Conservative fails finally coming home to roost?

 The National Post is reporting an 11 point drop in the government's popularity, according to EKOS polling. Perhaps people are noticing the incompetence of "Canada's New Government".


Just to remind you of the many sleazy and clumsy actions of Stephen Harper's government,  I have most of them covered in previous posts- look under 'Conservative party' in my tags.
here is a list posted in the Comments section of The Globe and Mail:

Chuck Cadman
Chalk River
Income Trust
Attempted to censor media coverage of our war dead coming home
Lying to Canadians about the Afghan War
Breaking his own election laws
Violation of human rights
Lying to Canadian during said election about the economy
Prorogation (twice)
Using Haiti as his personal photo-op (and his wife)
Contempt of Parliament
Billion dollar plus slush fund called the G20
1.7 million for the PMO
Killing the Census
F-35s when we are in HUGE debt
And for all you loving CONS out there...cutting the GST to 5% for appearances sake.
the attempt to hide the body of our first female casualty coming home from Afghanistan….Harper “stands behind our troops”? Only when there is a photo op.
-"Derringer" commenting on Stockwell Day's argument for spending 5Billion on new prisons for "unreported Crimes" posted in the Globe and Mail online

how's that transparency and corruption fighting working out for you?

The CBC reports that the ministry of Public works( remember the Libs got into trouble there) gave out 12 million Dollars for a contract in Haiti. No bid, no announcement.

But the folks involved made donations to the Tories.

The myth of Conservative fiscal prudence

The received wisdom is that Tories cut government spending. But if you look at Canada's spending as percentage of GDP, it has been falling through the 90's and only stabilises, and rises with the arrival of the Conservative into power forming a minority government. The last previous rise, doubling both debt and deficit was under Brian Mulroney's Conservative government.

The problem is the Tories like to spend money on expensive(and arguably futile or unnecessary) moral crusades, such as more prisons and a larger, conventional army and big corporate subsidies, and less on less splashy but cheaper and more effective programs i.e. drug rehab, an expanded Coast Guard and various kinds of post-secondary training and R&D funding. After all, successful businesses need new, better methods to stay in business, not a financial crutch to hide poor management practices. Preventing crime is more cost effective than punishment. On the otherhand, heavy weapons like main battle tanks are made by large corporate entities. The utility of having such systems seems redundant in the asymmetric battlefield of today. But the relationship between elected representatives and such business interests are well known. These do not always serve the interests of the polity at large.

Of course, Canadian's are not immune to being bribed with their own money, or better yet, that of their fellow citizens who don't vote for the Conservatives.

How did this economic mess occur?

I saw this article on the origins of the current mess. combined with an article that I blogged about earlier, it neatly sums up how political and economic power manipulated the markets to where they are today.

It's not high salaries for people doing the work. Heck, if we'd paid the CEO's involved the ridiculous bonuses but forced them to retire 10 years ago, this mess wouldn't have happened. Ultimately, people got rich promising the impossible- an upper middle class home for people, primarily U.S. residents, that couldn't afford them. 

It was like pretending a credit card was a salary. 

More In-and-Out; Tories bully their own into silence

The Tory brass referred to their own people in crude fashion, bullying their own people who questioned the In-and-Out campaign finance scandal.

When is anyone going to point out that this scheme attempts to defraud tax payers, as well as defying Election Laws?

Drinking the Tory Cool-aid

Cadman, Listeria poisoning, medical isotopes, Maxim Bernier, In-and-Out, fixed election date...

The Conservative government has taken us to the edge of a federal deficit and engaged in a campaign financing scandal that may have poured millions of tax payers dollars into Conservative party coffers, while violating the elections act by overspending. Stephen Harper's government were coached in how to disrupt the committee process which is critical for a functioning government; now He violates his own fixed election date law.

What is in the Tory Kool-aid that lets it's own supporters think this is an honest, fiscally conservative, law-and-order party?

The Idiot's veto

This is Roger simon's take on the Obama terrorist cover of the New Yorker magazine. He criticises the critics of the cover, and of satire in general as asserting...

Idiot’s Veto: If a single person might not get a joke, then you should not tell the joke. All humor (and everything else) should be reduced to the lowest common denominator just to make sure nobody misunderstands anything-Roger Simon, politico.com

The "idiot's veto", along with "the self-licking ice cream cone" characterise what is wrong with so much political activity, especially on the progressive side.

Money is power and power corrupts; Even social funding

Some people wonder about my ambivalence towards public moneys. Then I read an article like this one:

"I remember sitting one day in a swanky Old Montreal boardroom with a dozen more established black community leaders, Quebec's public security minister, the chief of police, and maybe the mayor - I forget - and for a few minutes, I felt that our little upstart group had arrived.

Then came the eye-opener. Some of the same community leaders who talked the talk when the cameras were rolling didn?t quite walk the walk when the hors d'oeuvres were being passed around.

Some of the same people who, five minutes earlier, yammered on about the "racist" authorities, were exchanging cheek kisses with those very authorities as they politely chewed on smoked salmon.

Soon after that meeting, our group received a relatively lucrative grant to put on a conference on racism (which was a failure), and with the money purposely left over the then-homeless group rented an office in NDG, purchased a brand new colour TV (to monitor news reports, see) and fed office hangers-on with a seemingly endless supply of pizza.

Some of us were appalled, tensions grew, people began to quit and the group eventually consumed itself.

Money can seduce as well as it can corrupt.
-Anthony Bonaparte, The Suburban

I wish that NGO's and worse yet QUANGOs(quasi- Non-governmental Organisations) didn't so often turn into 'self-licking ice-cream cones'.

Pandering part deux: The "in-and-out" scheme redux

Richard Cleroux neatly presents the Conservatives' "in-and-out" scheme and why it is corrupt. He also asks why so many of the MPs and candidates involved were from Quebec.

Despite the obliviousness of the core tory supporters, at some point, to qoute a great conservative "you can fool some of the people, some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Down south, the goal of the Bush administration was to fool enough of the people, enough of the time to get elected. This strategy has been embraced by the Conservative minority government up here in Canada. There is still hope that the Conservatives have stepped over the line enough times to start losing support among those still angry with the Liberals or worried about the Greens.