I know you're an NDP supporter, so I'd like to know what you think about the statement someone made regarding distrusting the NDP thanks to Bob Rae.We can almost pretend we're as much fun as BC here. ;)
I disliked Bob Rae intensely, as a person. Hey, didya know that he now sits on the board of Magna? You know ... Stronach ... Belinda ... union-busting ...
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20050418_103683_103683 Magna's board currently includes former Ontario Tory premier Mike Harris, and Ed Lumley, who served as minister of industry in Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government of the early 1980s. Another former Liberal cabinet minister, Doug Young, and Liberal Dennis Mills, who served as parliamentary secretary to the minister of industry, are directors of another of Stronach's companies, MI Developments. Last year, Brian Tobin, the flamboyant former federal fisheries minister and ex-premier of Newfoundland, had a brief stint as chief executive officer of MI. Tobin resigned after six months from Stronach's corporate empire -- taking with him a package of some $2.3 million -- around the time that long-serving board member and former Tory Ontario premier Bill Davis also stepped down.
It's not just Canadian politicians who have found their way into the Stronach family business. Franz Vranitzky was chancellor of Austria from 1986 to 1997, when he joined Magna's board. This year, Stronach named former U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci to an executive position with Magna Entertainment. Magna also has a global advisory board, which features such luminaries as former prime minister Brian Mulroney and Mexico's past president Ernesto Zedillo.
All sorts of truisms do come to mind.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. ... You're known by the company you keep. ... If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. ...One could say some of the same things about parties and their leaders. I belong to, and have been a candidate for, the NDP. Do I have fleas too?
I prefer to think that Rae benefits as much from his association with
moi as I lose from my association with him. ;) A party is a collection of individuals, and factions. Any party. If the party lets a bad individual or faction get the upper hand, yes, that's not good. But it's not permanent, either.
And I'll still take Bob Rae / the right wing of the NDP over, oh, Mike Harris, any day. And Dalton McGuinty too.
Apart from my personal dislike of Rae, the fact that the outgoing Liberal government lied shamelessly and grossly about the province's fiscal situation means that Rae had little choice but to do some things that nobody would like, and that even he might not have liked doing -- and it's brazen in the extreme to blame him for
the fact that *something* unpleasant had to be done. Things he actually did were probably not the wisest things, in political terms. But in government terms? What he did caused
his supporters to have conniptions; but a lot of what he did should have warmed the cockles of the rightest-wing hearts. Imposing cost-cutting measures on the public sector unions? What more could a Harris Tory have asked for?
It's the utter hypocracy of right-wing criticism of Rae that makes it weightless.
Lastly, and to all, do you think Iraq will be an issue? Poland is pulling out, Italy is planning their retreat, Britain is up in the air until their election is over. Do you think this will be the one issue to prove Harpey isn't the man for us?I'm beginning to feel like the oracle. ;) My humble and not specially informed opinion is that it's a bit of a non-issue. Harper wouldn't likely make it an issue (just like I don't think he'd make same-sex marriage an issue, and just like he didn't make the firearms registry an issue last time around), because there are no votes to be gained by it, and no votes to be lost by it if he shuts up about it and people don't bother going to the memory bank about it.
Or do you all think the healthcare privitization is the Big One?Ah -- you aren't asking just me ;) I missed it up there the first time around.
I don't think there is a Big One, that's the thing. The Big One would have to be what the election gets called over, and that would be ... the sponsorship scandal? It would presumably have to be; whoever brings down the government is going to have to offer
some rationale/justification for it, and that's the only one on the horizon really. Would any party be able to shift the focus to something else, by sheer dint of effort? I kinda doubt it. And we'd be stuck with 6 weeks of noise that could just as easily have been made in the House or the media, and with no possibility of a better outcome this time around.
After much digging, the pollster finally ascertained this voter was switching out of spite, NOT because she believed in Harpey's platform.
In the end, he had to explain to her that she would only be hurting herself (and Canada) by doing this.I mean, bloody duh, eh? Maybe we need to start calling the radio stations and requesting repeated playings of
You Can't Always Get What You Want. But if you try sometime, you can get something a whole lot worse than what you've got.