Musings —04.08.2011 06:47 AM
—KCCCC Day 14: The Hammer Town edition
- The tale of the tape in Hamilton: The Liberal and Conservatives were in the Hammer last night for rallies. Thus, journalists were wondering who would have the biggest and best crowd. Here, then is an account from SFH’s manager, Hammer Dom, who was there to tell the tale: “W, just back home – attended Iggy’s Town Hall here in Hamilton. Over a thousand people, they let anyone in, he answered 15+ questions from anyone with a hand up. Man of the people. What a wonderful, charasmatic, intelligent and in-touch individual. Harper’s rally, 300 people, and the bus load of McMaster students that were at Iggy’s show – we’ll, they were barred from Harpers an hour before. Conservative shit-show. Igg’s next PM – I promise you.”
- Is Hammer Dom right? Well, let’s pore through this morning’s entrails, shall we? The Spectator, the Hammer’s paper of record, has this headline this morning: IGNATIEFF DRAWS THREE TIMES THE CROWD THAT HARPER DID. Is that a big deal? It sure is. Federal Liberals have been dead in the water in the Hammer for almost seven years – principally due to what the Martin team did to Sheila Copps. The party has had little on the ground there, in the interim, but they still pulled in 1,000 Hamiltonians last night. Like, wow!
- What do the polls say, in Hamilton and elsewhere? As prognosticated in this space for the past nearly-two-weeks, (a) campaigns matter and (b) the Reformatories have indeed, as Dom says, been running a dismal campaign – while Ignatieff’s has been better than everyone expected. Sayeth the soothsayers: “The Conservatives are clinging to a six-point lead on the Liberals nationally but the critical gap is closing in Ontario, a new poll shows…“It still looks like Mr. (Stephen) Harper will win a minority, but that is by no means a sure thing – particularly with these differences in Ontario,” said pollster Frank Graves. “What is quite clear is that a majority is really unlikely.”
- The Cons are trapped: As all know now, they were using the RCMP (illegally) to eject citizens. The RCMP has now admitted they made a mistake, and won’t do that anymore. Now, the Cons are stuck: they can’t do much about protestors on their own – if they touch a person, it’s assault. Thus, they’re stuck with coverage of residents of the Hammer speaking up. As happens in, you know, a democracy.
- What does that all mean for the good people of the Hammer? It means that, despite being the subject of all manner of Conservative blandishments and affection, Ontario is slowly turning its back on the Angry Man from Alberta. And, as one of the smart Anderson brothers point out, the Cons need to “up their game” in Hamilton, Ontario and elsewhere – and particularly in the debates. I have long felt Iggy will do very well in the debates – and that, seeing things thereafter slipping away, the Tories will unleash a barrage of attack ads unlike anything this country has ever seen. It might work. It has before (cf. “bomb the bridges,” circa 1988).
- TV talking head is heard from: How nice. Perhaps he could invite the Canada Israel Committee’s favourite white supremacist, too. He has before. What’s the Hamilton angle? Um, er.
- Salutin in the Star! On Iggy! I think Rick might be from Hamilton. He was there once, at the very least. Anyhow, so sayeth Rick: “[Ignatieff] was an awful candidate, a gift to Stephen Harper like the second coming of Stéphane Dion. Now he looks comfortable in his own skin, and in Canada. I don’t think he’ll make voters wince, the way he used to…Harper…seems off his game. He keeps flubbing it, starting with his early campaign challenge to a one-on-one debate, which he suddenly retreated from when Ignatieff agreed. Wouldn’t Harper, the acclaimed chess master, have anticipated that move?”
- Pic of the day: Iggy is swallowed up by Grit logo in Hamilton! Caption contest!
