Categories for Musings

This guy will say anything. He flips and he flops, and he’s counting on you not noticing.

Against HST, now he’s for it.  Against full-day kindergarten, now he claims he’s for it.  Against anti-discimination laws, now he insists he’s for them.  Says he’s against “health taxes,” now he’s A-OK with ’em.  The list goes on.

Hudak and Guy Giorno were at the Albany Club this morning.  They were chortling about how Hudak will win: “the Liberals haven’t defined him,” said Guy.

Really? That so?  Does anyone think a picture emerges, perchance, from this “end-of-session” glimpse at a media avail Hudak just had, in public, on the Queen’s Park lawn?

I think it says quite a bit about him, personally.

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Reporter: The government also announced today that they’re going to send auditors in to the generic drug companies and to the pharmacies to make sure they’re complying with these new rules, do you think that’s an appropriate action?

Hudak: You know…we’ll see.

Reporter: The Liberals did quite a lot for Toronto, in a sense. They gave the City of Toronto more powers; they have a regional transit authority in Metrolinx. Would you build upon what they’ve done, or would you dismantle what they have done? What would you do differently as Premier for the GTA? You’ve got a lot of GTA candidates.

Hudak: Well, I’ll be—and I’m, and I’m very proud of the quality of individuals that have come forward to be part of our PC team in Toronto.

Reporter: But isn’t that just the same as what the – so basically you’re saying you would be status quo, because [your] infrastructure plan is the same as the Liberals. So you wouldn’t really change much. It would be the same old, same old. It’s not Changebook, it’s Samebook, isn’t it?

Hudak: We haven’t seen their plan.

Reporter: The Liberals have been pretty clear…their infrastructure plan, they’re going to keep the HST the way it is, they’re going to keep to their deficit reduction schedule, they’re going to keep the health premium, they’re going to keep the drug reforms. All those things you’re going to do to. Are you in danger of becoming Timid (sic) Hudak?

Hudak: You know, our plan is very clear…

Reporter: [Your plan is full of] minor tweaks. Why is there nothing that would pass as revolutionary in your platform? There really isn’t that much.

Hudak: I disagree with you.

Reporter: Tim, how can you say your energy policies are really affordable when you’re adopting the Liberals’ nuclear program and there’s so much uncertainty around that – which is only going to drive the costs of nuclear reactors higher?

Hudak: You know, I have a very different point of view.

Reporter: I am a little confused. I just want to ask you about it. You said when it comes to energy policy, you want to give local regions more autonomy, more say.  Yet when it comes to health, you are going to get rid of LHINs which are the local, regional health authorities. You are going to scrap them. So it is ok for the Premier Office to run healthcare, but not energy? I am a bit confused. Aren’t you contradicting yourself?

Hudak: I don’t buy the Liberal spin for a minute.

Press secretary: Thank you.

[Hudak walks away while reporter wants to ask a question.]

 

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Attacks on Jews and Arabs (and West Asians) are up substantially, according to this depressing report.

Why?  Well, I’ve written a couple books on this subject, and – generally – whenever the economy is down, these acts of hate become more frequent.  That is the biggest factor, far above government policy or international crises.

As a society, we clearly need to condemn hate crime, and work together to end it.  Dismissing hate as “hurt feelings,” or trotting out specious arguments about free speech, only serve to make a bad situation worse, in my opinion.

We have work to do.  Time to do it.

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“Even the covers on the March and June budgets are identical. The budget lockup could have been done in less time than it takes to sing the national anthem, frankly.

Missing: Anything for the province that gave the Tories their majority, Ontario. If anything, the budget’s silence on Ontario’s priorities — like health care — provided fodder for Premier Dalton McGuinty, facing re-election in a few months.”

 

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They’ve got a new editor, and new look and new approach. Check it out.

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She’s a kid, for Pete’s sakes.  A kid.

I led a student protest on Parliament Hill, many years ago – against a Liberal government, no less – and I probably said some things that were over-the-top, too (actually, now that I think of it, I haven’t really stopped in the intervening years).

For all these columnist guys who have been bashing/tut-tutting Brigette DePape for the past few days, I ask you: if the rest of us were permitted to poke through your high school-university yearbooks, poetry and poli sci essays, what gems would we unearth?

