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.