Stability? Who Needs It?

The bile and the rhetoric are back in Ottawa already, mere weeks after all the talk about creating a new spirit of cooperation because we're all in this together during trying economic times. That is going out the window because the Conservatives want to trim $30M in handouts to the political parties; it's the arts funding cuts all over again, except this time it's due to sheer navel-gazing on the parts of the opposition parties upset that they'll no longer receive the majority of their funding from the government instead of going out and earning it from regular people who are their nominal supporters.

With the economic situation in the country maybe not quite as sound fundamentally as we would have hoped, with the dollar still fluctuating, with voter fatigue running high among everybody except for Montreal Canadiens fans who vote 4 or 5 times a day for the NHL All-Star Game Starting Six, they're threatening to bring down the government and have an election!

After all the hand-wringing that the last one was hailed as "unnecessary" and "Harper broke his word," with all the talk of the need for fiscal restraint, despite the fact that the people have spoken only 7 weeks ago, despite the fact that the Liberals have no leader and no platform and no money, the Liberals want to have an election.

Nothing would say "we don't give a damn about stability" in a time when stability is urgently required more than having an election. Economies rely heavily on political stability in a country. When a country is going through severe political turmoil, investors tend to take out their money and look elsewhere. There's a reason that only the gullible send their money to Zimbabwean princes: they're afraid of putting it into that country's economy because there's always the threat of the government seizing all the assets for itself. Should Canada be plunged into its second election in the last half of 2008 it will send a signal to investors that the country is panicking in the face of this economic crisis, and they will respond by removing their assets and plunking them into the United States or Europe or Asia. We will lose out severely if we succumb to the folly of the moment.