Posted on 10/10/2007 4:20:59 AM PDT by Clive
Stephane Dion was in a breezy mood on Parliament Hill Tuesday, despite three weeks of internal crisis that would have had less resolute men reaching for their revolvers.
In a news conference to announce his Liberal party's shadow Cabinet shuffle, he joked that over the Thanksgiving weekend he had "cut bait and went fishing," a reference to Stephen Harper's challenge to opposition parties last week.
He brushed off questions about Quebec Liberals calling for his head, saying voters weren't interested. He dismissed the controversy surrounding the party's national director, Jamie Carroll, as a matter currently subject to legal action within the Liberal party. And he waved off a new poll that puts the Conservatives seven points ahead as predictable, given the recent adverse publicity surrounding the Liberals.
It all brought to mind Rudyard Kipling's inspirational poem of leadership, If: "If you can keep your head when all about you, Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you.... you'll be a Man my son."
Tuesday, Mr. Dion sounded like the ludicrously optimistic Liberal leadership candidate from last summer who did not appear to be well-informed enough about his own chances to be pessimistic.
"It will be very clear to all Canadians that if an election is forced, it will be Stephen Harper's doing.... He will have set up his own defeat," he said Tuesday.
The press conference was held to remind Canadians that they don't want an election, and that the Prime Minister is a control freak who will "take Parliament hostage" if he follows through on his threat to treat each piece of legislation that flows from the Throne Speech as a confidence vote.
Neither point is likely to carry much weight with voters, who aren't paying attention, and, by and large, are comfortable with this government.
Mr. Dion is right to say that the latest poll should be put in perspective -- the headline numbers are volatile. Party number-crunchers are much more interested in trends, such as whether voters think it's time for a change in government and whether they believe the country is heading in the right direction.
When these numbers start moving against you as a government, it's time to think of a life after politics.
With unemployment at record lows, the loonie above par and the federal coffers overflowing with surplus cash, both of these trend lines are moving in the government's favour.
But there are storm clouds on the horizon. Late last week, JP Morgan Chase Canada was the first on Bay Street to warn of "a sharp slowdown -- or even a complete stalling out -- of real GDP growth" next year.
Mr. Harper resisted pressure to go to the polls last spring, arguing that the longer he governed, the less open to the charge of "hidden agenda" his government would be.
However, senior Conservatives now say that the prospect of fighting an election in the teeth of a recession two years from now has forced him to rethink -- hence the ultimatum to the opposition parties to support the Conservative agenda or face going to the polls.
Mr. Dion's advisors are doubtless proposing a strategy that turns parliamentary flexibility into an art form, in the hope that a faltering economy starts to shift the "time for change" number in their direction.
Unfortunately for the Liberal leader, in the short term this leaves him with the unpalatable options of political emasculation or immolation: allowing the Conservative agenda to flow through the House, or blocking it and bringing on an election before his party is ready.
Perhaps the reason Mr. Dion is able to keep his head, when all about him are losing theirs, is because he hasn't grasped the dire nature of his predicament.
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"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
It’s so nice to see the Liberals suffer. Hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg. A nice , big, fat, melting, ICEBERG.
The Ontario party needs two things:
Get a new leader.
Get rid of the adjective in the party name and the political philosophies that go along with it. Perhaps they need to collapse like the federal party did so that they can be rebuilt through a conservative populist party in the same manner as happened federally.
I heard him say this.
Is it possible he doesn't understand the meaning of the phrase?
English is not his first language.
Dion reminds me of the corollary to the Kipling quote:
“If you can keep your head while all around you are in a panic, you obviously don’t know what the h*** is going on.”
Really? LOL.
He is also a citizen of France, but wants to be Prime Minister of Canada.
I guess logic isn’t part of his language either. ;-)
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