I like elections. They clear the air. They bring issues into focus. They allow people to actually express their views.

In a technical sense this election is about 50 ridings mainly in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. These are the “battlegrounds” and these are where the leaders will be.

In reality this election will really be a referendum about whether or not the CPC under Harper deserves, or can be trusted, with a majority. I think they can and I think there is every reason to believe that a cross country consensus will give the CPC a thin majority.

This has, I am afraid, nothing to do with any endorsement of CPC policy; rather it is the reality that, a couple of years in, the Liberals have nothing at all on offer. The Green Shift is simply silly and a rather obvious tax grab. The idea that Harper is somehow George Bush in cunningly bad suits is a meme without wings.

To the converted, the Green Shift and Harper=Bush are truths as solid as the happy thought that 9/11 was an inside job. To the rest of us they are the last gasps of a party which has ceased to have a reason to exist.

Cynics have suggested that this election is about financially bankrupting the Liberal Party. I would not be at all surprised if they are right. It is time for the Liberal Party to end. It is time for Canada to have a left party and a right one. The Liberal Party is simply in the way.

The Liberals climbed on board the dying Green/Kyoto trope and, finally, have found the issue which could finish them. They will make assorted noises about national unity and assorted women’s issues and just how very scary Harper and the CPC are; but I suspect those noises will be their death rattle.

Canada has changed. We are no longer obsessed with a seemingly resurgent Quebec, Women are who they are and don’t need the feds to define them. Harper is rather dull; but not in the least scary.

For many of us, a confederation which allows provinces to seek their own destiny is a confederation we can support. Lock step centralism is an idea whose time has passed.

Most of all, with a bit of prudent management and a world hungry for our resources, Canada is poised to become a resource rich Switzerland. Rich, capable and very much its own nation.

The Liberal Party has, I suspect, outlived its usefulness. It is mired in identity politics, an unstoppable urge to take from the successful and give to the losers, and a belief in its own righteousness. Canada used to be a nation of losers. Now it is not. Canada used to think multicult was the Grail, now it doesn’t. Canada used to think the Liberal Party was the natural party of government, now that view is pretty much exclusive to the Toronto Star.

Harper has the shot at going to majority. The only question is whether the CPC war room has the wit top push the right buttons at the right time. Because if they do they will destroy the Liberal Party pretty much forever.

BC has fixed election dates, the next time the government faces the electorate is May 2009. I anticipate a complete defeat for Premier Campbell and his wrecking crew, combined with a swift repeal of the carbon tax. daily bayonet

I don’t think Campbell will lose the next election; but he might and if he does his loony embrace of green theology will be most of the reason.

I suspect that, as the planet cools and the science underpinning “global warming/climate change” unravels there will be a rush to the exits on the part of politicians who are discovering that climate hysteria was a mile wide and half an inch deep.

Now, not even M. Dion’s supporters really have a clue what he is prattling on about with his Green Shift and, if he has any wit, he will quietly shelve the program and run on some issue people actually care about.

“We’re involved in shadow boxing,” lawyer David Matas Thursday of B’nai Brith’s attempts to defend a complaint of discrimination. “It’s been 4 1/2 years and we don’t understand why this (complaint) hasn’t been dismissed as frivolous.” winnipeg free press via kitty

I seem to remember something about the trick of riding a tiger being getting off.

And I particularily like this:

Matas said the commission has recently told the B’nai Brith it’s turning over its file to an outside expert to determine if a hearing should be held on the complaint, adding that the commission refuses to identify the expert or provide B’nai Brith with a copy of the file.

Perfectly ‘rooish of them….Dave should just suck it up and realize that the HRC’s have become swords rather than shields. They need to be eliminated. Now.

In paragraph 33, you state that my republication of Rev. Boissoin’s words were “more likely” to generate a debate, than to promote “hatred”. Again, that’s a fabrication: Rev. Boissoin’s column generated an enormous debate, both in the pages of the Red Deer Advocate and elsewhere. The debate is still going on, six years later.

