your sleeve.  You've got to connect with the voting public and not on some ethereal plane either.

Try to imagine how Pierre Trudeau would have taken on Stephen Harper.  He would have eviscerated Harper, gutted him and then shredded the remains.

Word is out that you want to make this election a debate over the economy.  Sit down Senator Kerry, that ain't going to work.   No, your target is Stephen Harper, prime minister.  You've got to cut him, again and again and again.  He's not a likeable guy.  You have to make the public revile him.  You have to paint Steve as this secretive, power crazed, manipulative, dishonest and anti-democratic bully boy.  You have to make voters hate the way Steve has treated them.   You have to make them want his head for what he has done to our Canada.

As Dion showed, this really isn't a game for academics.   It's a blood sport.  Don't waste your time giving lectures.  No feeble reaching out to the public.  They don't like you either.  Best not to remind them of that.  Even if we don't much like you, we're all fight fans at this point.  What you've got to do is put on that fight, show us you can take this punk down.  Or step out of the way and let somebody else in who can.

Just Sayin', That's All

I got dropped from Iggy's real Christmas list last year so I was a bit surprised to get an e-card from the Igster today.  It's not actually a Christmas card as such.  It's a "Happy Holidays" card with all the baby Jesus stuff left out.   Wouldn't want to offend anybody while folks are celebrating the birth of our Lord and Saviour.   That wouldn't be right.   So let's be politically correct and keep religion out of it entirely except let's toss in a dandy pair of Menorahs!  Now I could be wrong.  There's a little figure in there and I think it's Caspar the Friendly Ghost or a snow-covered Charlie Brown.   Could that be the Baby J hisself?  Nah, he'd have that little halo thing wouldn't he?

In any case I was pleased to have Michael so openly thank me for keeping the Liberal tradition strong in 2010.   Well, Mike, somebody had to.   Lord know there wasn't much of it to be seen up on Parliament Hill.

And a merry, merry, merry to you and yours too Mike.

"We Stand Shoulder to Shoulder with ...Israel. End of Story."

What?  Really?  Before he sacrificed his own genitals to self-mutilation for political expediency, Michael Ignatieff embraced a far more nuanced, balanced, honest and plain-spoken perspective on Israel and the Palestinians.   Now the Liberal Lizard King has shed that skin and wrapped himself in new scales.

And this is what the Liberal Party of Canada is to become?  Its integrity sacrificed to political expediency for a hack who couldn't get elected dog catcher in a one-man race?

C'mon, really, dig deep.  This guy isn't Liberal.

h/t Pogge

If You Want to Turn Those Polls Into Something, You Need to Fix What's Broken

There's something telling in the way Canadian polls on the federal parties seesaw back and forth.  From what I've seen they're usually tied to Harper screwups.   Harper goes ideologue and his numbers dip, sometimes enough to bring the Libs into 'statistical tie' territory.  Harper backs off and his modest lead returns.  It's like clockwork.

What this seems to suggest is that Harper drives the polls.   In other words, the Libs can expect to win when Harper self-destructs.  That's unacceptable.

What the polls appear to show is that the Libs need to focus not on Harper's failures but their own.  Michael Ignatieff should be seizing the initiative, taking the fight to Harper.   He ought to be acting much like Harper did when he took down Paul Martin.  Two problems - one, you can't really do that on the beer'n burger circuit, and, two, that's tough to pull off when you've positioned yourself so closely to your opponent.

What issues do the Libs have where they're so superior to Harper they'll motivate disenchanted, disengaged voters to show up at the polls to dump the Tories?   That's the only place the Libs are going to find the votes they need to retake power - the disengaged voter who has simply tuned out federal politics.  What electoral arrows do the Libs currently have in their quiver?  Arts funding, daycare?  C'mon, get real.  You're not going to beat Steve over the head with that stuff.

