-There will be an election as soon as the polling numbers consistently (maybe for one or two months) suggest that either the Conservatives or the Liberals can win a majority government. That may happen this year, or not.

-Stephen Harper will never lead an intelligent, reasoned discussion on public policy or the role of government because, fundamentally, he is a career machine politician who doesn’t give a damn about any of those things, and even if he did would consider the electorate to be too stupid to comprehend his pearls of wisdom. No, he will continue to do whatever the latest polling numbers suggest with occasional measures designed to piss off the opposition thrown in for good measure. While he may personally believe (quite rightly) that deficits and big keynesian stimulus packages will be no better at saving the economy than they have been at any point in the twentieth century, he will pretend to embrace them enthusiastically, compel all conservatives to do the same under threat of expulsion or other less legitimate reprisals, and find some kind of new wedge issue to distinguish himself from the Liberals and provide fodder for the fundraising letters.

-The Liberals will resume backbiting the moment Iggy is seen to make a mistake or back down on something. Bob Rae will insult him behind his back, try to win over the MP’s who feel they haven’t gotten their fair share and generally cause sh*t while publicly praising the virtues of party unity and congratulating himself on his unparalleled maturity and sense of perspective, gained from all the wonderful lessons he’s learned in public life.

-Having never seen him in action as a leader or seen him indulge in the kind of odious, slimy partisanship that Martin, Dion and Harper are so good at, I think there might be some hope for Ignatieff.
But he has zero margin of error within the country or his own party. If anything, get hurriedly crowned as leader instead of winning fair and square will turn out to be a curse. His tendency towards pandering and grandstanding will start to get annoying at some point. Given how angry most Liberals are at Dion for backing down so much, and given that he is already seen as a kind of right wing Liberal, any attempt Ignatieff makes to reach a consensus with Harper will be held against him, and the Tories will use this to their advantage. Similarly, at some point he will have to decide to either indulge Jack Layton on the coalition or repudiate him entirely, and thus risk either pissing off the country or else losing control of the Commons and angering people within his own party.

-Jack Layton has nothing to gain from going along with the Grits in using the coalition as nothing more than a threat to get the Tories to behave. He will continue to raise it at every possible opportunity, putting the Liberals in a difficult spot and feeding endless media speculation of a repeat of what we saw in December.

-Elizabeth May is irresponsible and frankly, kind of nuts. She will continue to behave erratically, and may even leave of her own accord to briefly join the Liberals if that seems advantageous. In any case, with a recession going on (and the fact that average temperatures are actually going down and the winters getting colder) most people won’t be spending much time worrying about global warming or climate change.

- The media will speculate about the possibility of a constitutional crisis several times a week. Anonymous sources close to Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe will now get as much attention and as many free dinners from eager journalists as Liberal hacks looking to overthrow the leader were getting one year ago. The 30 billion dollars in stimulus, most of which will be spent on crap, will be largely ignored, except when the shifting of a few billion from one useless project to another becomes a sticking point in secret backroom negotiations to overthrow the government and kickstart a constitutional crisis.

Happy New Year Paul.

Regards,

Ted.

How do think he would make out in a conversation about Bill C-51? This magazine has never written about Bill C-51. This is the legislation that sought to legalize the sale of human body parts. It defined ‘cells, tissues and organs’ as therapeutic products that could be sold.

Stephen Harper is scum bag. When will you get it Paul Wells? He’s no good. A bad person. A liar. A secretive cheat.

http://markontheworld.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/the-end.jpg

The only choices are that the economy will get worse or better. I for one, think it will not get worse, but it will be a year before the economy starts improving again, along the lines of 1 or 2% growth for the next year and an uptick in unemployment of a few percentage points for about a year and a half.

and then back to my cave (recall that daylight burns the skin of true conservatives and it’s getting frighteningly sunny in my neck of the woods):

1) the over-hyped great depression of our times, will turn out to be relatively short lived, with fairly healthy growth returning by this summer [dirty little secret - car sales may actually be going up as we speak, to name just one indicator]

2) the IPCC will issue its next report (very tacitly mind you) backing down from its preditions of warming and placing the theory itself in the “debateable” category. They won’t say it explicitly, but it will be inescapable to not draw such conclusions based on the report’s content.

Pass it along

For which fact, we are truly grateful.

Looks like commenters of the tolerant progressive left of 2009,

will be just as tolerant and progressive as they were in 2008.

Oh, I dunno. Take that last paragraph about the press gallery. I don’t see anything stopping you, Mr. Wells, from using your blog to call your PPG colleagues on the spot whenevery they indulge in “breathless chronicling” without providing context, or judging “the government’s ability to excite.”

After all, it’s not like they’re going to ostracize you for pointing out that they should be doing a better job of reporting Parliament. Are they?

I think we can cut it a little slack :)

Harper, being a ruthless tactician against his political opponents will trigger an election in the next two months by inserting one or more poison pills in the budget or confidence motions. The pill will be on a wedge issue that will further fracture an already weakened Liberal party. Harper will not allow the Liberal party to regroup and will capitalize on the recent opposition blunder of a forming a wildly unpopular coalition.

During the election Harper will make the coalition (and more importantly Iggy’s signature and continued reference to it still being on the table) the centerpiece of the campaign. The Liberals will, for obvious reasons, be unable to thwart the theme of the election as being a choice between a stable, centrist Harper government capable of guiding us through touch economic times, and a socialist/seperatist government which is radical, unstable, disorganized and ill prepared to serve Canadians in these tough times.

As a result, Harper will gain a majority (very possibly a super-majority of historically significant proportions),

Iggy will return to his hallowed Ivy League halls in the U.S.,

and the Liberals will actually use the opportunity of “impossiblity of governing” (the only scenario where this is possible given current dynamics of base political power grabbing now dominating their party) to form policy, regroup, and revitalize,

or,

they will fail to do this, break apart, and a new party will form in its ashes to fill the political void.

(50/50 chance of the Liberal party disintegrating)
(90% chance on the rest)

And when your Grandchildren ask about the man who had the vision to see it all,

you remember the name:

Kody.