All too infrequently recognized:
…Stephen Harper was re-elected on a platform that put him considerably to the left of Barack Obama and the voters of Ontario re-elected a man who would be called a Bolshevik by American Tea Partiers, if American Tea Partiers knew what a Bolshevik is…
Gardiner throws out the ‘left of Obama’ line with no proof.
Harper is not a socialist, union puppy like Bam Bam.
Gardiner is thankful that Hudak allowed the media and left to define him and reign him in on the ‘Harris-fear’ ticket. Hudak caved. He did not come out with a strong conservative campaign like Ford. He and his campaign manager lost this.As it was pointed out…Hudak kept the same CM as John Tory…where’s the logic?
Insipid, boring & trivial campaign by Hudak.
He lost. duh.
I suppose the bright side of last night’s Ontario election,is that we won’t have to fear another Ipperwash.
Yeah…I’m ticked.
Fact: 63% of Ontario voters did not vote Liberal.
Where have we heard that line used before?
And what’s worse, 50.1 percent of Ontario voters didn’t bother to vote at all.
It’s a disgrace.
Tim Hudak is a pitbull owner. Is there a more obvious sign of a lack of character?
51% of Ontarions believe investing in green energy creates jobs ! How stupid is that?
Well, perhaps to the left of where Obama pretends to be when he is trying to get votes. I have seen Harper espouse and support a lot of positions and policies that I can’t imagine Obama ever seriously supporting outside of a vague talking point speech.
Ralph, maybe it’s a good thing when people don’t turn out to vote. Who knows how ignorant their votes would have been? I would prefer a small number of voters who have educated themselves about the issues than masses of uninformed idiots casting their ballot based on what the local info-babe said on the evening news.
I’m gonna try my hand at lefty math. Dalton only recieved 38% of the popular vote and only 50% of eligible voters turned out.
This means that after 8 years as Premier, Dalton has the confirmed approval of only 19% or 1 in five of the electorate.
Shouldn’t someone in the MSM be asking him about resigning in the face of such devastating mathematical facts?
I am really saddened about the lack of ‘conservative’ policies federally and provincially. With federal spending expanding more under Harper than with Cretien and whimps like Hudak leading ‘Conservative’ parties in provinces like Ontario and Manitoba, where is a small ‘c’ conservative to go? Unless we all get off our ass and get involved to champion our beliefs, we will be shoved to the side to piss and moan about how crappy things are. How important are your conservative beliefs if you don’t put yourself at risk?
Garnder’s a twit.
There is no way that Harper is to the left of Obama. And he throws a gratuitous insult at tea parties, when in fact it’s plainly obvious that tea-partiers are more intelligent than the rest of the population.
In one sentence he’s manged to say two completely idiotic things.
“Harper is not a socialist, union puppy like Bam Bam.” – bluetech at October 7, 2011 11:40 AM
No, but from the perspective of a Tea Partier, Harper is an accepting “manager” of a state that has long ago enacted a single payer monopolized socialized Health care model (Bam Bam’s signature transformational legislation) and where unionization, free speech, and gun control is at a level envied by Bam Bam’s fellow statist thugs. Also, Canada is seen (at least by me) as a nation where, without a visible grass roots movement like the Tea Parties, conservatism is either non-existent, neutered, dormant, defeated, driven underground, irrelevant, compromised into oblivion, or all of the above.
Hudak is/was typical mid-Canadian all purpose politician with mediocre capabilities, I suspect he’ll breathe a sigh of relief when he see the financial sh*t coming down at Canada and especially Ontario, which is going to bury McGinty and Co. So Ontarians you reap what you sow and if you stayed home and didn’t vote you’ll wear it anyway. Here in B.C. we’re no better off with Clark, Dix and Lazarus Cummins.
Its times like this when I just have to admit I have no freaking idea what so bloody well ever what motivates people in Ontario. None. It is a mystery to me.
I will however go so far as to say that Dan Gardener is a twister of the truth and probably a dork.
I agree. Ontario voters have shown time after time they act against their own interests.
What a load of crap!
If Harper was more socialist than Obamassiah, Canada would be running deficits in the $150 Billion Range.
He would be killing our economy by over regulating energy production and preventing the growth of domestic production.
He would be flushing money down the greenie toilet at epic rates “investing” in bankrupt solar panel companies . . . that is where Dulton is just like Obama.
Sorry Mark, have some coffee and realize your entry is just bogus.
Bolsheviks were, mainly, liars – right down to the name, as they were NOT the largest faction.
But, hey, far be it from an ignorant tea partier to correct my better’s misapprehensions…
PMSH isn’t a ‘Fast and Furious’ gun runner to drug cartels, which thus far have resulted in at least 200 deaths.
Agreed Fred, Dan Gardner is drawing too long a bow…
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Gardiner is spinning what is the underlying story in all of these elections: more and more voters are moving to the right. Conservative talking points are the winning talking points. Federally it means a majority for the cpc. In the GTA it gets rob ford in as mayor. In ON PEI MB it means weaker mandates for the left wing incumbents. The middle is shifting rightwards. Left wing talking points like nationalization of industries, increased green spending etc are extinct. Gardiner should rethink his column.
Well, Danny Gardner.
Communists know Bolsheviks best. You seem to know quite a lot about them.
Hmmmm….
Harper is a libertarian(ish) conservative pretending to be a Red Tory in a country that is dominated by Big Government socialists.
Obama is a socialist pretending to be a moderate centrist in a country that is dominated by Big Government conservatives.
