Harper's Limited Options on Afghanistan

If Stephen Harper wants Canada’s current Afghanistan counter-insurgency mission to be extended beyond the current February 2009 expiration date, he has only a few options of making such an attempt with this minority parliament. Firstly, he can call off the extension and end the current mission in February, 2009. Harper has promised a vote in parliament on all military missions, including a possible extension of this current anti-insurgency mission. The Liberals are now united in their support of ending that current mission at its present expiry date. With the anti-war NDP and anti-war Bloc also sure to vote against such an extension, extending the mission would fail in a vote in this current parliament. So if Harper really wants to extend the mission, he would have the following options left. He could do what he did last time, and say that in the event that the vote fails in parliament, the mission gets extended for one year rather than two. Harper’s second option is to go back on his word and extend the current mission without a parliamentary vote. Harper’s third and final option is to declare the vote on the extension of the Afghanistan mission to be a confidence vote and to then call an election when the vote fails. The problem with this strategy is that Harper may have trouble fighting a campaign that was triggered on the contentious and divisive issue of the Afghanistan mission extension at a time when polls show a majority of Canadians opposing the mission.

School shooting in Toronto

If either John Tory or Stephen Harper attempt to score political points against the Liberals on this school shooting in Toronto, I will be very upset. It is upsetting enough about this tragedy without politicians trying to score political points on this terrible tragedy. I don’t want to hear from Stephen Harper that this incident is all the opposition’s fault for stalling Bills C-9 and C-10. Whoever did this was probably a first offender so that neither Bill C-9 nor Bill C-10 would have applied. That’s not mentioning the fact that Bill C-9 recently received third reading in the Senate and really has not been purposefully stalled anytime recently if ever.

I don’t want to hear from John Tory that Dalton McGuinty should have already done something to prevent this tragedy from happening. Tragedies happen. It looks as though this was not a random shooting but a targeted one for a specific reason against the victim. This is not the first targeted shooting that has occurred at Toronto’s schools in the last 7 years. If anything, its incidents like these that point to a need to ban handguns so that anyone caught with one could be arrested on the spot and prevented from committing an imminent crime. This is something Stephen Harper refuses to do. Because of that, maybe it’s time the provincial government looked at introducing its own handgun ban and exploring whether doing so is constitutional. In any event I will be very angry if I hear any Conservative politicians trying to blame the Liberals for this terrible tragedy.

Judgement Day in Manitoba

May 22, 2007 is Judgment Day in Manitoba. Manitobans go to the polls on Tuesday to elect a new government. By the looks of it, incumbent NDP Premier Gary Doer is likely to be re-elected. Despite being a Liberal, I am quite glad if this is true. Gary Doer is a very moderate New Democrat who actually won his first term in 1999 on a promise of modest tax cuts. The Doer government is left-of-centre, but more in the sense that a Liberal government would be left-of-centre. I also like the Manitoba Liberals. But they are a distant third party that only has two seats in the legislature, which is not enough for official party status (something I think they deserve even with two seats). Going into the election, the Manitoba Liberals only have those two seats but have the potential to gain more. If the Manitoba Liberals win a total of three seats, they would still be short one to make official party status. I believe the winning government should be gracious and restore their official party status even with only 3 seats.

If I lived in Jon Gerrard’s riding or Kevin Lamoureux’s riding, I’d vote Liberal. Those two men are the two current Liberal MLAs in Manitoba. If I lived in a super-safe NDP riding, I would vote Liberal. If I lived in a riding where the Liberals finished second to the NDP last time, I’d choose to vote Liberal. But if I lived in a riding which is a tight fight between the Tories and the NDP, I’d vote NDP to avoid splitting the left-of-centre vote. This is all a moot point, of course, because I live in Ontario. I’d also vote Liberal if I lived in a super-safe Tory Manitoba riding like Tuxedo. Of course I would choose to avoid living a Tory seat.

Also of note is that even Liberals can occasionally get shortchanged by the first-past-the-post electoral system. In the 1995 Manitoba election, the Liberals received 23.73% of the vote resulting in only 3 seats. Currently there is something going on in the Manitoba riding of Wellington. There were allegations of signing up members without said new members paying their own membership fees leveled at incumbent NDP MLA Conrad Santos. As a result Santos was forced to drop out of the nomination and is now running as an independent. He will split the vote. I am hoping that Santos wins. He was in my opinion treated unfairly. He may well have done nothing wrong. If nominations had been protected, none of this would have ever happened. This is why I believe incumbents should be protected from nomination challenges. Another NDP MLA also lost re-nomination for no apparent good reason. Therefore I indeed think that incumbents should be protected to prevent messes like these. If Santos wins, he may well rejoin the NDP caucus. Mr. Santos is 72 and has served in the legislature from 1981 to 1988 and continuously since 1990. It is not fair that this long-serving member has been in treated this way. That he’s running again when he’s 72, even as an independent, shows how much he loves politics. He ought to be able to serve until he’s 82 or longer. What happened to him this year is totally unfair.


In conclusion I want to wish Jon Gerrard and Kevin Lamoureux good luck in their ridings for Tuesday. I also send good wishes to the Liberals in the election on Tuesday in ridings that they are not splitting the left-of-centre vote. I also wish Gary Doer good luck in his quest to win a third consecutive majority government on Tuesday.

Christian Heritage Party helps pass gay marriage

The Christian Heritage Party is a very right wing and socially conservative party that strongly opposes same-sex marriage. Yet ironically at least two of the parties candidates in the 2004 federal election helped ensure that same sex marriage would become law in Canada. I will point to two ridings. In Skeena-Bulkley Valley, NDPer Nathan Cullen won by 1272 votes, or 3.45% of the vote. The Christian Heritage Party candidate received 1408 votes or 3.82% of the vote. Had the Christian Heritage Party candidate not been in the race, the Tory incumbent clearly would have won by about 100 votes. The result was that ironically the presence of the Christian Heritage Party allowed for the election of a pro-gay marriage NDPer and the defeat of an anti-gay marriage Tory. This paved the way for one extra vote for gay marriage that would not have been there otherwise. It also would give the future Liberal-NDP coalition one extra vote without which the government would have fallen in May 2005 prior to the passing of the gay marriage bill, thus causing it to die on the order paper.

In Middlesex—Kent—Lambton Liberal incumbent Rose-Marie Ur won by 164 votes over Conservative Bev Shipley. The Christian Heritage Party candidate received 1,015 votes. Without the Christian Heritage Party, Tory Bev Shipley would have won by about 800 votes. Although Ur strongly opposes same-sex marriage, she (along with all Liberal gay marriage opponents who were still in the Liberal caucus) voted to support the government in May 2005 in the tied confidence vote that was broken in the government’s favour by Speaker Peter Milliken. Had Shipley been elected, he would have voted against the government and the government would have fallen and the same-sex marriage bill would have died on the order paper. Thus also in this riding the Christian Heritage Party helped ensure that same-sex marriage would become law in Canada.