Can you clarify? I read your site each morning following the KCCCC and am grateful for your insight. But each day from reading your site it would seem that Harper is absolutely tanking and Ignatieff is have a meteoric campaign. But the polls never seem to really reflect that. Yesterday on 308.com for instance showed for the first time a projected Harper majority. That site hasn’t been updated today. So, should I be reading your site as a Liberal Spin guy? or are you citing polls that don’t feed into the 308 aggregate? Either way I do like to follow your website.
ThreeHundredEight.com has “Conservatives back to a minority” today (if only just below majority territory). Also learned today–thanks, Warren–that Rick Salutin found a home at the Star. (I gave up my Globe & Mail subscription partly because they dumped Rick in their latest makeover last fall.)
I’d volunteer the caption “Help! I’m sinking!”, but that wouldn’t be very accurate any more would it? 😉
Caption:
“Hey, Guys, I said ‘Raise the *Volume*’, not ‘Raise the *Column*’!!!!!”
(That photo is priceless, WK. The best part is, is that Ignatieff is comfortable enough in his own skin to laugh at himself, and he’d probably come up with his own captions!)
Wrong again Mr. Tulk.
1. The debate is Tuesday night and the Libs have a barrage of ads to start running afte rthat as well. harper no longer owns that soapbox and you will be surprised at the ferocity of the Liberal ads. The Libs are well prepared and organized for the onslaught and Harper will be decimated personally by them.
2. Iggy is doing very well in battleground areas of the Country while Harper;s numbers are doing a slow fade. Debates do matter when one has the opportunity to surpise like Iggy does and put down the attack ads as just so much Tory BS with a good performance.
3. Most cable companies have yet to sign up for Sun and the only people who will watch are dyed in the wool blue dead heads.
I was under the impression that both CPC and Liberal campaigns would spend the maximum, so why do you expect the CPC to outspend the Liberals on TV ads?
Easy, like 2006, just ‘bend’ the advertising laws (In & Out Scandal)
After years of “volume” – ads attacking Ignatieff – which ultimately be proven to be a wasted investment, you ought to recognize that volume isn’t nearly as important as quality.
Harper as the prime reason Canada is an island of stability is a crock of shit anyway. Election 08 lies: “I won’t entertain deficit financing” and “if there was going to be a recession it’d already have happened” == asleep at the wheel, or lying through his teeth.
Time to vote Harper off the island.
Are you a charter member of disneyland?
Ther liberal war chest is full. They will match the harpecrites dollar for dollar and thier ads will be hard hitting and HONEST, a word tories shrink from.
Remember liars are tories and tories are liars.
@Gord – http://www.threehundredeight.blogspot.com/ actual does riding-by-riding projections. Pretty interesting stuff.
“come to the party that now reflects their core value – fiscal responsibility first, foremost and always.”
– most expensive ever G8/G20
– seemingly blank cheque for new jets
– expensive, unneccessary prison expansions
– $45 billion dollar defecit (but governments can usually blame that on the previous govt, right? oh, wait..)
So, the deficit *is* the Liberals’ fault?
The high ground you say Gord.
What say you of this Gord?
http://jmortonmusings.blogspot.com/2010/08/pmharper-verified-follows-freepornpics.html
See when that post was written Gord? The account is still there Gord.
http://twitter.com/#!/pmharper/following
I’ll partially agree with you Gord.
You have no idea.
Yeah but it blows your highground argument to shit.
Aha… well I did a little article on it. Pics snapped, data collected. Free for anyone but Conservatives to use as they please.
http://mikewatkins.ca/2011/04/08/twitter-pmharper-follows-freepornpics/
The porn user also follows Harper.
Apparently pornographers are interested in Stephen Harper too. That’s quite a big blue tent Harper has, uh, erected.
LPC voted for stimulus spending because it was the right thing to do based on the economic situation. CPC had already put us in line for a structural deficit because of massive spending since 2006 and because of the GST cut which was the wrong thing to do. Good polictics but bad economics. They also cancelled an income tax cut brought in by the Paul Martin government.
