The Liberals have no choice but to suffer the humiliation of not voting against the throne speech on Tuesday and worse being the one party keeping the government alive for the next couple of months.
This is not all bad. Consider the so called poison pill: the Conservatives are going to announce that targets set under the Kyoto protocol are unattainable. The thing is they are unattainable. Canada is not going to meet the 2012 Kyoto targets without buying emission credits and this just will not sell domestically. That is just the half off it. So long as Kyoto is the focus, the question will arise as to why Canada is not going to meet its targets and this will allow the Conservatives to offer up Liberal inaction as the reason why. The Liberals need to focus the debate on how the various parties plan to reduce carbon emissions going forward. The Liberals have a plan, the semblance of a plan anyway, and the Conservatives have potential political piñata known as intensity based emissions. Call into question the effectiveness of the Conservative plan and then sit back and watch as environmentalists, academics, pundits and yes bloggers break it into a million pieces. Under intense scrutiny, I give such a plan no more than month and half, maybe two. As for the other parties, the Bloc’s reason for being means it is no position to offer up a plan and the NDP poise no realistic challenge to the Conservatives. Whether they have a good plan or not is moot. The NDP will not win the next election. The underlying message is thus this. Only the Liberals are both able and willing to tackle global warming.
As for what Conservatives crime agenda etc, let them spend their wad. Only make sure to make plenty of noise while they are doing so. How do you make noise? You roll out policy. You include a nice mix of policy designed to tackle the big issues and controversial policy to catch the media’s and public’s attention. Hopefully by the time the Conservatives are finished, they will have run out of things to do just as the Liberals have wetted the public’s interest for their new policies.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Excellent comment.
As you say Kyoto is unattainable.
So who has the best plan going forward?
The liberals have a better chance of discrediting Harper in the house, I don't believe time is on Harpers side there are too many scandals on the back burner and no real policies going forward.
Good points
I stand by my assessment.
Party members are split on whether an election is necessary. Sitting MPs are not going to vote their political careers out of existence.
All an election does now is to give Dion an opportunity to clean house and get rid of deadwood MPs. Necessary but on the verge of acting irrational to say the least.
>>>>> "All an election does now is to give Dion an opportunity to clean house and get rid of deadwood MPs. Necessary but on the verge of acting irrational to say the least."
I do not even think it does that. Paul Szebo, Derek Lee, John Mckay, Dan McTeague will likely win reelection. What it would do is hopefully bring some talented individuals in caucus e.g., Gerard Kennedy, Penny Collenette, Anne Park Shannon, Bob Rae, Martha Hall Findlay.
"Gerard Kennedy, Penny Collenette, Anne Park Shannon, Bob Rae,"
All in races with Dippers as their main opposition. This makes it doubly difficult for Dion at this very moment.
There are very few safe Liberal seats and most of those seats are in urban centers where the competition is likely to be the Bloc in the case of Montreal or the NDP in the case of the Vancouver and Toronto. Moreover the suburban seats tend to be blue Liberal or red Tory seats and the aforementioned candidates are for the most part more to the left of that.
Post a Comment