A commentor on the Shotgun;

Did my duty today and paid my $10 for my Separation Party of Alberta membership. I had to do it online b/c all of the phone lines to their headquarters were busy, busy all day. (whoo hoo)
Also, noticed on the Rutherford show this morning Separatist calls outnumbered confederation calls 17:1
What do they say? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me; fool me thrice, I’m really getting steamed; fool me a fourth time, I’m not taking it anymore.

Sure, people are blowing off steam. But today a provincial Tory backbencher defected to the separatist Alberta Alliance Party after accusing Premier Ralph Klein of ruining Stephen Harper’s federal election chances.

In and of itself, not earthshattering. The defector was already critical of Klein and facing the dissolution of his seat through boundary changes.
But, it’s not going to go away. I once asked a friend in Calgary – a 70’ish grandmother, not particularly politically motivated – what it would take for her to support separatism. Her answer – “A ballot”
Stay tuned. I think Paul Martin has a big, big problem on his hands. The things he must do demonstrate he is serious about western alienation – pull out from Kyoto, kill the gun registry, mend fences with the US – are precisely those things that are going to trigger the NDP and his own left-wingers to pull the plug on his government. If Martin is going to diffuse Western anger, he’s going to have to broker a serious deal with the Conservatives – not the NDP.

The defining moment for me during last night’s election results was this one: Newly elected Liberal MP in Kings-Hants (NS), Scott Brison:

“There’s not a lot of room for Red Tories in a party with a lot of red necks.”

This morning, I’m wondering where the outrage is.
There is none, of course, because it’s acceptable in the media to use cultural slurs against Western Canadians.
And sadly, it’s been acceptable to us for too long. Or it never occurs to us that the slur is serious, intentionally dehumanizing and directly aimed at core conservative values and belief systems integral to our heritage and western history. A couple of weeks ago I took a swipe at the CBC’s Michael Enright for “criticizing the media for assuming” that the conservative Fraser Institute was the Droolers and Knuckledraggers Association. He never did “get” it. He was incapable of recognizing that his use of those terms, in and of themselves, to describe conservative thought was dehumanizing, whether or not he was defending the Fraser Institute in this instance. He wasn’t criticizing the marginalization of conservatives by the media, he was criticizing them for automatically dismissing the Fraser Institute as part of that “drooler” crowd.
The biased conduct by the national media during this campaign has been brazen. From day one, a blatant double standard has been applied to the Conservative party members who dared open their mouths and express personal conservative values. Social conservates in the Liberal Party enjoyed a free pass, their “gaffes” unreported, the contraversial backgrounds of Liberal advisors unexamined.
The media drove the agenda, hijacked the campaign and framed every discussion on so-called “social issues” as an “us vs them-who-would-kill-gays and enslave women”. Stephen Harper was branded as “scary” . Apparently, Liberal corruption at the senior civil service isn’t “scary”, but invoking the constitutionally entrenched notwithstanding clause is the chainsaw massacre of Canadian Politics.
The same thing happened to health care. No rational debate of private vs public ever occured. It was good vs evil, right vs wrong, Canadian vs the evil baby-killing American system. During the Klein health care frenzy nobody turned a camera east to the blatant Canada Health Act violator – Quebec.
The Conservative campaign has to take some blame for that. They shied away from those direct comparisons. In the well-predicted hindsight of a zero seat performance, it was an opportunity squandered to put Paul Martin’s challenge under a public microscope and pound home the message of “double standard”. They didn’t, and why they didn’t I will never know.
If Canadian conservatives, both big C and small c, are ever to find a voice in this country and rescue it from it’s headlong collapse into international disintegration – we must begin at both the top political echelons of the party, and the grassroots, by reclaiming the language and demanding our own share of protection under political correctness guidelines. It is not a silly “get even” suggestion. It is critical, if we are to remove this tool from the hands of the opposition.
The most obvious first target is to eliminate the use of the word “redneck” as an acceptable tactic to stifle debate before it occurs. Make the use of the word “redneck” as unacceptable as “redskin”, “raghead” and “frog”. Then we can go to work on “hillybilly”, “cowby” and all the other sniggering cultural insults as they surface. It’s an easy one to attack because it’s so common and used so casually. Tackling “redneck” would seed doubt in the minds of moderate Canadians that maybe – just maybe – it is not appropriate to marginalize conservatives with cheap namecalling tactics.
This week Conservative party officials should hold a news conference. That news conference should have a sole purpose – to demand a public apology from MP Scott Brison for his derogatory cultural slur against Western Canadians.
Get this namecalling issue on the table. Stop allowing the left to write the Encyclopedia of Political Correctness. Point out just what terms like this are intended to do, and that their use is a cheap device to avoid debate. Until that happens, western Canada will remain vulnerable to being political dismissiveness as uneducated, unintelligent, unsophisticated, and untrustworthy. And so long as we permit it, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
It’s time to demand respect, and to settle for nothing less than 100% compliance in the language of both the left and the media.

