01 June 2010

Feeding the Trolls

Young Liberal President reminds me why I couldn't get out of the categorization of being a Young Liberal fast enough: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/young-liberal-pushes-stop-harper-coalition-conservatives-brag-on-economy/article1587660/

Seriously, all of this rejuvenated coalition/merger talk just makes me ill to my stomach. The Liberal Party stands (used to stand?) for so much of what is great and good about Canada, yet we find ourselves entertaining the notion of bringing Jack Layton and his ilk into the fold simply for the sake of political expediency. I honestly just don't understand what happened to the party machine that did such an effective job of making the Liberals the "default option" of Canadian government. We're four years removed from the sponsorship scandal and Paul Martin's spectacular flame out, and we've seen four years of incompetent Conservative government that has turned the $13 billion surplus we'd invested into the country into a $54 billion deficit that is going to have a severely negative impact on Canada's economic well-being for a generation, not at all unlike the mess left behind by Mulroney that took Chretien & Martin years to fix.

With all of this, how is it fathomable that the press team is being outwitted at nearly every turn by the guttersnipes at CPC HQ? With all of this, how is it fathomable that we turn to Jack Layton--JACK LAYTON--as the one that can deliver us from Stephen Harper?

The mind boggles, and yet we still find ourselves feeding the trolls.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What does the LPC stand for exactly?

What's the LPC economic policy?
Education policy?
Health care policy?
Sustainable development policy?
Environmental policy?

Perhaps just start by not referring to others as "ilk" and our party can start getting somewhere!

Why don't you post policies the party should adopt? God knows they can use some!

p.s. I'm a Liberal!

RGM said...

liberal.ca would be your starting point to find out party policy positions. One would think that a good card-carrying member would know that.

Is "ilk" such a horrible perjorative in your eyes that it must not be used to describe a group of people that think very differently from the Liberal Party? Is that truly the starting point for Liberals to "get somewhere" politically in this country? Somehow I think that the good Dr. Ignatieff has bigger fish to fry than ensuring I don't refer to Jack Layton and his ilk as such.

Here's the thing: the policies that have formed the bedrock of Liberal policy for the past twenty years are highly successful. We didn't lose the 2006 election based on policy or ideas; we lost it due to the outrage over the sponsorship scandal. For the past four years, however, these main planks have not been sufficiently updated and articulated by the people running the party; instead we let ourselves get distracted by the petty antics of the Harper Conservatives and devote far too much time to that. Ignatieff has detailed his vision for Canada in his book - yet we never hear that. This is a man that has advised world leaders on world issued, that has written countless policy articles and books, yet he never comes out and talks policy. We have the policy, we have the vision, but we instead play the Conservatives' game. That is where we fail.

Anonymous said...

"Ignatieff has detailed his vision for Canada in his book - yet we never hear that. "

Then there's obviously a message problem.

p.s. When a poll says that a coalition led by Ignatieff would lose but one led by Layton would win, I say there's not a problem with the product; there's a problem with the salesman.

My 2 cents.

Anonymous said...

this is very funny rhetoric against Layton without a drop of evidence or statement about what is objectionable other than perhaps his name?

I mean you don;t even provide evidence for that.

Calling this a screed would elevate it unjustly methinks.

Liberals for Layton!

RGM said...

Jack Layton's track record more than speaks for itself - if I'm going to be pumping out 250-word or less blogs I just go with the natural assumption that my readers know about his lengthy history, thus sparing me the joy of listing such wonderful ideas of his as labeling of the multinational 3D effort in Afghanistan as "George Bush's war." But you know all of this.