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.

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.

Too bad the indications are towards global cooling; but if they are wrong, and they might be, good news on the heart attack front.

Yes, it would be tragic if someone other than Ontario paid more than its fair share to maintain the Confederation.

Having friends in high places has propelled me to the #19 spot and so I was delighted to see that Lorne Gunter has responded to Alan over at the National Post:

The share of the green taxes he wishes to impose on Alberta and Saskatchewan would work out to nearly $1,500 per capita, or $6,000 per family. In the rest of the country, the load would be just $325 per person or $1,300 a family.

And it’s not as though Albertans, in particular, aren’t making a disproportionate contribution to federal finances already.

In addition to fuelling the federal budget surplus, Albertans contribute about $4,000 more per person to federal finances than they receive back in federal program spending. By comparison, the fiscal deficit Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty frequently speaks of for his province is just over $1,500 per person per year, and Green Shift wouldn’t raise that to $2,000. national post

Trust me Alan, if Dion is elected and tries to pull this stunt the anger out here is going to make NEP I look timid. And this time there is a real capacity to go it alone.

A number of bloggers have pointed out that at least Boshcoff is honest.

It is time for the West (and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia) to make it very clear to the Boshcoffs and the Dions that this sort of a revenue grab will have a single consequence: the end of Canada as a nation. I am old enough to have been around for NEP I and I saw the anger first hand in British Columbia and Alberta. Now Saskatchewan will join the party.

Think Bloc Quebecois in Parliament and an activist, separatist, movement at a regional level. Paint this revenue grab “Green” is not going to work simply because “Green” is not selling as it did when Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party.

There will be a lot of industry solutions to this problem: reducing investment, reducing production, using carbon sequestration as a weapon (goofy as it is as science, its costs can be passed right along to the silly buggers in Ontario in the form of higher oil prices). But there will also be a final recognition that there is really very little Eastern Canada can do for the New West save sanctimoniously claim to be raping us in the name of Green rather than Greed.

Bye guys, best of luck; hope you can do something about that air pollution problem - you know the real one not the CO2 BS. But of course you are…you are losing manufacturing jobs. Fast. And you will, of course, lose more as investment in the oil patch decreases because (you morons) nearly 50% of that investment ends up in Ontario. So no body will be able to say that the Eastern Bastards are not doing their bit to be green: they are actually hollowing out their economy….Bravo, but excuse us if we are not willing to hollow out ours.

We banged away about old Vancouver socialism, sturgeon, Kevin Annett and the Vancouver Students’ Association but, at one point Glavin asked a rather good question: why are the righty blogs more interesting to read than the liberal or lefty blogs?

I made noises about just how damned intelligent we are - well, actually, no. But I did point out that it was OK for me to disagree with Kate or Kathy or Ezra. They don’t send me Christmas cards in any case so I miss nothing by supporting SSM or what have you. Glavin suggested that orthodoxy seemed to rule on the left. And he is absolutely right.

But, and here’s the rub, we have our own Society for the Supression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue: The Blogging Tories. Now, mercifully about half the BT blogroll has not posted in the the last year but the BT in chief, Steve Taylor, for whom I have a lot of respect, has been dragging the party line far too long.

Now that Rob Nicolson has let slip the dogs of, well, a Parliamentary Committee, maybe it is time for Steve to grow a spine and start writing about free speech in Canada.

Elephant meet Steve - Steve, the big gray object over, more or less, in the corner is a Free Speech Elephant. Go nuts, tell us what you think of him. It’s safe to come out of the closet now.

Mr. Harper told an extraordinary new conference on Parliament Hill that Maxime Bernier’s controversial relationship with a woman linked to the Hells Angels was not a factor in the decision.

But the resignation came as Julie Couillard was about to go to air on the French-language television station TVA to say that her former lover was careless with classified documents.

The Prime Minister says Mr. Bernier failed to uphold his promise to protect cabinet confidences. globe and mail

Hey, it could happen to anyone…have a few pops, have the chrome sucked off your bumper, forget your briefcase…but anyone is not supposed to be the Minister of External Affairs.

Nice to see David Emerson step into the breach. Harper finally goes for clued in rather than the optics.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission. bruce bawer city journal

If you want to get an idea of why fighting for free speech in Canada is critical go read Bawer’s piece in City Magazine. It is as depressing as it is vital.

We need to fight for free speech because it is an essential Western and Canadian value. And we need to fight hard because we are in very grave danger of losing the right to assert that value.

On the eve of his retirement announcement over beer Monday night, Gen. Hillier nicely framed his military legacy in a single sentence: “We’re one of the big boys now.”

With air, ground and naval equipment upgrades on order or delivered to bolster an extended Afghanistan mission fortified with 1,000 fresh American troops, Gen. Hillier has put the force back into the military. national post

Hillier was and is a strategist. He leaves without the war in Afghanistan won but with the means in hand to win it.

He walked close to the line which divides the military from its civilian masters but he was surefooted enough to win those battles.

He took the Stanley Cup to the ‘Stan and the fight to the Taliban.

I hope his audacity, vision and intelligence are not lost to Canadians. We have a lot of work to do; Hillier is a man who has demonstrated he is a dog for work and a leader without rival in the Canadian government. He is certainly entitled to the potential corporate rewards his service has earned; but if Harper has the brains God gave a goat he will find General Hillier a place where he can continue to serve Canada.

The people responding to this - while they have been characterized as Concervatives - are, in fact, conservatives; more accurately classical liberals.

Now, I wonder if we might find agreement on other issues which the CPC is too scared to address.

anti-Kyoto
mass immigration
fiscal responsibility
pro-Israel
pro-Canadian Forces
anti-additional funding for bilingualism
anti-regulation
pro-small government

I suspect there are some metrics I’ve left out. The point being that we tend to be people willing to challenge the validity of the so called Canadian consensus.

And then I wondered how we might best influence the various political parties in the direction we would like to see the Canadian conversation actually go.

One thought I had would be to rate MPs - not parties - on their relative commitment to a set of goals. We would define the goals and then build a database of MP ratings.

It would take a bit of work to come up with the ratings and the metrics used to calculate the ratings. However, I suspect it would be entirely doable. Basically we would score - riding by riding - the candidates and members based on what they have actually said.

Call it “The League of Real Canadian Voters” and endorse candidates in every riding in Canada. Given the metrics I think are important a LRCV endorsement would likely be the kiss of death in TO and Vancouver. But, in the rest of the country it might be worth several hundred votes.

So, what do you think? Good idea, pernicious nonsense and the CPC will see us through? Do comment.