In addition, thanks to the Harper-Flaherty hand on the federal government purse the federal government was already on its way to historic levels of deficit before Election 08 was even called. This was only partly caused by the bone headed move by Harper on the GST; revenue simply dried up and it was impossible for Harper-Flaherty to miss this inconvenient truth. When remittances to the federal government started to dry up at an alarming rate over the spring and summer 08, they continued to pretend all was well. The budgetary deficit was headed huge at a rate not seen in decades and this trendline would accurately predict the historic deficit which ensued.
On Harper’s watch. On Flaherty’s watch.
That they claimed all was well in election 08 was one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetuated on Canadians. They only got away with it because the media and Canadians were horrified of the thought of Dion having to manage the task.
Which is the right movie comparison for those days? Would it be “Dumb & Dumber” (Harper and Dion)? Or “A Liar and a Thief” (Harper and Flaherty) ?
In British Columbia the term “fudget budget” was hurled at the political party in power during the 2001 campaign and it stuck and became a potent tool in that campaign. Whether the label was deserved or not is irrelevant. Based on data easily obtainable from the Ministry of Finance it is clear to tell that Harper-Flaherty were engaged in fudget budgeting before and during Election 08.
Harper had no need to call Election 08 except that he hoped to accomplish two things, neither of which were beneficial to the Canadian people. 1) Deal a death blow to Dion and his Liberals; 2) attempt to improve his electoral position, perhaps even gain a majority at the expense of Dion, ahead of what ANY financial analyst with their head screwed on properly could tell, ahead of election 08, was going to be one hell of a ride down into the abyss.
So Harper-Flaherty lied; got their increased plurality, wounded the Liberals, thus ensuring they’d be unchallenged for the worst of the economic cycle and hopefully ride the wave back up, ready to call another election (and here we are). Virtually no matter what Harper-Flaherty did during 09-10, the wave would start back up. For this they deserve no particular credit as economic managers. They simply did the obvious and knew that time would be their ally.
Spending on stimulus served multiple Harper-Flaherty objectives, anyway. Get the cities and provinces off their backs (and hopefully into their confidence) by awarding gobs of funds that could be used to justify politically-relevant billboards all over the country. From fake lakes to toilets to road projects unstarted but well-signed of course even if in the middle of nowhere, stimulus greased the way forward for both construction jobs, and public awareness for the Conservative Harper government.
But the other thing massive stimulus spending does is push the country deeper into debt, which is a wonderful hammer to hold over the Canadian public one day. The deficit and debt allow him to promise things he may never have to implement (see Election 11) while simultaneously permitting him to continue his program to savage the power of the public (federal) purse. That ultimately is his goal – a completely emasculated Federal government with as little real power as possible.
Without even one majority, he is well on his way.
Fudget Budget Watch
Aaron Wherry points out a remarkable change in fiscal forecasts for 2014 – 2015… over two weeks:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/08/what-changed-in-the-last-17-days/
08: Harper lied to you.
11: … And he’s doing it again today!
The GST and corporate tax cuts have done done far more damage that you precious tidbit you can try to blame on the Liberals. Keep flailing that straw man.
Gord,
Simply holding up Mintz (or Friedman or Mises or …) as an ideal model of thinking, or quoting the “Laffer curve” and pointing to a Wikipedia page, does not automatically raise the content value of your argument. What is the ideal taxation rate Gord? Is it affordable? If not, what would you cut as services? What would Harper?
Driving revenues collected through taxation to zero is not optimum. Raising rates sky high is not optimum. Common sense and practice in modern economies over the past sixty years have proved as much. We don’t need a trite reference to Laffer to understand that. Where the optimum level lies for any economy depends on specific circumstances.
Let’s be clear – Harper is not cutting taxation because he believes in a specific optimum level, he is doing it to emasculate the federal government and hobble *future* political administrations because he simply does not believe in the utility of the federal government at all, save for a very narrowly constructed view that is almost 150 years old.
