The Commons: Checking in on Michael Ignatieff's inevitable doom
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - 177 Comments
It is a tradition that binds us together as a nation, our eternal obsession over the ever-imminent downfall of our elected leaders. And so we return now to the question of just how profoundly, unavoidably, indisputably screwed is Michael Ignatieff.
At last report, he was most immediately doomed by Monday’s by-elections. As the conventional consensus had it, the Liberal party was to lose all three. Defeat in the former Liberal stronghold of Vaughan would be particularly resounding—it would be what Outremont was to Stéphane Dion. What once was a Liberal caucus of 77 would be reduced to a mere 76. Everything else would subsequently come crashing down around Mr. Ignatieff. By Christmas, he would be deposed as leader. By spring, he would be bussing tables at Harvey’s on Elgin Street. His household’s cats, Mimi and Eric, would hiss at him when he returned home from work each day.
As the day dawned on Tuesday in the capital, it was but a trifle that Monday night had not at all gone according to plan. The Liberals had indeed lost Vaughan, but by just less than a thousand votes. Meanwhile, the Liberal candidate in Winnipeg-North was victorious in a riding the party had not won in 17 years. What was a Liberal caucus of 77 is still a caucus of 77. He had broken even. He had exceeded expectations.
Rest assured, the Liberal leader is still destined to soon be asking the public not for their support, but rather whether they’d like fries or onion rings with that. “Vaughan by-election loss adds to Ignatieff’s woes” explained a Globe headline this morning, that atop a story that spoke ominously of “Michael Ignatieff’s troubled leadership.” “For Ignatieff,” preemptively eulogized a Conservative operative now lending his analysis to the National Post, “his days are numbered”
Though a doomed man, he arrived this morning to the House foyer looking mostly undead. Continue…
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Outremont’s unholy mess
By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 61 Comments
A long-brewing fight over accommodating Hasidim turns ugly
Photograph by Benoit Aquin
Pierre Lacerte rarely leaves his house without a sense of righteous indignation, and never without his point-and-shoot camera holstered on his belt. When he walks through his neighbourhood of Outremont in Montreal, he may take a picture, or seven, of garbage-strewn yards, illegal construction, parking infractions, oversized buses, unlicensed gatherings and any other infraction allegedly committed by the area’s Hasidic Jewish community.
The pictures are fodder for his blog, a mean-spirited take on his Hasidic neighbours and the politicians he says “are on all fours in front of the Hasidim.” Liberal politician Martin Cauchon becomes “Martin Kosher”; Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay is blasted for courting the Hasidic vote during the last election, or “electorah.” Lacerte also attends municipal council meetings with near-religious fervour out of a sense of “exasperation” with the Hasidim, who he believes are making Outremont unbearable for the goyim. “I’m determined, not obsessed,” he said recently from a croissanterie near his home. “They’re a small minority, and already it’s a mess. What’s it going to be like in 15 years when they have doubled in size?”
Lacerte’s diatribes are indicative of the mood in Outremont. The arrondissement of choice for Quebec’s cultural and political elite is synonymous with sidewalk cafés and quiet power. Yet it has in recent years been the scene of a debate over how much leeway should be given to its religious minorities. Many residents think they know the answer: not much. Not any, actually. “Some people just want to make life miserable for the Jews,” says Alex Werzberger, the Hasidic leader frequently parodied on Lacerte’s site.
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Let us now obsess over relatively minor events
By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 10:49 PM - 32 Comments
Monday night will see the election of four new MPs to fill the vacancies left by Bill Casey, Dawn Black, Real Menard and Paul Crete. The results of these four races will no doubt be incredibly important and meaningful. At least for about 24 hours or so, after which everyone will move on to some other shiny object.
Wikipedia has past results for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, Hochelaga, Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup and New Westminster—Coquitlam. Pundits’ Guide has that plus plenty of other stuff.
By-election results on Monday night will be available through Elections Canada beginning at 10pm EST.
Various other points of note.