Mark Steyn; So it’s corruption plus socialism. That’s great news, isn’t it?”

Class victory speech of the evening – openly gay Conservative – turned – Liberal Scott Brison : “There’s not a lot of room for Red Tories in a party with a lot of red necks.”
We have a minority government with a “tie” potential. The Liberals and NDP, who are expected to work in concert, will have 154 votes in parliament, less the appointed speaker.
The Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois have 154 seats, plus Chuck Cadman, who was a Conservative MP who won his seat as an Independant after losing the local nomination.
No word yet on whether the newly enfranchisedCanadian Convicted Felon community influenced any of the outcomes.
Cosh has a synopsis
Saskatchewan anhilated the NDP – a Conservative sweep of 13 of 14 seats, with the exception of Finance Minister Ralph Goodale, who has respect across all party lines. (Plus, he’s good insurance – smart strategic voting there). Premier Lorne Calvert’s shaky majority is more vulnerable than ever – this is a message to the provincial NDP as much as it is the feds.
With this Anti-American, left wing alliance and David Pratt gone – the only decent Liberal defense minister in the past decade – things look desperate for the military. Short of an attack on Canadian soil, nothing substantive will be done with the NDP holding the hammer. And hopes for early BSE-border resolution just evaporated.
I said on the Shotgun last night – the unofficial slogan of Western Canada, The West Wants In may be on the cusp of changing to The West Wants Out.

Andrew Coyne has a must read column for those interested in Canadian politics and tomorrow’s election. That includes you Americans, by the way. You cannot understand Canada and our schizophrenic foreign policy without a cursory understanding of the political system and regional idiosyncracies that have allowed a single political machine to install itself in virtual perpetuity.
Andrew argues that this machine is on the verge of finding itself dismantled.
For the country’s sake, I hope he’s right. The tentacles of government have been increasingly rewoven under the Liberals to entrench that power. Majority governments hand 95% of the decision making power of parliament to the office of the Prime Minister, and challenges to the constitutionality of legislation are adjuciated by a Supreme Court – also appointed by the Prime Minister. New campaign finance laws shovel out taxpayer cash to parties on the basis of the votes they garnered during the previous election – and forbid corporations and unions from contributing at all, giving the governing party a financial edge. Private interest groups and individuals are gagged by strict spending limits in elections, effectively muzzling all but the political parties and the media. That media that includes a government funded CBC with it’s own self interest in conflict with the prospect of Liberal party defeat.
Short of reform from within – highly unlikely – the only hope for cutting those tentacles permanently is from the outside, and I will argue, like Andrew – the outside represented by the more inately democratic political mindset of western Canada.

Whatever the precise result on Monday, and whoever forms a government, one thing should by now be clear: the political landscape of Canada is on the verge of historic change — radical, permanent, and mostly for the the better. Eight decades of Liberal dominance, punctuated by occasional Tory interludes, are about to come crashing to an end. This isn’t 1984. It isn’t 1979. It isn’t even 1957. It’s something completely new.

We shall see. Go read it all.

Dominatrix and Marijuana Party candidate Carole Taylor is running in the riding of Ottawa-Vanier, against Liberal MP Mauril Belanger. Belanger is chief government whip.

I couldn’t make this stuff up.
hat tip – Ghost Of A Flea

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.

