Don’t make me vote again this year. I heard Harper say that his agenda was “frankly supported by the majority of Canadians” even though he got 29% of the vote in June. Nothing has changed. If you make us vote for you before the Liberals have done anything, you will see 5 seats in Quebec go to the Liberals, you will see a couple in Ontario go to the Liberals, you will see a few percentage points move NDP from Green and that will likely put the NDP into the low twenty seat range and, pooff, there goes Harper’s dreams of power. From today’s Toronto Star:
The Liberals were huddling last night to assess whether the raft of proposed changes would amount to a fundamental rewriting of the Martin government’s blueprint for minority rule. The choice rests with this shaky minority government to reject the changes as a threat or accept them, in whole or in part, which would in effect allow opposition parties to have a hand in designing the governing plan. A throne speech has only been successfully changed by the opposition twice in the history of the Canadian Parliament; in 1899 and in 1951, and the changes in both cases were minimal.
The vote on the Bloc gambit takes place later today, and if Government House Leader Tony Valeri judges the proposed changes to be a sharp shift in the Liberals’ chosen path, the Commons will be in a mad scramble around 6 p.m. as the three-month old government tries to hold on to its precarious control of Parliament. A loss by the Liberals in this case would amount to collapse of the Martin’s barely-begun government.
Don’t make us vote again, Mssrs Tory and Separatist alliance. All that you have shown in the last three months is that you two, the Alberta and Quebec independentistas, have much in common and that is the thing that most Canadians will agree upon.