What about Afghanistan?  Martin might have been hoodwinked into the Kandahar gig but Harper embraced it, made it his very own.  Had the Libs stood their ground on the 2009 deadline, it might have cost them a bit initially but it would have stuck Harper with that foolish misadventure and cost him dearly afterward.  Instead he squirmed right off that hook and now it's Ignatieff and Rae looking to drag out this fiasco.  Good issue, dead loss for the Libs.

The economy?  Ever since the great recession landed in 2008 the Libs have abjectly failed to present an alternative economic initiative.   Instead Ignatieff was forced to back the Harper-Ignatieff Pinata budget and, even then, made a fool out of the Liberal opposition with his grandiose but hollow threats about putting Harper "on probation."   Geez that makes me wince every time I recall it.   No, sorry, way too close to Harper.   No room to swing even if you knew how to land a punch.

How about the environment, Canada's existential threat of the 21st century?   The Tories past paid dearly for accusing Jean Chretien of speaking out of two sides of his mouth but the Libs have painted themselves in just that corner on this one.  You cannot be a Tar Sands booster and appear serious about fighting climate change.  It can't be done.  The IgLibs have declared themselves inveterate Fossil Fuelers and they have failed to exploit Harper's vulnerability on global warming lest they reveal their own.   Once again, way too close to Harper.

Unfortunately there really is nothing useful for the Liberals at the centre-right.  It used to be the Libs succeeded by controlling the centre where, as needed, they could force the Tories farther to the right.  Now it's Harper who has control, who has managed to move to the centre-right where he's virtually immune to any effective IgLib opposition.  By blurring the distinction between Tory and Liberal, Harper ensures a disengaged, indifferent electorate and that's just what he needs.  It allows the Tories to retain power and to enjoy a complacent, timid opposition that, more often than not, can be maneuvered into advancing his agenda, bit by bit.

It's sad, really, to see this party so continuously mauled by a guy like Steve Harper but the Libs have no one to blame for that but themselves - and their leader.  Until you Libs fix what's broken you'll just have to sit around and hope Harper self-destructs.   Good luck with that.

Mike, This Is No Time for Trivialities

In his anything but stunning opening to his summer long bus tour of Canada, Mike Ignatieff yet again completely underwhelmed with his first salvo.


The announcement? More arts funding! Great Mike, but is that really very high on the average voter's (the same voters you're not reaching) priority list? Here's a word to you Libs who may think so - you're wrong, flat out wrong, dead wrong.


Arts funding? Oh Ignatieff's at it again. Boring. Nothing to see here. Too bad. What's on TV?


There's no wonder MI can't gain any traction, his boots are mired in clay. The good part is that he's whittled his way through the Liberal ranks so he's probably not in much risk of losing too many of the remaining die hard party faithful. He'd have to be caught buggering the Bishop at this point for that to happen.

Okay Igs, supporting artists is a personal priority for you. We get it - descendant of Czarist nobility, spawn of the diplomatic corps, elevated and esteemed academic - great. We all get it including the guys with votes who hear this yet again and change the channel, some of them for the last time.

Spending the summer drifting around for beer and burgers and chinwags with party faithful and wannabes is one thing - it's a waste of time that's not yours to waste buddy. It's not your job to limp along in hope that Stephen Harper has an aneurysm or actually chokes on a pretzel.

Politics is a blood sport Yer Igness and the guy at the top, the guy who has done things he can be held accountable for, is supposed to be the punching bag. Why then is it the guy at the top, the prime monster hisself, who's always throwing all the punches - and landing? He's made an art of gaining comfortable minorities with cowed oppositions by transforming elections into referenda on opposition leaders. In between elections he can pretty much do as he pleases, incrementally advancing his agenda with the complicity of a cowardly and feckless opposition scared out of its political wits. It's like a high school bully beating up on pre-schoolers. And it's sickening to watch.

