What's with "Liberals" these days?

[Glacier]

The Liberals seem to want Harper to put the death penalty to a vote. Judging by the comments at the bottom, the populous are non too impressed with such grandstanding...

Jeez, talk about taking something out of context.

I'm no Harper fan by a mile, but even I can read and understand what a person means.

Harper said he can justify capital punishment in certain cases. Heck, we all can in certain cases! It doesn't mean we support it as a routine practise.

I swear, these idoit liberals are driving me to choose between dumb and dumber, and dumber still, etc....

Use some intelligence before you speak McGuinty

[Al Czervic]

I think the Liberals may well be I for a rude awakening if they REALLY want to put this issue to a vote….

[steven lloyd]

Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
(A TRUE Political Fable)


The seven dwarfs always left to go work in the mine early each morning.
As always, Snow White stayed home doing her domestic chores.


As lunchtime approached she would prepare their lunch and carry it to the mine.


One day as she arrived at the mine with the lunch she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in. Tearfully, and fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow survived.


'Hello!...Hello!' she shouted. 'Can anyone hear me? Hello!'


For a long while, there was no answer.
Losing hope, Snow White again shouted,
'Hello! Is anyone down there?'


Just as she was about to give up all hope,
She heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, singing . . ...."Vote for Michael Ignatieff Vote for Michael Ignatieff"

Snow White fell to her knees, crossed herself and prayed,
'Oh, thank you God! At least Dopey is still alive!'

[FreeRights]

It's a shame, because at the national level, I believe Iggy is easily the most qualified person to be Prime Minister.

[steven lloyd]

It's a shame, because at the national level, I believe Iggy is easily the most qualified person to be Prime Minister.

That's ironic sarcasm, right? Because I love irony

[Urbane]

Ignatieff is a bright fellow but he has poor political instincts:

Michael Ignatieff, all dressed up as Jack Layton

Kelly McParland February 24, 2011 – 1:39 pm

After eight weeks off for Christmas and just three back on the job, Parliament is taking a break again and Michael Ignatieff has gone off to expose himself to some more Canadians.

Everyone in Ottawa keeps talking up the possibility of an election, and the Liberals seem to believe Canadians may yet warm to their leader if they see him in the flesh often enough. Over the past year Mr. Ignatieff has been the Canadian political equivalent of Bob Dylan, touring so diligently it’s hard to remember just which comeback he’s on.

It’s not like he’s lacking in material to use against the Conservatives. The government spent the summer tripping over its own feet, filling Toronto with the unfamiliar smell of burning police cars when it wasn’t conjuring up the world’s most unlikely controversy over the slumber-inducing issue of the national census. After managing to get through the autumn without accidentally setting itself on fire, it struck again with the Great Bev Oda Brouhaha, in which a minister few Canadians had never heard of was suddenly thrust into the spotlight on a charge of lying to MPs.

The Oda debacle showed the government at its most arrogant. Not since Pierre Trudeau has a Prime Minister so openly displayed his disregard for the institution in which he serves as Stephen Harper did in blithely ignoring the issue at hand — that government ministers aren’t supposed to tell bare-faced lies to other MPs — while defending Ms. Oda on the peripheral issue of her right to deny government funding to applicants.

The big mystery is why Mr. Ignatieff can’t seem to get any traction from the government’s pratfalls. The ruder Mr. Harper gets, the more Canadians seem to perceive him as a leader. If you believe the polls, three times as many Canadians pick Mr. Harper as the best choice for prime minister as mention Mr. Ignatieff, who trails both the NDP’s Jack Layton and “none of the above.”

While failing to land a glove on the Conservatives, the Liberals instead appear determined to dress themselves up as the NDP. Mr. Ignatieff’s “Working Families Tour” is aimed at “hard-pressed families across the country who are worse off after five years of Stephen Harper.” It’s a none-too-feint echo of Mr. Layton’s habitual references to “hard-working Canadians” and their sufferings under the Tories.

Mr. Ignatieff is talking pension reform, jobs for youths, early learning and child care programs, and caregiver support. All fine issues accompanied by hefty price tags. Mr. Ignatieff doesn’t sweat the costs: all will be affordable once the Liberals get into power and cancel “prisons and jails and unaffordable tax cuts for the richest corporations.”

