12-02-2008
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Coquitlam, BC
Posts: 1,778
Rep Power: 5
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Conservatives vs. everybody else (Canada)
Wanted to share my thoughts on some current events in Canada (the ice-bound wastes lurking to the north of most of this forum's members).
First some background for those rare few of you who don't normally follow Canadian politics.
Last month, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, called an election. This means that all the seats in Parliament were up for grabs. The other parties based their campaigns on the same things that the Conservatives did (the economy and the environment, primarily), except that they also campaigned about how bad Harper was, each claim that he was the most capable of getting rid of him. I live in the Vancouver area, a particularly loony-left region, so around here we heard a lot about how vile a beast Harper was (of course, not nearly as much as we heard about how glorious a savior Obama was).
The situation didn't change much from what it had been before the election: Harper's party, the Conservatives, gained a few seats, slightly strengthening their minority government. The other parties were too busily vying for power among themselves to get a foothold.
But now, in a to-my-knowledge-unprecedented move, three of the other parties are forming a coalition to usurp power. There is a rule that, when there is a minority government, Parliament can put through some sort of petition to the Governor General (the Queen's appointed representative -- i.e. a figurehead's figurehead) to have the Prime Minister removed, or something like that.
This was apparently in response to Harper's decision to cut public funding of federal campaigns (currently they get $2 for each vote they got in the previous election).
I have been trying to figure out what is so horrible about Harper. In my research, I found that he sponsored quite a few handouts in his time. The things that people have complained about most recently was the above cut to public funding of campaigns, cuts to Canada's "arts and culture" federal grants, and cuts to university funding (the money was sent to trade schools instead).
What's the lesson here? Canadians (notorious for being confused about their national identity) are, by and large, moochers. Their country is a country of handouts. Anybody who even hints at holding back on some of the handouts is painted with a devil's brush. The country (so says the left) would have no culture whatsoever if the government wasn't paying for it, nor would the populace be educated in anything other than such ignoble subjects as plumbing or engineering or other profitable (a word more spit out than spoken) disciplines. The new "coalition government" would for the first time have the New Democratic Party (even more liberal than the Liberals) in places of nontrivial power (Finance Minister, for a particularly brilliant example).
I was invited to join a facebook group called "Canadians Against a Liberal/NDP Coalition Gov't". Following my Harper research, I declined to join, as I am loathe to be even indirectly lumped with the culture of moochers: I am not Canadian.
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