I'm calling you out Igs, you're a damned coward. You've played Harper's stooge so long, been his wilful dupe, that the credibility you need to attack him now is squandered, discarded long ago on the floor of the House of Commons. Oh sure, every time you propped up bad legislation or staged abstention votes to save Harper there were plenty of rationalizations for it. The odd time when you didn't play ball, Harper had Layton there to backstop him. How in hell did anyone expect to get any legislative accountability from a power manipulator like Harper in a field of opposition sheep? You were the force multiplier that transformed his minority into a quasi-majority government. That's about all you've accomplished. Oh yeah, I forgot about arts funding.

Igs, if you can't start throwing punches, real jabs and fast hooks, and landing - if you can't start rocking Harper on his heels - you're a cheap poseur occupying but not discharging the role of LOL, Canada's opposition leader. It's nice enough - a house, a decent paycheque, a chauffeur, buckets of hobnobbing - but you're still supposed to be a political brawler, ready at the drop of a hat to knock Harper to the floor and kick him straight out to the curb. How many of us would rather witness just a bit of that than hear a lot of vapid drivel about arts funding?

The big problem you've got now Mr. Ignatieff is that you haven't got room to swing. You drew your party so close to Harper, turned so collaborative with his agenda, that he's sort of got you clinched in the corner. He steps back quickly, gets in a few shots of his own, and then ties you right back up again on the ropes. You have to get off the ropes, get some room, get ready to hit this guy hard, where he's vulnerable.

Oh, but where is Harper vulnerable? Well now that's where vision comes in. You're not going to make much headway bitching about the past, not when you are associated with supporting it. People have that image firmly in their heads and it's not going away anytime soon. For you, haranguing about the past is a post-electoral, one way trip to the cloakroom Igs.

Okay you haven't got much to work with in the past but that still leaves the future. And what fertile fields you have in front of you to till. Orchards sagging under the weight of low-hanging fruit. How about accountability and transparency - dismembering the political commissar structure Harper has implemented to gag the bureaucracy and the armed forces and thereby transform them into a propaganda agency of the PMO? How about a serious discussion of the Canadian north and what we can really do to consolidate Canada's interests? How about our crumbling infrastructure - the rotten electricity grid, steadily deteriorating bridges and highways, our antiquated and obsolete rail system - the very arteries we badly need to unclog to maintain a healthy Canada in the future? How about this one - global warming. Yeah, climate change that's already impacting Canada and is picking up steam while you jokers in Ottawa turn your heads and whistle past the graveyard. Now I know that could make your Bitumen Booster image on the Tar Sands just a little awkward but keep this in mind - the Tar Sands aren't inevitable but global warming is.

Since I'm on the topic of the Tar Sands, here's what I think you should do. Start calling them what they are, the "TAR" sands. Back the venture if you must but re-order your priorities. Place production and export on a level plane with remediation of the immediate and long-ranging environmental calamities already building there. Of course that means you'll have to do some reading and some thinking and make yourself able to discuss the Peace and Athabasca rivers, the MacKenzie River watershed, tailing ponds, acid rain, upgrader emissions, pipelines, depletion of natural gas and the potential for nuclear-powered extraction and production. That means you'll have to do what no one before you has managed - come up with a vision of the Tar Sands that works both financially and environmentally because you can't make it work without both.

You need vision. You need to find matters that are on the minds of the Canadian voters that they're not hearing discussed. Here's my shortlist - the scourge of income inequality and narrowing Canada's growing wage gap; concrete and immediate programmes for environmental remediation and climage change adaptation with emphasis on Canada's coastal regions, all of them; the rationalization of Canada's military role abroad and the refocusing on national defence to meet the challenges of a changing world (read the US Quadrenniel Defense Review if you don't get it); a wholesale review of Canadian foreign policy in a world where more will be needing help with fewer able to give it; revitalizing Canadian society and our economy with a Marshall Plan of direct investment in infrastructure and alternative energy.