But putting aside this factual falsehood, you falsely imply that hate speech jurisprudence grants an exemption for publications that create a debate. You just made that up, as a fig leaf to cover up your double-standard against Rev. Boissoin. ezra levant

I nearly spat out my beer…Watching Ezra make fun of the CHRC is a blood sport. The create debate exception, nowhere found in the CHRA, is lovely. Whenever accused of hate speech one simply has to click the heels of one’s emerald shoes together three times and murmur “debate”. The Commission will back right off.

Cool. Who knew?

The CPC is the best party to lead through a recession and, wait for it, Senate reform. Ah yes, the old Canadian chestnut the Senate. I love Senate reform. It puts my poli sci brain to work. Rep by pop but not too much. But, as an election issue it is a true snoozer.

Now, “best party to lead through a recession”. Big problem with that is that officially there is no Canada wide recession. Ontario wide, perhaps, but out West things are ticking along, the Rock is doing OK and much of the Maritimes is just fine thank you. Quebec is looking alright….so where is this recession the CPC will be so good navigating?

Second problem, why would the CPC be the preferred party in a recession? Do they have the Keynesian cred that Canadians will likely want to “smooth the business cycle”? Well, they certainly seem to like spending money and are more than willing to measure government spending using the bogus yardstick of % of GDP; but will Canadians, long told that the way out of a recession is for the government to spend money, actually believe that the CPC will cut the cheques? I don’t know but it is not an issue which is screams “elect us”.

Meanwhile, M. Dion looks as goofy as ever with the Kyoto albatross hanging limply ’round his neck and the Green Shift lunacy convincing even Torontonians that spending more for gas, food and heat may not be quite what they want to do even if the West will be paying most of the freight. (In the West we are already getting used to having been written off by the Grits.)

Dion’s best move, in my view, would be to quietly drop the Green Shift and make stump speeches about a glorious - if detail light - Liberal future. The trick being to have as his warm up act none other than Justin Trudeau. It is not as if Justin will have to spend a single day in his absolutely safe Montreal riding. And the man speaks coherently in both of Canada’s official languages. Having been a school teacher he can, no doubt, quiet unruly media - not that there will be any unruliness: the tongue bath awaiting Justin from the Canadian media will make the canonization of Obama by the American media look insincere.

M. Dion can look professorial, say several incoherent things and point at Justin. The crowd, and there will be crowds from one end of the country to the other, will love it.

I fear that Steve has no one in his caucus or running with quite the star power of a Trudeau. Ben Mulroney? Do we really want to go there?

Elections are strange things. They acquire their own dynamic, their own issues and, ultimately their own logic. At the moment there is nothing terrible to nail the CPC with. Neither is there any CPC accomplishment to particularly single out for praise. So the Liberals have the opportunity to run their own campaign on their own issues and, more importantly, on the intriguing possibility that they are really going to renew themselves.

It will be interesting.

Here’s what I wrote, we’ll see if it is posted:

This was absolutely the right thing for B’nai Brith to have done.

The CHRC’s hate crimes investigation group was and is a disgrace. The lack of competent management, the total absence of rules and procedures, the behavior of very junior people (with the apparent approval of management) means that we now know many of the hate messages posted on the internet were posted by our own government.

Free Speech is the bedrock of democracy - not limited speech, not inoffensive speech - Free Speech. The greatest threat to Canada, and the greatest and most express threat to Jewish Canadians, are not the little neo-Nazi creeps in their basements. Rather it is extremist Islam with its imams openly inciting hatred of a Friday in Canadian mosques.

We have to be able to write about those extremist imams and their followers without worrying about the long arm of the censors at the CHRC.

S. 13 must, in its entirety, be repealed.

I was relieved to see B’nai Brith finally recognizing that the wannabe secret police at the CHRC are doing far more harm than good. Ezra Levant is rather more direct than Mr. Matas, “Fire. Them. All”

That would be a start, the full judicial investigation of the excesses of the Commission would go some distance to correcting the gross abuses the Commission has fostered over the years.