Maybe Canadians aren’t buying into this because they recognize it as traditional NDP territory and can’t quite figure out why Mr. Ignatieff is intruding on it. If they thought it would work, they’d have elected Mr. Layton years ago. In its glory days the Liberal party included a big-spending wing and a slightly-less-big-spending wing, with most of the party occupying a broad middle that stole freely from left or right, whichever was temporarily necessary to hang onto power. Mr. Ignatieff has reversed the trick, moving to the left at a time the country is buying into conservative themes on crime, the economy and immigration. They may not like the messenger, but they often didn’t like Trudeau much either. They just preferred him to the alternative.

After several false starts, Mr. Ignatieff seems to determined to stick with the current line, contradictory though it may be. He’s attacking fighter purchases, even though the Liberals would have to buy planes too. He’s aghast at corporate tax cuts, which his party has long championed (and still does at the provincial level). He’s criticizing the Tory deficit while pledging to introduce new big-spending initiatives.

Maybe Canadians just can’t bring themselves to accept that a bright fellow like Ignatieff actually believes this stuff. Mr. Layton does, they’re sure of that. But hearing it from Mr. Ignatieff is like buying a Ford from a Chrysler dealer — it makes you wonder why he’s not selling his own product.

National Post

[Urbane]

Now that an election looks more and more likely we're starting to see some offers going out to voters:

Ignatieff pledges to help pay for Quebec arena

Graeme Hamilton Mar 14, 2011 – 2:39 PM ET


MONTREAL GAZETTE/John Mahoney)
Hey ... how come he didn't pay for OUR arena?
All along, I’d been thinking that the proposed $400-million building in Quebec City, where an NHL team might one day play and Olympic figure skaters might one day Triple-Salchow, was an arena. But speaking to reporters in Quebec City Monday, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff set the record straight.

If elected, a Liberal government would join the province and city in footing the building’s bill because it would be “a public space that promotes culture.” Similar funding would be available to public spaces in other regions of the country, he said. A structure devoted to spreading the Roughrider culture in Regina, for example.

Sure, some sticks in the mud will take exception to having their tax dollars spent on playgrounds for rich athletes, but sports fans should rejoice at the true significance of Mr. Ignatieff’s policy. Before, a cultural outing generally meant a visit to a museum, theatre or concert hall. Boring. Now, some home-team face paint and a plastic cup of lukewarm draft is all that is required to be a culture maven.

And if arenas and stadiums are redefined as “public spaces,” surely access could never be limited to those privileged few able to pay inflated ticket prices. Corporate boxes will be replaced by a People’s Zone, with places assigned by national lottery. Entry to the stands will be pay-what-you-can, to ensure finances never impede one’s ability to experience culture.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is accustomed to being hammered as an enemy of the cultural class, but he surely never thought his refusal to subsidize a hockey rink would be reason to paint him a philistine. “Mr Harper said ‘No’ to the Colisée,” Mr. Ignatieff said, using the nickname for the proposed Quebec City arena. “I say ‘Yes’ to the Colisée. The contrast could not be clearer.”

He has not indicated how much his government would cough up, but really, can you put a pricetag on culture?

National Post

[Urbane]

Lorne Gunter Mar 15, 2011 – 11:17 AM ET

Michael Ignatieff’s pledge to give federal tax dollars to a new hockey rink in Quebec City may be the most clueless, tone-deaf bit of political gamesmanship I have seen in a decade or more. It is unlikely to win his Liberals any seats in Quebec, but it will almost certainly cost them seats in the rest of the country.

Seriously, is someone making up these boneheaded strategies for the Liberal leader? Or is he just winging it on his own?

It’s smart in politics to find “wedge” issues – policy stands that separate you from your opponents. But wedge issues that separate you and your party from reality are to be avoided. This is one of those latter wedge issues.

Arena funding would define the Liberals as being different from the Tories, something they have struggled with since Mr. Ignatieff became party leader back in late 2008. But the wedge in this case would cost them more support in the rest of Canada than it would gain them in Quebec. And there is a good chance it could cost them support in Quebec, too.