Those are just a few ideas for a message that you can lift off the pages, ideas that can reach and resonate with a nervous voting public. Each of them opens room between you and Harper, room to distance and position yourself to hit him where he's weakest - his own crippling lack of vision. Harper is an ideologue at heart, a grey soul wrapped inside a grey suit. That's not a good thing, Igs. You don't have to be him.

Your Daily Call to Arms - Nikiforuk Style

With an election possibly looming for the fall I plan to argue the case for the Libs pursuing major, dynamic environmental initiatives in the campaign. I believe it's a no-lose proposition for the Libs. It is a splendid vehicle to reconnect with an increasingly disengaged, disaffected if you like, voting public apathetic and uninspired by the tedium that is today's Ottawa.

I'll attempt to post a daily "call to arms" - a snippet taken from here and there that I hope will capture your imagination and focus it on how much opportunity simply awaits the Liberals - and Canada - if they can only muster the courage to scrap their obscure lethargy and turn dynamic.

Ignatieff's simplistic endorsement of the Athabasca Tar Sands touches a really raw nerve in me. The way the Liberal leader, like all the other Bitumen Boosters, trivialize the environmental catastrophe building there is infuriating. The way they resort to the most facile sophistry in dismissing these problems is stripped bare by this passage from Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent:

"The rapid devlopment of the tar sands has made climate change a joke about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. Everybody thinks reducing carbon dioxide emissions needs to be done and expects Somebody will do it. Anybody could have reduced emissions, but Nobody did. Everybody now blames Somebody, when in fact Nobody asked Anybody to do anything in the first place."

Sorry Iggy but that's game, set and match Nikiforuk.

Why Canada Is In Desperate Need of Fresh Leadership

No matter where one lives, people face many problems - social, economic, environmental, security problems, the list goes on and we all have them. It is precisely because we have to face these challenges collectively that we maintain political structures, governments in all their varying forms.

Now we hope, today rather cynically, that our governments will be representative. We hope they'll honestly and faithfully represent our interests, at least attempting to balance our individual interests with our collective interests while accommodating the interests of others - corporations, other countries and so on. We have so many interests we require levels of government - municipal, provincial, federal - that we hope will all represent our interests at the appropriate level.

Yet politicians fail us, cease to represent us, when, in their own interests they construe the problems and challenges that beset us as primarily political issues. I can think of no more disturbing example of this than the way in which our federal politicians treat the Athabasca Tar Sands. Here's a clue. They can't even bring themselves to say "tar." To them it's the Athabasca Oil Sands as though the fossil fuel industry was actually pumping oil instead of mining the bitumen/sand/clay sludge. There's a reason they call the operator SynCrude, not just "crude." In effect, the first word that passes their lips is a lie, a deliberate lie that serves as the foundation for an elaborate construct of lies required to mask or trivialize the risks in order to frame the problem as a political issue.

As we may well discover in the not too distant future, Athabasca is a wildly out of control environmental catastrophe or collection of looming catastrophes. Yet how many of our supposed leaders merely pay lip service to the problems? Oh yes, we must get those carbon emissions under control. Yes, we must do something about the water concerns. They're bullshitting you and me. Yes we must do what exactly? Who must do it? By when must it be done? Who is to pay for whatever must be done? Who is to compensate those who are already suffering the fallout? What if it's not done? What then? These so called leaders spend less time addressing any of these questions than I just spent writing them. Does that tell you anything?


It tells me that there are several aspects of the Tar Sands development that are so awful, so intractable that they can't be addressed by political leaders. They're mentioned in the most simplistic terms, dismissively, in passing. In the same breath in which they're uttered the politician moves on to another subject. Yet every time they do that, they speak volumes if only you're listening.

To understand that these passing remarks are a disingenuous sop, a political contrivance, you have to learn more about the Tar Sands than our political leaders want you to know. They don't want to get involved in a discussion about the litany of environmental catastrophes building in Athabasca and, trust me, greenhouse gas emissions are just one of several and not the worst by any means.