Cabinet ministers are going to fall. There is a new desperation in the Liberal campaign — a whole generation of Liberal MPs and organizers have never felt what it’s like to lose. They don’t like that feeling, and it shows.
They’re angry. And so they’re telling Martin to be angry — to do something, anything. And so Martin is getting angry at the easy scapegoat, the traditional Liberal whipping boy: Alberta. He really ought to be angry at Ontarians, who are rejecting him for the Conservatives, according to recent polls, by a 10- point margin, or at Quebecers, who are rejecting him by even more.
They used to vote Liberal, and aren’t. But Alberta makes a much more gratifying target.
So last week, Martin blasted Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, calling Klein’s health-care reform package un- Canadian. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will look Ralph Klein in the eye and I will say ‘no.’,” ranted Martin. From Ontario, of course — not over the phone to Klein privately, not in a memo, but at an election event, using federal-provincial relations as a desperate partisan weapon. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will defend medicare,” he said — defending it against Klein, the new Liberal demon.
Although nearly every province has private health-care facilities, Martin chose to attack only Alberta.
He did not criticize Ontario and Quebec, with their burgeoning private hospitals. Ontario and Quebec are run by Liberal governments.
The government of Alberta has kept Martin briefed about their proposed changes for months. Martin has never raised an objection, and Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister, has repeatedly approved of such changes.
So there was no reason to criticize Klein’s plans at all — at least until they provided a scapegoat for the Liberals. And if Klein’s plans provide a scapegoat, so do all the other provinces.
This is not coincidence. This is what the left would call “systemic bias” — an anti-Alberta bigotry.

This hypocrisy needs to be targeted hard by the media. Instead, they’re lining up behind the Liberal canard, awaiting the Klein “bombshell” that Paul Martin is predicting.
Funny how he doesn’t apply the same standards to his own doctor.
hat tipDebbye

Why I’m voting Conservative and not NDP in Ottawa Centre�:

3. $1.75
My vote is a $1.75 donation to a political party – I don’t want it to go to the NDP.

The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” voters might keep that in mind.

Fab Magazine’s Editor-In-Chief Mitchel Raphael:

“Paul Martin is your only hope if you do not want to see Stephen Harper become prime minister. Under the Liberals, we have seen gay rights move forward a touch beyond what most Canadians are comfortable with. The Conservatives will roll back our rights. I say, bring it on: boost the NDP, infiltrate the Conservative Party and make them change. But if you want to avoid a big battle, vote red.”

From his interview of the chosen candidate:

How do you think your personal views on homosexuality have changed over time? And why?
No comment supplied.
In the last session of Parliament your government introduced Bill C-12, which would remove the artistic merit defence in current child-porn laws. How can gay youth be protected from prosecution for expressing their sexuality through art?
No comment supplied.
The new Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes home insemination illegal. This is a big hurdle for gay men and lesbians trying to conceive. Does the state have the right to be in the bedrooms of the nation if a gay man decides to inseminate a lesbian with a turkey-baster?
No comment supplied.
Will you be attending Pride Day in Toronto on June 27, the day before the election?
No comment supplied.

I smell a Pulitzer.

As the media and political adversaries begin to spew charges of “intolerance” towards the Conservatives – “intolerance” towards abortion, “intolerance” of homosexuality, and yesterday, “intolerance” of the Metis – I predict that during this coming week, they’ll be reviving the anti-Reform rhetoric charging out and out racism.
And through it all, momentum continues to build. Canwest is reporting that the Conservatives may be within striking distance of a majority government, if poll trends prove accurate.
Paul Martin’s Liberals would do well to consider that the majority of Canadians oppose gay marriage and aren’t nearly as supportive of our no-holds barred abortion policy (Canada has no laws at all governing abortion) as left wing activists would have you believe. Being profiled as an “extremist, intolerant bigot” isn’t likely to convince the majority of Canadians who have quite reasonable objections to abortion and gay marriage to vote for you.