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Sweet revenge for Denis Coderre
By Paul Wells - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 88 Comments
Denis Coderre’s resignation begs the question: can Michael Ignatieff run a tight ship?
They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and Denis Coderre has always been fond of generous portions. There was a weekend between Sept. 25, when Michael Ignatieff stopped taking Coderre’s advice on Liberal candidate nominations in two key Montreal ridings, and Sept. 28, when Coderre convened a news conference to resign as Ignatieff’s Quebec lieutenant. During that time, sources say, the Liberal leader telephoned his pugnacious deputy repeatedly. Coderre wouldn’t take the calls. He preferred to plan his revenge at leisure.So on Monday, Coderre, a scrappy Liberal lifer whose Rolodex is as formidable as his self-regard, told a national television audience he could no longer run his leader’s Quebec operation or serve as his parliamentary defence critic because he had consistently been “short-circuited” by “the leader’s inner circle in Toronto.” Hours later, five other Liberal officials in Quebec with ties to Coderre quit their own positions. Le Devoir’s headline the next day said the party had been “decapitated” in Quebec. Continue…
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Denis, Denis
By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 9:53 PM - 108 Comments
It was predictable enough that Denis Coderre would resign his position as the Liberals’ Quebec “lieutenant” in the wake of Michael Ignatieff’s decision to overrule him in the matter of who should carry the party banner in Outremont. Indeed, after such a public rebuff he could hardly do otherwise: his credibility was shot.What was not so predictable, perhaps, was that he would do so in such a spectacularly destructive, and self-destructive, fashion: the political equivalent of a suicide bombing. To claim that he was the victim of a Toronto-based cabal — one that, by implication, also held Quebec in its grip — is a particularly incendiary charge in Quebec, ever alert to signs of Anglo domination.
It’s not true, of course: Coderre is not Quebec, and many if not most members of the Liberal Party in Quebec would prefer Martin Cauchon to Denis Coderre as their standard-bearer. Amongst those Liberals, I’d guess, would be a majority of the Quebec caucus, plus the party executive — and Jean Chretien. Continue…
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Megapundit: Gerard Kennedy ruins it for everyone
By selley - Friday, September 19, 2008 at 2:19 PM - 13 Comments
Must-reads: …Colby Cosh on the economic meltdown; Chantal Hébert on Gerard Kennedy’s big mistake;
Must-reads: Colby Cosh on the economic meltdown; Chantal Hébert on Gerard Kennedy’s big mistake; John Robson on Elections Canada’s censors; Rosie DiManno on Jeremy Hinzman.
Wayne Easter’s revenge
Why can’t the Harperites shut up and play nice?The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin believes the Liberals got off lucky yesterday with Gerry Ritz’s gallows humour dominating the news instead of whatever Stephen Harper, who recently described a $9-billion promise as “mind-boggling,” might have said about Stéphane Dion’s $70-billion infrastructure plan. In these trying financial times, Martin suggests we’re less in the mood for twelve-figure “vote-buying tactics” than we are for modest measures like, er, cracking down on banana-flavoured cigarillos. Lehman Brothers and AIG be damned, we’d respond—we want good roads and kids not to smoke, and we won’t be convinced it’s not possible!
Sun Media’s Greg Weston summarizes Harper’s response to the Ritz crackup as follows: “While [he] may have insulted and otherwise upset the families of 17 Canadians killed by tainted meat under his watch, that ‘should not detract from the good work that he has done,’”. (We’re not sure you can really “insult” someone in a private conversation to which he or she isn’t party, and suspect whichever bureaucrat leaked the conversation probably took far longer away from his or her job to do so than Ritz did to make his off-colour jokes. But never mind.) In any case, says Weston, each of these ongoing Tory gaffes and the ensuing apologies “likely negates a dozen of Harper’s homey sweater ads,” and not only do they throw the campaign off-message, they force Harper to actually “praise the public service” in hopes of plugging any future leaks. Gross! Like kissing your sister!