Our political elite would rather you didn't read Marsden's indictment of Alberta's oil and gas industry, Stupid to the Last Drop, or Andrew Nikiforuk's excellent, Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, or Maude Barlow's Blue Covenant, or Monbiot's Heat or Jarred Diamond's Collapse or any of the dozens of well researched, well annotated books, reports and studies that shine a glaring light on Athabasca. They don't want you thinking of the Athabasca and Peace Rivers as feeding into and thereby threatening Canada's largest watershed, the world's third largest, the MacKenzie before wending their way into the Arctic Ocean. They don't want you to trouble your gentle mind with information about the toxins brought to the surface along with the bitumen sludge - the carcinogens, the heavy metals - or the rates at which they leak/leech into the groundwater. They would rather not have you dwell on the industry's rapacious consumption of our limited reserves of conventional natural gas used to generate steam to liquify sludge so that it can then be pumped to the surface. SAGD? Don't even ask. They don't want you to look too closely at the Athabasca "tailing ponds" many of them lining the banks of the Athabasca itself. These things are eye openers that serve as an immensely powerful indictment of the Tar Sands, the Fossil Fuelers, and the the cheap hucksters and fixers in high political office who, at every turn, place Big Oil's whim above the interests of Canada and the Canadian people.

With the ascendancy of the new economic superpowers - China, India, Brazil and, to some extent, Russia, we're faced with a world in which there's a burgeoning demand for a strategic resource that's already in decline - conventional crude oil. That has already sent us chasing Option "B" - unconventional oil such as tar sands, shale oil and deepwater reserves. Unconventional oil is considerably more expensive because it's invariably much harder to extract and process, much harder and vastly more dangerous. Whether it's drilling by remote control into the deep seabed or extracting tar and countless thousands of tons of associated toxins once safely buried deep below the surface, it's all high risk and potentially devastating.

It's ironic that the controversy over the Tar Sands raises the hackles of so many Albertans who have virtually nothing to do with the Oil Patch. The ironies are multifold. It's their environment that will suffer the most and just keep suffering decades, even centuries after the last barrel of commercially viable bitumen has been taken from Athabasca and Big Oil has moved on. Those in the south usually don't understand that they're not really immune to what's happening in the north. They don't grasp how climate change will impact their already limited freshwater resources and they're facing the devastation of their own groundwater reserves by the shale "fraccing" industry. Big Oil took'em dancing, bought'em a few drinks and now it has its hand down their pants all while their political guardians count their bucks and look the other way. And we used to think it was funny how the Manhattan natives were duped out of their lands with beads and trinkets.

I want to share with you just a few things I've discovered about the Tar Sands that you'll never hear mentioned by Harper or Ignatieff or Layton. Maybe when I'm done you'll ask yourself why not?

Water. Virtual water. That's water exhausted in the production of an export. It's water lost to the producing nation, water than might as well be treated as if it had been exported. Athabasca produces a million barrels of bitumen a day which means that, even with enhanced recycling, the Tar Sands virtually export three million barrels of water every day.

But of course we really don't export that water. It's far too toxic to be allowed into the states even if that option was economically viable and it's not. So they get the oil, we get the waste water. Some producers such as Syncrude now manage to recycle their water up to eighteen times. That really does cut down on their freshwater consumption but the downside is that when that exhausted water finally does reach the tailing ponds, it carries many times higher levels of toxins and carcinogens than less recycled water. There's less of it but it's far more lethal.

Let's talk about tailing ponds, the reservoirs where the toxic sludge is held. When implemented, the engineers believed the "tailings" - sand, clay, leftover bitumen and the associated heavy metals and toxins would settle to the bottom in a few years leaving water that could be rehabilitated. Turns out they were wrong. Now it's looking increasingly likely that settling could take centuries, possibly a millennium, and even then - who knows?