Harper appears to be to the left of Obama only because of starting position of the governments they now lead. If each man had to take a political quiz with the aid of a lie detector I have no doubt that Harper’s score is much further to the right and Obama would be a NDP-style left-winger.
Ontario is…actually I don’t understand Ontario but I know where their path is headed. Like Sask. under the NDP, their future is a mass exodus of young people and working families which reduces tax revenue and increases the proportion of tax-receivers in relation to taxpayers. This will result in huge spending cuts and tax hikes just before economic collapse. Which then leads to more people leaving, smaller tax revenues and on and on and on.
At least Sask. had valuable natural resources to sell allowing the province to drag itself out of this viscous circle. What will save Ontario? No-one better say increasing equalization payment from western Canada.
Dan Gardner?
Ottawa Citizen?
You mean Ottawa, as in that city where the private sector (Ottawa Citizen included) derives the biggest part of its income from one level or other of the public sector?
Are we supposed to be surprised by what he wrote? Hell, he’s just toeing the company line.
Huff-n-puff pundit!
Of course to a partisan Librano scribbler Dolton McGuilty is a “colossus” but the reality is a rat-faced liar got back in a second time by default because the PC leader was so weak and hard to differentiate from a Liberal that the tea party conservative vote stayed at home and the center voter went with the Liberal they have rather tan n new liberal leader like timbits.
Gardiner should be losing sleep because the Canadian tea party is large and wide spread, it just has no candidates to vote for. Alberta’s election will make it abundantly clear that turning the PCs into a defacto Liberal party never works if there is an alternative for tea party voters (Wild Rose). Ontario had no real conservative party to vote for.
Gardiner’s political optics are obscured by the fact he can only see what’s in front of him while fart catching for Dolton.
SYF
Many people did not vote.
You know, when there is little choice why should one vote? To elect someone who really will not be much different? Who will be “liberal-lite”?
Assuming that Hudak’s program was quite different from McGuinty’s, did he stated these differences clearly? Did he push his agenda? If he put his ideas clearly, like Ford did, many people would have voted for him, but he did not.
As usual, the PROGRESSIVE Conservatives in Ontario tried to placate the masses with Liberal pablum.
Many Conservatives didn’t bother to vote, as both choices were basically the same.
I’ll repeat my oft spoken mantra from Conservative Ontario. When the west belittles us, they should remember that without us, their PM would be Iggy.
Other than PMSH what government can the west point to that is actually conservative?
A reform/wildrose party is sorely needed to give the pent up conservative voter a place to land.
I think Hudak could have won (not that I really think he deserved to – he didn’t offer up any substantially different policies than the Liberal ones that have dragged us down to have-not status) by taking a page from the Rob Ford book: present a simple, fiscally conservative platform and let the resulting shrill media circus from the left do the rest of the work for him. (Never understimate how much the over-the-top leftist hyperbole encouraged people to vote for Ford.)
Instead he decided to walk straight through every atheist/LGBT minefield he could find, and the leftist media didn’t even have to break a sweat.
Stephen Harper is to the right of Obama on support of Israel *alone.
Kate’s stock headline, ‘Scratch a Liberal…find an Anti-Semite’, exemplifies this.
Remember when Prime Minister Stephen Harper rolled back the GST from 7% to 5%?
Name a Leftist that would roll back a tax that way, I know Obama wouldn’t.
*does not mean ‘only’
Ontario got the government it justly deserves. I was born there, but I will never move back. The teachers union owns it now, from cradle to grave they have poisoned it.
A lot of Harper’s decisions must be taken in the context of the dominant liberal political beliefs among a very large chunk ofthe electorate, and the system he inherited which was the result of decades long rule by liberalism.
Judging Harper’s actions in that context, it seems he acts in strategic opposition to liberalism, even if the advances seem small, tardy and intermittent.
LC Bennett, Bill Elder and small c, exactly. Harper seems to changing the course of the the ship of state by increments. Hopefully this not a facade.
Below is an example of what is already happening because of the move to freeing farmers to sell their own wheat. Western Canada’s first pasta plant. The Bolos are not happy.
http://www.ckom.com/story/photos-50m-milling-facility-announced-prime-minister-stephen-harper/26430
The left knows Obama is inept and heading for a very big fall.
Gardner is setting the table for the left, ..here, to link Harper with Obamas failure.
Trying to label Harper, left of Obama, is fantasy at best or skullduggery propaganda(repeat it over and over, eventually it becomes the truth) at the worst.
Watch for Gardners contemporaries, to pick up the ball (Harper is left of Obama) and run with it.!
Ps…
From the comments at CBC re Obamas speach the other night…
comments by Huffington Post readers after Obama’s speech..
Botany5000 said: “Talks too long! Says too little.”
Beelzabubba responds: “That’s his Cherokee name.”.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/10/06/obama-job-bill.html
I almost choked on my coffee…LoL.
As to who is left of whom, I wrote this elsewhere in 2008:
‘What really redneck Canadian conservative, rather disappointed with prime minister Harper’s government, would not almost swoon if the leader of the Government of Canada:
…
*maintained that Osama bin Laden must be killed, wherever found, if there is good actionable intelligence;
*proposed universal health care mainly provided by the private sector;
*considered that the threshold for a “wealthy” income is over $250,000;
*did not approve of gay marriage;
*accepted capital punishment; and,
*made a public point of affirming his belief in the Christian religion?
Yet our media persist in trying to create controversy over possible ideological difficulties between the “Conservative” Harper government and a “liberal” Obama administration.’
Mr Gardner is almost unique in our media for noticing the reality in terms of many actual positions is rather different.
Mark
Ottawa