Putin is blunt about Democrat hypocrisy at the G8 summit

Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped into the U.S. political campaign on Thursday, saying the Democrats had “no moral right” to criticize President Bush over Iraq.
The Kremlin leader, answering a reporter’s question in Sea Island, Georgia, suggested that the Democrats were two-faced in criticizing Bush on Iraq since it had been the Clinton administration that authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S. and NATO forces.
The reporter had asked Putin to respond to U.S. press articles questioning Russia’s place at the G8 feast of leading industrial countries.
Putin brushed these off, saying such articles were part of an internal U.S. political debate.
He went on: “I am deeply convinced that President Bush’s political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because they did exactly the same.
“It suffices to recall Yugoslavia. Now look at them. They don’t like what President Bush is doing in Iraq.

hat tip – The Commisar

Steven Taylor has an amusing collection of past punditry about Reagan from the 80’s this morning.

Secret plot by the Tories and Liberals to rig key ridings in 2000 election?

Just when it seemed federal politics couldn’t get any sleazier, Sun Media has learned that a group of powerful Tory and Liberal backroom operatives secretly conspired to bolster the Grit national campaign and skew the results in a number of ridings in the last federal election. Two weeks before Jean Chretien called the country to the polls in October 2000, reliable sources say, a small group of top Tory officials cut a secret deal to help Chretien’s ultimately successful national campaign for a third majority government.
In return, the Liberals agreed to throw the vote in the Calgary Centre riding of then Tory leader Joe Clark.
In what may have been a series of similar deals, sources say the Tories also agreed to “stand down” to help Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan hang on to her Edmonton seat, which she won by only 733 votes.
…
Clark had entered the campaign with abysmal polling numbers pointing to an almost certain defeat.
Instead, the former Tory leader won by 4,304 votes after a bizarre campaign in which a group called “Liberals for Clark” suddenly popped up from nowhere to back him.

It might help explain that “devil we know” endorsement of Martin by Clark a few weeks ago.
hat tip – An American in TO

A story I picked up while in Fargo – and realized it’s not been mentioned elsewhere. The latest polls out in Minnesota (May 31), show Bush in a statistical dead heat with John Kerry in that state.
Minnesota hasn’t voted Republican in 30 years.

Former public works minister under Chretien, and former ambassador to “get him the hell out of here” Denmark Alfonso Gagliano has been implicated in another scandal alleging undocumented contract awards. This time it’s the Canadian Space Agency with missing millions.
Last week, Gagliano did something most people wouldn’t have expected – he filed a lawsuit for $4.5 million against Prime Minister Paul Martin and the Gov’t of Canada, for damage to his reputation.
Hmmmmm…. I wonder what he’s up to. Here’s a scenerio to consider – imagine a crowded courtroom, Galiano on the stand, testifying to a “chain of Liberal command” in the Adscam affair.
Blowing it all wide open, and on his terms.
I suspect that might just send some scurrying to find ways to keep that from happening. An out of court settlement? I’m no lawyer, but something tells me that prosecuting a former minister on criminal charges would be very difficult if he already had a civil settlement in hand.
“It would be irresponsible to spend taxpayers dollars on a lengthy and unproductive trial.”
And what better way to get even with Paul Martin, than to have that settlement in hand, or alternately, to bring a network of prominent Liberals down with him. Either way, the Martin Liberals lose. And if the gamble pays off, Gagliano might just walk away, giving Chretien his get out-of-Adscam-free card.
And revenge.

Andrew Coyne is back, but his blog doesn’t seem to work that well in Opera and even worse in Mozilla. But he had something to say today about the backtracking of Liberals on promise making, and the non-consequences of promise breaking.

Mr. McGuinty responded by suggesting he was not banking on Mr. Martin’s $9- billion health care plan — the centrepiece in his platform — as it was just “a campaign promise.” Mr. Martin raised the ante, insisting that a politician should only promise what he can do, and “whatever you say you’re going to do, do.” Stung, Mr. McGuinty chose this week to announce that he would bring in a bill setting fixed election dates, so that “never again will a premier have the ability to set election dates when it is politically opportune for the government.” Wait a minute: are you saying that Mr. Martin… ?
All hugely entertaining, as I say — almost as good as the debate between Jean Lapierre and Jean Lapierre. But not so much fun for Mr. Martin. Things had deteriorated to such a point that by week’s end the Prime Minister was forced to issue a new promise: that he would keep his promises. If he had not kept at least three of them within two years, he told reporters, he would resign. This raises all sorts of interesting epistemological questions. What does he do if he doesn’t keep that promise? Kill himself?