"Ponds" now there's about as pastoral a word as you can find. Think Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, think Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. Think again. Think instead of China's Three Gorges Dam which is poised to overtake the Athabasca tailing ponds as the planet's largest man made reservoir. When you visualize a pond, do you form a mental image of placid waters held back by an earthen dam more than 300-feet in height? That's 325 feet to be exact, grown somewhat from the 40-feet initially thought necessary by the engineers who designed it. Try to picture an earthen berm that's as high as a 30-story building and stretches for two miles. Now can you understand how Athabasca's tailing ponds are visible to the naked eye from the space shuttle? Now imagine those earthen containment berms shifting, actually moving, and constantly degrading.

There are two especially nasty carcinogens in Athabasca pond tailings - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and napthenic acids. The US EPA found that most napthenic acids produce skin cancers in any creatures exposed to them. Napthenic acids are sometimes extracted from oil to produce wood preservatives and fungicides. They also kill fish and most aquatic life on contact. This toxic witches brew is currently leaking back into the Athabasca river at a volume of 18-gallons per second. That's 18-gallons of concentrated, lethal toxins every second. That's 86,400 X 18-gallons of raw, carcinogenic toxin each and every day. One million, five hundred fifty thousand, two hundred gallons per day.

Now about that 300 foot plus wall. It's experiencing "deformation creep." Tailing ponds expert Dr. Norbert Morgenstern describes deformation creep as movement in a dam's foundation. Back when he was working for the European Union, Morganstern described tailing pond reliability as, "among the lowest of earth structures" and warned that "a well-intentioned corporation employing apparently well-qualified consultants is not adequate insurance against serious incidents." Since his EU days Morganstern has become one of those consultants himself - in Alberta - and doesn't think any of his conclusions apply to Alberta's ponds.

Of course what could go wrong? A lot. Nikiforuk writes:

"Engineers and ecologists agree that the tailing ponds pose a substantial risk to Canada's largest river basin. 'The longer the tailings sit there, the more likely there will be a major weather event and a big dyke failure,' predicts Bruce Peachey of New Paradigm Engineering. 'If any of those [tailing ponds]= were ever to breach and discharge into the river, the world would forever forget about the Exxon Valdez,' adds the University of Alberta's [eminent hydrologist] David Schindler. (the Valdez released about eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. ...PAH concentrations alone in the tar ponds represent about three thousand Valdezes.)"

This is just a glimpse at the tailing ponds nightmare and it's going to get worse, much worse. After the most easily extracted bitumen is exhausted it's going to become even harder, and much more water and natural gas intensive, to go after the rest. Recycle as they must, the Tar Sands developments will be producing far more, vastly more toxic waste water over the next two decades. Is it any wonder that politicians of flimsy integrity avoid talking about this?

I can't begin to address here the other environmental calamities spawned by the Athabasca Tar Sands - the depletion of freshwater and natural gas reserves, the acid rain that sweeps into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, provincial and federal governments that rubber stamp industry approvals and fail to maintain even rudimentary monitoring of the environmental impacts of the Tar Sands and so much more.

The tragedy is that we are forced to rely entirely on entirely unreliable people to represent our interests and our nation's interests and to act responsibly to redress potential calamity before it can happen. We have to rely on self-serving political reprobates like Harper and Ignatieff so utterly devoid of the decency and integrity as to treat Athabasca as anything more than a political issue to be weighed on political costs and advantages.

Michael Ignatieff proclaims the Athabasca Tar Sands the beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century and a veritable key to national unity. That's the talk of a craven hack who puts his personal political fortunes in direct conflict with the welfare of the nation and people he pleads to be allowed to lead. So long as this toxic mentality prevails, Ignatieff is not fit to lead the Liberal Party of Canada and the Liberals are not fit to govern our country. It's that plain.

Iggy Meltdown - Isn't It Time He Finally Left?