To that end, Harper would like to see our anthem changed slightly:
The LPC voted for a defict of about half the amount mr. ugly and his henchmen sctually spent. Check it out…and that was after denial by the cons about any recession.
Who owns the high ground……………not mr angry
“The Laffer Curve offers the false promise that we can cut taxes without making any sacrifice on the spending side, and that’s simply not true. It’s the economic equivalent of arguing that you can lose weight by eating more.”
“If Laffer were right, lower taxes would never require any spending sacrifice. We could pay a mere one percent of our income in taxes and still fund all of our government spending — and maybe more! Do you think that’s really possible?”
“Whether it’s tax policy or dieting, you can’t have your cake and lose weight, too, which is why America currently has huge deficits and a lot of fat people.”
“A debate between a rational thinker and someone with a need to rationalize, is like a debate between a person and their cat. The person may be right, but the cat almost always wins.”
… the usual finger-pointing drivel from a sensationalist talking-head, trying to diffuse the appalling practices of the Harper government and its supporters. What’s far more significant is that the campaign signs of Ryan Keon, Liberal Candidate in Ottawa, are still selectively being defaced with firearms targeting symbols, and that his Conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, is being staffed by the militant right-wing, anti-gun-control group, the Ontario Land Owners association.
.
Alders last paragraph in the article is *full of his own bullshit opinion, raft with weasel words*
ftfy
Probably have to take a pay cut for that one.. still Cha-ching!
Alders are trees I’m allergic to. Adler’s allergic to tree-huggers.
And Conservative voters are afwaid… vewy vewy afwaid.”
….and the bus load of McMaster students that were at Iggy’s show – we’ll, they were barred from Harpers an hour before.
Oh look media, here comes a bus load of totally non-partisan university students that were turned away from a Harper rally; come on in! See how utterly WONDERFUl we are and how mean and exclusive the Tories are? As if they knew that they weren’t going to be turned away. I’m sure that busload went to the Harper rally for a totally non-partisan, non-disruptive altruistic purpose, and said, “hey the Tories don’t want us, let’s go see the Liberals.”
It was a well-played propaganda moment I have to say, but come on, lol.
Reading one of the polls yesterday, broken out by age. In Ontario the Libs had something like 68% of the < 25 age bracket, which really skewed the data. Over 65 and it was about 60% for the Conservatives. Guess who votes and who doesn't.
This election reminds me of Harper's first crack at Martin in a lot of ways. Reading tory blogs and following the crowds on the tory campaign, you would think he was headed for a majority, damn the polls. Same thing seems to be happening in the liberal echo chamber.
They are worried about spending are they?
Nobody told this guy.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/its-normal-for-tory-ridings-to-get-more-federal-cash-larry-smith-says/article1975537/?from=sec368
Born-in-Hamilton here, checking in with a caption:
Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff with a hand signal communicates how much integrity Stephen Harper has.
Except that it’s a continuation of the existing agreement which was negotiated by the Liberals, which Harper is taking credit for, and waffling about on whether he’ll guarantee that same level for the new agreement. A swing and a whiff.
Oooooo …. no cha-ching for Tulkie 🙁
Blah blah… it doesn’t matter what you or many in the CPC are ruminating about.
What matters is that Harper is going around saying that the CPC won’t cut health & social transfers to balance the budget, like the Liberals did (at, ahem, his & the Reform Party’s instigation) in the 90s… with the implicit threat that the Libs intend on doing that again.
And now MI’s pulled the rug out from under that, and pledged that they won’t pay less than what they agreed to the last time, if the Libs are the next govt.
So the ball’s in the bully boy’s court: will he pledge to continue to pay at least 6% more to the provinces per year?
But he wouldn’t give a straight answer to Terry M. when asked that this morning.
And now from what you’re saying, it looks like they want to get out of the transfer business altogether, which sure sounds like a cut to me.
Hammer DOM…not ‘Don’ – you know that ya drunken blind punk!