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.

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.

Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions rose 25 per cent between 1990 and 2005, the biggest percentage increase among G8 countries over the same time period, according to new Statistics Canada figures released Tuesday. cbc

Hmmm…the Conservatives were wiped out in 1988 1993 and did not get back into power until 2006…The Liberals signed Kyoto and hired Rick Mercer as a substitute for an actual program to comply with the terms of the treaty they signed.

I know, let’s blame the CPC.

(Not that there is any reason to actually worry about greenhouse gases in the first place as the science and models are either wrong or unproven; but one might remember that M. Dion was Minister for the environment from 2004-2006 and in Cabinet from 1996 onward. Not terrifically effective was he.)

Apparently the “Liberal brand” is just not selling.

Somehow I am not surprised.

Update the First: “The extent of the Conservative victory stunned the Alberta Liberals, led by Kevin Taft, who are on the way to losing more than half of their 16 legislative seats, led by a collapse in their traditional base of support in Edmonton.” cbc

Here’s a little hint…Albertans, alone apparently among Canadians, actually recognize the real cost of the Kyoto nonsense. Taft wanted to, at least, look at Kyotoish thinking. That was more than enough to lose seats.

Update the Second: 53% 26% 8.6% Snort!

Update: Greg Staples has a rather intriguing question…

Update II: 600 arrested, 700+ cars torched. The “youths” - and Lord knows we would not want to identify them to much more precisely - are not amused with the election of Sarko who, accurately, called them scum the first time they went car burning and reiterated his view a few days before the election.

I suspect Sarko is not entirely dismayed that the “youths” are providing him with the pretext necessary to crack down and crackdown hard on the yobs living in the housing projects which ring many French cities. And I think it is fair to say that many of the police, frustrated by Chirac’s endless dithering, would rather like to put down this suburban intifada. It is not going to be pretty but it will be necessary.

Update III: And for video of the Paris riots. The “youths” look pretty outgunned. But no question, cobbled streets give an edge to the intifadistes.

If he goes to Dion it’s over. And Iggy knows it. Will Iggy do the classy thing and follow the mo?

For the Liberals’ sake I hope so.

Of the 1100 votes which were loose on the last ballot 800 went to Dion.

Update: Now it is all about the delegates. Dion Gear is going to anybody who requests it. Iggy and Rae cannot whip their delegates to each other. Cherniak

Update II: “Look at the numbers. Iggy’s people were spinning 35 per cent on the first ballot for their guy, and after three ballots they STILL aren’t there. You can’t spin that away. Look at the growth. Michael picked-up 135 votes, while Dion grew my an earth shattering 642 votes. Look at the momentum: Dion.” a BCer in Toronto

“I could have stayed on, there might have been sparks for me but frankly I am in this for a reason,” Kennedy told reporters after walking over to Dion’s camp.  ctv

Smart.

Kennedy only picked up 64 votes from the first ballot. Dion picked up 220. Combined they have 1858 votes which would put Dion within 500 of a win. Dion owes Kennedy big. And it preserves the Liberal Francophone/Anglophone rule which has worked so well for so long. Kennedy takes a crash course in French, a safe seat in the next election, a serious Cabinet post in a Dion government and a promise of Dion’s support in, say, six years.
The big news is that neither Rae nor Iggy picked up much support. Eyeballing it, Iggy is up a hundred, Rae 200. In the big mo sweepstakes this means Dion actually grew more than Rae or Iggy.

So now the third ballot question is whether or not enough of Kennedy’s delegates will follow him to Dion to put him ahead of Rae.

With only Rae, Dion and Iggy on the third ballot one is going to come last and be forced off. My sense is that Iggy has enough of a lead over Rae that he will survive to the next ballot. But I can’t see where Rae’s growth is going to come from.

And then? Well, then the question becomes whether the Liberal party wants Iggy or not Iggy. In a sense it is a question of whether the party wants a hard or a soft edge. Last night the speeches were as much about style as substance. Iggy promising victory, Rae promising to share and listen, Dion and Kennedy promising reform and renewal and a new generation.

The activists who go to political conventions want to win. But they also have a conception of the sort of political party they want to belong to. After Chretien and Martin - two old school politicos - there is a seriously question as to whether the activists want a guy like Iggy who went to the same political boot camp.

cbc

Total ballots cast: 4815 To Win 2407

So Iggy hits just under 30% and needs 1000 new votes to win. Did the speeches matter? Not for this first ballot. But the relative performances of the candidates and the buzz about that performance is going to have a significant impact on the second and - likely - third ballots.

It is not at all obvious where Iggy is going to pick up 1000 votes. If he had delivered a great speech the idea that there would be movement from the various camps would make sense. But with his relatively lackluster speech that logic goes out the window.

If there is a surprise here it is that Kennedy and Dion ended in a dead heat. Either have nearly enough delegates to push Iggy over the top. neither has much incentive. One might be able to walk up the middle if the other throws support early.

And what of Rae? Basically Rae has to pick up a few hundred delegates on the first ballot and then cut a deal with one of Dion or Kennedy (or both). Here is where a good speech may have made the difference. Rae has to be betting that there will be enough delegate movement to keep him in sight of Iggy.

Volpe has gone to Rae, his organizers may have gone to Iggy. MHF will be off the ballot and it is not clear where she is sending her delegates if anywhere.

Dryden is widely seen as having made a genuinely excellent speech. One good enough to ensure that he will be able to stay on the ballot for a couple of rounds without losing any respect.

The buzz in Liberal blogland seems to go back to the ex officios - the hacks. They were supposed to go significantly Iggy’s way. Apparently they haven’t. As one commentor at Livin’ it up in Gritland puts it,

The blood-letting for Iggy begins on the second ballot, though in the loss of anticipated ex-officio votes one can see more than a trickle of of the red stuff.

UPDATE: I took the table above directly from the CBC…and it’s wrong. Dion was in third place, Kennedy in fourth rather than the placing in the chart. Sorry!

CTV NewsNet cut away from Iggys speech.

Were they bored too? kinsella

(The good news is that I don’t have to link directly to the pathetic little man.)