"The" Scott Ross can be controversial at times. Lord knows I don't always agree with him. But his account of Michael Ignatieff's attempt to cow Liberal dissent in Vancouver needs to be heard. It's time to send this charlatan packing. There's nothing for the Liberal Party of Canada to be had in following Michael Ignatieff into this ditch.

Who does this joker think he is?

Count Dizzy Strikes Again

Michael Ignatieff can't help himself. The smell of bitumen is simply irresistible to the man. He's so drawn to it he can't bring himself to say a bad word about the ecological catastrophe the world knows as the Athabasca Tar Sands. To the contrary, Iggy is Big Oil's man in the Liberal Party of Canada and they know in Iggy they've got a winner even if he's a dead loss for liberalism.

Yesterday His Igness put in an appearance at the University of Alberta trolling the empty Wild Rose Sea for Liberal votes. Perhaps sensing that the good folk of Alberta are possibly even less wild about him than progressives, he's reported to have encouraged supporters to go door-to-door, chanting, "Iggy ain't such a bad guy." He said that, he really, truly, did. He wants his supporters to go bleating that at strangers' doors. Cue the clown car.

Sticking with his theme that Alberta is the "driving heart" (or at least the lower alimentary canal) of the Canadian economy, the LPC's in-house gravedigger chimed, "We're going to be in a hydrocarbon future for a long time." He followed that up with the same, conditional bullshit. "The key thing is to make it sustainable -- to create an industry that has great working conditions for the people in it, that drives down excessive use of water and that gets CO2 under control." Perhaps while he's at it he can come up with the key to turning lead into gold.

Iggy admonished his supporters to stop considering Liberals the natural governing party. "We're now the official opposition. We can't go to the country and say, 'The timeout's over, give me the keys." Don't worry Iggy, they won't. Then again, given the utterly pathetic job you've done as leader of the official opposition, who would?

Time for Iggy to Fish or Cut Bait

What began as a few voices of discontent is today a cacophany. It's time for Michael Ignatieff to do something - anything. This apprenticeship should have been over a year ago. He should have fielded policies that would at least unify the Liberal ranks even if they weren't entirely palatable to the voting public. It's going to take more than policies to recapture public support at this point. It's going to take a revitalized, re-energized Liberal Party that looks and acts like it's ready to govern Canada, something that, for years, has been lacking.

What is a Liberal any more? I'm damned if I know. Whatever it is today to me is certainly unrecognizable as what I understood Liberal to be these past forty years.

Now there's talk about mergers and coalitions. The centre-right Ignatieff Liberals have become so lame that the Toronto Star's Tom Walkom says that they should consider a coalition - with the Harper Conservatives:

"...surely the only coalition that makes sense is one that joins the Liberals and Conservatives.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Rhetoric aside, the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff are far closer to the Conservatives than they are to Jack Layton’s New Democrats.

The governing and official opposition parties may quibble over details. But in broad terms, they are on the same page."

Walkom's right - the IgLibs and the Harper Conservatives are very much on the same page. We're sort of drifting into American politics. Harper has long wanted to transform the Conservatives into northern Republicans while Ignatieff seems intent on following suit to give the Libs a makeover into northern Democrats. Those are pretty stomach-churning ideas, aren't they?

If you can't believe this, Walkom has an interesting analysis to back up his point. Read it here.

An editorial in the same paper argues that it's time that Ignatieff actually did something.

...the Liberal/NDP merger talk may just be a smokescreen for a move to oust Ignatieff.

That would be premature. Ignatieff is the party’s third leader in just four years. The Liberals can’t keep changing leaders the way Cito Gaston summons pitchers from the bullpen.

But there is no question that Ignatieff needs to raise his game. His 18 months as party leader have been marked by more gaffes than gains. After an initial upward swing under Ignatieff, the polls show the Liberals slumping back into the 20s, or Stéphane Dion territory. The polls also show the public doesn’t see Ignatieff as prime ministerial.

