16 October 2007

At Issue

Allen Gregg is terrible...

...and so is Andrew Coyne.

Frankly, the CBC's At Issue panel is...well...terrible.

Pairing a former Conservative strategist and an avowadly neoliberal newspaper columnist with a reasonable, but fairly centrist, journalist (Chantal Hebert) is not representative of the breadth of Canada's political public opinion. Full stop.

Stephan Dion, bring down the government. Let's hit the hustings: I've had enough of this shit.


5 comments:

Aldous said...

What the hell are the Liberals doing?

Luke said...

Coming to the same conclusion I came to in the shower this morning: that they have no money, and are basically fucked.I saw a report suggesting Liberal internal polls show they would be reduced to two seats in Quebec if the election were held right now.

Actually, what's a particularly bad sign is that Dion wanted an election - the fact that he couldn't muster the caucus support for it says a lot in itself.

Sigh. In hindsight, it's easy to say that the Liberal Party has slowly been sipping from a poisoned chalice for twenty years. And say what you will about Stephane Dion, but the party's financial woes wouldn't be substantially different if someone like Ignatieff were leader: finance reform is finance reform, and that, fundamentally, is what is screwing the Grits royally at the moment.

Aldous said...

Yes, that is a particularly bad sign. But the flipside would be that they must have some reason (hopefully other than hope) for expecting to be in better shape later. Otherwise, they should fight now before inevitable further decline.

Luke said...

I suspect it's mainly hope - it springs eternal in the human breast, don't you know...

I think the rationale for waiting involves a) allowing the new Quebec lieutenant, whoever it is, to at least find their office before the election is called; b) bring down the government over an actual issue (crime, it looks like - not a good thing to be for/against, but it can't be helped); c) restore some sort of organisation to Dion's office (he hired a woman recently to be his chief secretary who's apparently quite competent; and d) let more time pass between the negative media coverage about the by-elections and the campaign.

None of these are great reasons...but they're reason enough.

Aldous said...

On (b) why not climate change, or maybe Afghanistan?

Also, our blog needs to stop being so reflexive.