Kathy mentions my wondering who is paying for Warman’s lawsuit. Now filing the not terribly well drafted thing was not very expensive; but taking this to trial, especially now that Ezra has called Warman’s reputation into question is not going to be cheap. Warman works for the Department of National Defence. How much he makes is, no doubt, a state secret; but it is unlikely to be enough to fund a six week trial. So, who is paying or will be paying for this?

Unfortunately for the Missing Sockpuppet, he does not actually understand the origin of his blog title. he states,

And finally, it is an example of a derogatory epithet created by neoconservative bloggers to ridicule the efforts of select minority communities in their quest for social justice. missing sockpuppet

In fact, and I may well have been the coiner or close to the coiner of the term as it applies to the 3 Islamic losers who are 0/2 before the HRC, “sockpuppet” in the blogging world, was most famously used to deride Glenn Greenwald’s habit of using fake names under which to post comments defending and praising Glen Greenwald.

I, and several other bloggers have also used it to attack the CHRC’s hate crimes investigators’ habit of using pseudonyms for their membership and participation in various hate sites.

Now, when the 3 Islamic losers (And what did they do with Denny?) claimed they were filing hate speech complaints against Mcleans and it turned out in fact that it was the CIC under the direction of Dr. Mohamed Elmasry - noted advocate of killing Jewish civilians in Israel - which was the complainant it was apparent that the 3 Islamic losers were, indeed, sockpuppets. That is, they were speaking lines dictated by someone else.

So, welcome to the blogosphere Missing. Have fun, try not to get sued and try not to sue anybody.

Seen from this perspective, needle exchanges and safe injection sites are relatively minor attempts to reduce a harm created by prohibition.

But people don’t see it from that perspective because all they hear about is harm reduction. The news stories. The research. The politics. The debates. The noise about harm reduction is deafening. It dominates public discussion of drug policy.

As a result, perception is totally out of line with reality. Most Canadians, I suspect, would assume Margaret Wente is right in calling harm reduction “the philosophy that has come to dominate drug policy.” But to say that harm reduction dominates drug policy is to focus on the housefly while ignoring the elephant on whose rump it sits. Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen

The headline on the Wente piece is “Legalization in disguise”. Some chance. As Gardner points out the safe injection sites are the fly on the elephant of drug prohibition. Do they work? Do they reduce harm? Perhaps. But compared to the harm inflicted needlessly by the current drug laws in Canada the entire concept of safe injection sites is trivial.

I had business in downtown Victoria today and it took me down Pandora Street. There are handy receptacles for “used sharps” which is a good thing as I sure as Hell don’t want one sticking in my foot or my children’s. There were a lot of people who were clearly “on something”. And there were street workers out checking to see how the people they know were doing.

Gardner advocates an end to the drug prohibition, so do I; but that end has to be managed very carefully lest it turn out like the influx of Residential Schools settlements or resource money on Indian Reserves.

Part of that management may well be the creation of a quasi-criminal space where, for their own benefit, substance addicts can be taken off the street for a period of time. And, yes, this is exactly opposite to my libertarian views and to my skepticism about the State’s ability to do good; but the tragic fact is that there are concentrations of two or three thousand people in various cities in Canada for whom full legalization of drugs with the attendant 95% (or 70% or whatever) drop in price would be fatal.

Drug prohibition must end and end soon; but we will have to deal with the consequences of 50 years of this misguided policy. They are people and they are citizens - and they might just be your brother or your child.

Update: Excellent rebutal of Wente from Rebecca Jesserman in today’s Globe.

But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. the new republic

What has always struck me about Ms. Klein is that her world view admits no possibility of doubt, much less error. She knows the truth and sets out to find the facts that back her up. Chait, a rather more nuanced thinker, finds more than a few facts which shoot her down. Not that it matters: to the sort of people who read Klein, “truthiness” is more important than actual fact. And much more interesting.