Category Archives: liberal party

Félicitations, Stéphane

green party, liberal party

I’ve spent the day watching the Liberal leadership convention, and Stéphane Dion was just announced the winner of the final ballot. Those of you who have been watching as well will remember Stéphane as the “green” candidate, literally. He was the only leadership contender whose supporters weren’t using red as their primary colour.

And, of course, I want to also congratulate my former Liberal opponent Bill Graham on the completion of a very successful leadership term. I like Bill a lot, and he’s been a good MP for Toronto Centre.

Watching the leadership race of a rival political party from some other parties can be a conflicted event. On the one hand, you want the best candidate to win for the sake of the country. On the other, you can’t help but speculate on which leadership candidate might be the greater benefit to your own party.

Thankfully, we don’t have that problem (or at least not nearly as much) in the Green party. At the end of the day, what’s good for our party is good for the country, because unlike other parties, we’ve explicitly said that the implementation of our policies and the health of our democracy come first. (It’s sometimes said that we’re the only party that hopes to work itself out of existence.)

Dion, therefore, was the best choice by both measures. Not only does he have the best values and priorities of any of the Liberal leadership contenders, he’ll also be the most willing to cooperate with Green MPs. His biggest challenge, of course, is that he’s still the leader of a party that is systematically invested in the status quo. It will therefore be harder for him to change our country’s disastrous course, which is just one of the reasons why we still need new voices in parliament.

The next few months will be interesting.

Hey. Play Nice.

democracy and good government, liberal party, polls

Liberal MP Maria Minna (what a name, that) and Liberal leadership contestant Hedy Fry are upset that Harper has asked Liberal MP Wajid Khan to be his special adviser on the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Said Maria, “This is, pure and simple, a partisan effort aimed at halting the Conservatives’ slide in the polls. We should not be aiding and abetting their efforts in that regard.” Added Hedy, this is “a clear conflict of interest and of trust.”

Wow. And I was worried I was getting too cynical.

Listen folks, we need more cross-party cooperation and dialogue, not less — especially in a minority government situation. Harper could make a monkey his special adviser on banana affairs for all I care, so long as said monkey was qualified for the job.

I’m with Bill on this one. Give Wajid a chance.

The Status Quo Budget

conservative party, economy, liberal party, ndp

You may have heard Greens refer to the other three national parties as the “old-line” parties. I’ve never been a big fan of this term since I consider it to be a little negative and mean-spirited (though I almost changed my mind when Peter Kent casually used it to refer to his own party in a conversation with me). Instead, I call them the status quo parties. The Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP represent business as usual, with their only differences being largely aesthetic. In the words of Christopher Waddell, they all “seem struck by a collective crisis of imagination.”

That’s why it wasn’t surprising to here Michael Hlinka (Metro Morning’s business commentator, and my neighbor) this morning (on the radio, not at my door) saying that this Conservative budget is almost identical to what we would have gotten from the Liberals. It even contains specific Liberal promises, as well as all the stuff the NDP negotiated to prop up the Liberals a year ago. (Makes you question all the time, energy, and money that went into the election, doesn’t it?)

The main difference, according to the Globe and Mail, is that the Conservatives are taking dangerous financial risks, hoping that the global economy will continue to outperform at an extremely unlikely rate. The Globe concludes by saying that the Conservatives have taken Canada “too close to the deficit brink…counting on their commodity chickens to keep producing. It is too easy for the perilous outside world to dash those forecasts, and spoil our collective party. And that is too great a risk to take for votes.”

And they’re only talking about a fiscal deficit, to say nothing of the social and environmental deficits which continue to build up. Either way, this budget takes is further down the same road. And that’s a bad thing, because this road ends at a cliff.