During Mr. Ignatieff’s tenure as Lib leader, there has seldom been much daylight between his party and the governing Tories. Oh sure, there has been no shortage of typical opposition bluster about the government’s failures or negligence or ineptitude. But on nearly all major issues such as Canada’s mission in Afghanistan or stimulus spending to deal with the international financial crisis or the need to rein in government spending – eventually – the Grit boss has suffered from me-too syndrome. He has mostly just criticized the Harper government for failing to do what they were doing as well as he would have done the same things. (Yawn.)

However, the Tories have flatly refused to fund a new hockey rink in Quebec City. So by coming in now and promising to make a federal contribution toward construction, Mr. Ignatieff is clearly standing apart from the Tories. The trouble is, the Tories themselves tried to find some way – any way – of slipping Quebec a little federal dough and couldn’t; not without enraging the rest of the country or getting sucked into giving similar support to new stadiums and rinks in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Hamilton, Halifax and elsewhere.

Having tried and failed to find a way to stomp on this flaming bag of dog poop without getting their shoes soiled, the Tories left it burning on the doorstep only to watch Mr. Ignatieff put his foot right in it. They must be killing themselves laughing at Tory election HQ.

Mr. Ignatieff has arrived too late to the party to get much credit in Quebec. He wasn’t there pushing the Tories to fund an arena when the issue was hot. Quebec voters will give him no credit for taking a political risk on their behalves. He waited until the issue was decided, then cynically popped up with what he thought was the popular, vote-winning choice in a province were his party once dominated, but now sits third in the polls. To most voters in Quebec this will look like opportunism, pure and simple.

Meanwhile, outside Quebec Mr. Ignatieff’s move will rightly look like naked pandering.

In making his funding pledge Monday, Mr. I said “I don’t listen to the polls, I don’t pay attention to the polls. I’m on the ground and I’m talking to Canadians all over the place.” His implication was that he knows this move will resonate with voters inside and outside Quebec, despite how unpopular it is said to be by pollsters.

He must be talking to Canadians no one else has talked to, though. But I can assure him there is no silent majority in favour of money for rinks. Pollsters, radio talk show hosts and callers, bloggers and editorial boards across the country have been in surprising agreement about arena funding – they don’t like, overwhelmingly.

Even if some of the opponents of funding Quebec’s arena could be placated by Mr. Ignatieff tossing them similar bones for their local arena/stadium project, the cost of a nationwide sports palace construction boom – which would run to several billion dollars – would anger still other voters worried about runaway federal spending and debt.

The Tories aren’t stupid, at least not on this issue. They ran all the permutations and variations through their electoral calculators and came up with no option that won them more votes than it cost them. The proof that they were working desperately to fund this themselves is in Ignatieff’s after-the-fact pledge. For as long as the Tories were looking for clever ways to sneak money to Quebec, Ignatieff kept his mouth shut. Only after they had conceded defeat did the Liberal leader pipe up.

A wise man would have known when to keep quite, but when it comes to politics, Michael Ignatieff is not all that wise.

On funding Quebec’s arena, he was selected the lose-lose option.

National Post

[Ken7]

It's a shame, because at the national level, I believe Iggy is easily the most qualified person to be Prime Minister.

_______________________

You must be joking.

The guy can't look you in the face when he speaks. He always shoots the opposition ideas down when they speak and he never has an explanation how his party would deal with any matter.

I still feel as a Canadian voter, all those in office should have to swear to do what is in the best interest of Canada. These children spend more time, effort and money trying to upset and overturn the opposition than to fix and repair the broken Canadian system. I truly wish Iggy would go back over seas his intentions are not for the Country.

I would vote for him or his party if he were the last man standing.

[Graphite]

The last few times Iggy tried to call an election it was disastrous and failed. He has waited some time since last time when he was the most unpopular and now he thinks the time is ripe to try to oust Harper again. Desperate and obvious. The attempts at hauling around the other parties, trying to whip everyone into a frothy frenzy have come off as failed desperate attempts. All this harassment of our current government spells it out. He needs to remember, this is all about Canada, not Iggy. And I personally have not seen him putting Canada's interests to heart. Opportunistic? Megalomaniac? Three ring circus?