Happy New Year!

Welcome to a new year in Richard McAdam: Words of a Grad Student! I'm looking forward to a very interesting 2006, with lots of insights, discussions, and debates. We've certainly got a fast and furious three weeks ahead of us as the race for 24 Sussex Drive heats up and the polls between the Liberals and the Conservatives get ever tighter. I've made my official prediction of a Conservative minority, and I've got a track record of being good at calling these sorts of things.

It only took me 11 hours to get on TV in 2006! This morning on CBC Newsworld they were running a program called Minority Report: The 2004 Election. During a segment on Stephen Harper's trip to Kelowna in the final weekend of the campaign, I appear for but a brief moment with a placard I had brought to the Liberal presence that day, which read: Liberal First Rate Canada. The comment was in response to something that Harper had said in his time as the head of the National Citizens' Coalition, where he stated that "Canada seems content to be a second-rate socialistic country." Given that these were the days of my Liberal partisanship (though certainly nothing to the extent that Cherniak takes the Martin Kool-Aid...the guy predicted a Liberal majority the other day!), such a comment, in the heat of a very close race that the Liberals had a real danger of losing and in a time when the extent of their corruption and scandal was not yet realized, had to be responded to in force. So that's what I did that day in Kelowna. It was afterwards that I talked to Stockwell Day, who concluded our conversation with, "You seem like an intelligent young man, maybe one day you'll be on our side." If only he knew eh?