Mr. Coyne goes on to ask ” How do we hold politicians to their promises?”, and tosses around ideas for a “Truth In Politics” law.
Unfortunately, that would require politicians pass such a law. Absent a coup by Preston Manning, that’s unlikely in the extreme. But there is recall – which has the additional selling point of being flexible enough to remedy the incompetent and/or dishonest.
Or, failing that…

“Stephen Harper has been clear about his plan for Canada. He has said over and over, and again this past week, that his intention is to reduce taxes until they are lower than those in the United States.” — Liberal Leader Paul Martin, Rideau Hall, May 23, 2004.

A year or so ago, I was talking provincial politics with a friend in the Saskatchewan government. She made what I thought was a strange statement – that women in Saskatchewan didn’t “trust” the conservative SaskParty leader Elwin Hermanson. There was no further attempt to explain what this meant – just a blanket statement that he wasn’t “trusted”.
I wondered, trust as in “trust to do”? Trust not to do? Trust with your wallet? Trust in a dark alley? I didn’t ask at the time, and I should have – how do you even know this? Polling? And what prompted the governing NDP to ask such a undefined question in the first place?
The NDP had been push polling, of course – seeding a meme into the voting public, to draw upon later during a campaign. When the election was called, the local media fell in line, making the never defined “trust” question part of their own coverage of the election.
Well, the trust meme has already surfaced in the federal election, and on cue, it’s being pushed by the media.
It’s astonishingly counterintuitive – in view of the arrests and premature shutdown of the ADSCAM hearings, the biggest scandal in Canadian government history. Yet it doesn’t stop CTV’s Lloyd Roberston and Tom Clark from raising the “do Canadians trust” question when referring to Conservative Stephen Harper, in the guise of political analysis.
Harper is going to have to find a way to respond to this without defensiveness, that throws attention back on the question itself – to draw a white hot circle around the bigotry of a media and Liberal default position that suggests that “Western Canadians can’t be trusted”.
He went part way yesterday with his response to the media questions after the election call, and is being widely quoted;

“You know, in this country, you can be a Canadian without being a Liberal. The government seems to forget that. That’s why they need to be defeated. “It’s that kind of arrogance that leads to the waste, mismanagement and corruption we’ve seen.”

Not a bad start. We’ll need more of this.

It’s officially official. The election call will be made tomorrow. Martin is heading to the polls with an Ontario base angry at broken election promises by the provincial Liberals, ADSCAM’s wrapup was ugly and unconvincing, and Quebec support for Liberals is collapsing in favour of the Blok. The West? Still hates ’em and the announcement about insignificant changes to the gun registry won’t have earned anything more than cynicism.

Who knows why he’s determined to go now. My suspicious nature suggests there is more to learn on the ADSCAM front, or ominous signs for the economy ahead. Or some known unknown? Not much else makes sense. Speaking of which, how may photos do you think they shuffled through at the Ottawa Citizen before they settled on this one? Heh.

Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry is hinting that he may continue to presume, and not accept the nomination at the Dem convention in July. A delay would allow him to avoid campaign spending limits. (At what point does presumption become assumption, with its associated peril?)
Bill Quick is running a bumper sticker contest. My favorites so far;

John Kerry once made $750 million by saying “I DO”
Now he’ll make $75 million by saying “I DON’T!
BrINg 200 MillIOn DoLlaRs iN UmArkEd BiLLs oR I wOn’t AccEPt tHe NomInatiOn – AnOnYmous

Heh. If lowly blog commentors are coming up with stuff this good, the late night talk shows will have a field day.

Moron.

Even the Flames are having a hard time getting used to the attention that comes with being on the A-list. Flames president Ken King thought it was a crank call when his cellphone rang in the final minutes of Wednesday’s 3-1 victory over the Sharks and he was told it was Prime Minister Paul Martin’s office.
“I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Daffy Duck and I’ve got a hockey game to watch here’ and I hung up,” King said yesterday.

Well, duh.
(Tickets to the Calgary games for the Stanley Cup finals sold out in 90 seconds.)