"The public doesn't see Ignatieff as prime ministerial." That's an understatement. He's not. So why then are so many Liberals happy to follow him to the right, to Harper country? What gives Ignatieff the right to so warp the Liberal Party of Canada, to render it toxic to its traditional progressive component? He's forfeiting far more at the centre/centre-left than he can ever hope to steal from Harper on the right. He's misreading his party and the Canadian people. Liberal leaders past at least tried to be attuned to the Canadian voting public. Not this guy.

I think the Toronto Star is wrong in claiming the Libs can't change leaders at this point. In fact I think that's exactly what they should be doing only this time vet the candidates properly. If the right person isn't already within the active Liberal ranks, start looking outside. It's not that the Liberals can't afford another leader as much as that they can't afford another Dion or another Ignatieff. The public has sampled those offerings and said a resounding "No." They won't have it.

Another factor arguing for a leadership change as soon as practicable is that someone has to reverse Ignatieff's reckless turn to the right. The right doesn't need a second party, it already has the Harper Conservatives. The right is a place where the Liberal Party of Canada can only go to die. If the party belonged there you would see a different result in the polls and we've seen countless polls over the past twelve months that this point cannot be in doubt.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Ignatieff can still pull something out of his hat. Well this is his last chance to do just that. If he's got a progressive gene in his DNA, this is the time to show it. If not he ought to see if he can get his old job back at Harvard.

Even the Toronto Star Gets It - Ignatieff is Failing Canada

Columnist Thomas Walkom isn't mincing any words - Michael Ignatieff's Liberals are failing the country and those who elected them to become the official opposition. The proof, he says, is in the IgLibs' spineless refusal to oppose Harper's Bill C-9:

All three opposition parties say that to package so many disparate things in one bill is an outrageous abuse.

But the Liberals, desperate to avoid an election they believe they can’t yet win, are letting the bill move ahead anyway.

Most recently, the Liberals kept one of their MPs away from the Commons finance committee to make sure that Bill C-9 could get through that stage without their having to explicitly support it.

On Tuesday, Liberal MP and finance critic Bob Rae was on CBC Radio suggesting that the unelected Senate might be better positioned than the elected Commons to give Bill C-9 the scrutiny it deserves.

That’s an argument that doesn’t make sense (the unelected Senate is always loath to defeat a Commons money bill). But to be fair to Rae, it’s all he could say given the refusal of Liberal MPs to undertake the job they were elected to fill — that of official opposition.

The essential problem is that the Liberals don’t take the role of opposition seriously. Desperate for power, they are unwilling to do anything to spark an election until they are reasonably sure of winning it.

Yet given the current configuration of political forces in Canada — and their current leader — they cannot be certain of winning more seats than Harper’s Conservatives in the next election.
So they do nothing. They hem; they haw; they occasionally threaten. But in the end they back off, waiting for that elusive better chance.

That may be fine for them. But it’s not for us. The country didn’t elect 77 Liberal MPs so that they could sit on their hands waiting for the moment to regain power. We elected them — and the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats — to rein in a minority Conservative government that most of us don’t trust.

There are a lot of Liberals who tolerate the Ignatieff malaise as a matter of loyalty. But, as Walkom points out, loyalty to whom? Does loyalty to their party always have to trump loyalty to their country?

I'll bet that many of the diehard Liberal faithful harbour a pretty good hunch that Ignatieff is never going to become prime minister, at least not without eating humble pie to court the support of the other opposition parties, just as they realize that the current leader of the opposition has done squat for this country. Coming in the wake of the failure he deposed, the inept and hapless leadership of the successor who was supposed to make everything right has to be an enormous and bitter disappointment.

These hard core Libs need to take stock of the situation before them. They need to accept that the brand alone isn't enough to get Canadian voters to restore their party to power. How many more times are they going to beat their heads on that wall?

Read Walkom's column here.