Exactly.

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Didn’t see some of these over the weekend. Here they are, as a public service:

• Christina Blizzard, Sun Media: “The important point for PC Leader Tim Hudak to remember is he won’t become premier because it’s his turn.  Voters have a refreshing habit of cutting to the chase and rejecting anyone who appears complacent…If we’ve learned anything from the recent federal election and last fall’s municipal elections it is this: Don’t take the electorate for granted. Do not think for one minute that all you have to do is drop a platform and cruise to a coronation…Hudak said in his platform he’d keep all-day kindergarten. McGuinty came out swinging, suggesting the Tories will renege. It’s all a question of heart, McGuinty told reporters Wednesday. He has heart. The Tories don’t.”
• Martin Regg Cohn, Star: “Here’s a hot issue that Tim Hudak thinks will bring down the Ontario government: Higher hydro bills. And here’s the Tory leader’s bizarre pitch to bring those bills down: Stop collecting for our hydro debt, by brazenly declaring it paid in full — even though it’s still there. Ignoring our debts is a strange notion coming from Ontario’s once-proud Progressive Conservatives. But Hudak has calculated that by profiting from voter frustration, and banking on voter folly, he can cash in on voting day, Oct. 6. His plan is a scam — a classic tale of buying votes with taxpayers’ money. And a parable of how elections are won in an era of short attention spans. A warning to readers: The PCs are counting on you tuning out the details.”
• Angelo Persichilli, Toronto Star: “In Ontario, provincial Conservatives were in favour of the HST until the day that the McGuinty Liberals adopted it…Hudak is no Mike Harris. You could disagree with Harris, but he had a vision, he had the Common Sense Revolution. The Hudak Conservatives have nothing revolutionary — their Changebook sounds more like another tablet competing with the BlackBerry Playbook and the iPad 2. Another similarity between the Ontario Conservatives and the federal Liberals is the issue of party unity. Even if the wound is not as open and deep as the one still affecting the federal Liberals, Ontario Conservatives are still discreetly dealing with the way former leader John Tory was treated by his party. How much this lingering resentment will impact the October vote is hard to say, but it cannot be ignored.”
• Ken Gray, Ottawa Citizen: “Former U.S. President George W. Bush had a disconcerting view about debt. Don’t pay it. Let the next guy cover it. And with Tory Leader Tim Hudak’s Changebook platform, Ontarians could get a taste of that U.S. fiscal and economic solution….Hudak’s election platform is the kind of document that made Greece the model of fiscal prudence it is today.”
• Phil McNichol, Owen Sound Sun Times: “Tim Hudak is starting to use the same populist, tough-on- crime tactics that seem, sadly, to have worked for the Harper campaign. It has nothing to do with espousing an intelligent response to crime and the “correction” of people convicted of crimes. Rather, it’s all about the cynical view that a lot of voters are stupid, that they will have a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to dubious policies that exploit their fears, suspicions and prejudices.”

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In one cable, we now learn, Rossi was dishing to the Yanks about what was going on in Ignatieff’s office. He kvetched that Ignatieff wasn’t listening to super-smart guys like him. Instead, Rossi whined, the Grit boss was much more preoccupied with his wife Zsuzsanna Zhosar. “The only person whose opinion he really cares about is his wife, Zsuzsanna,” the WikiLeak cable reports in one Rossi-related dispatch. (If you ask me, things might have ended a lot better for Ignatieff if he’d listened more to his wife and a lot less to the likes of Donolo or Rossi.)

If we’d been in government, Rocco’s penchant for disclosing secrets to a foreign power might have landed him in court. When you are a government employee, there’s a name for that kind of duplicity. It’s called “treason.” But because we weren’t the government, Rocco’s secret briefings with the Americans can only be legally categorized as “dishonest” and “sleazy.”

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…in which the Toronto Star columnist absolutey destroys the PC frat boy:

“Watching the just-concluded federal campaign and the Ontario provincial contest that is just about to start is rather like being a spectator at a hockey game where the players exchange jerseys in the middle of the second period.

The thrust of the federal Liberal campaign against the federal Conservatives was about making accusations of contempt of Parliament and corruption, tarnishing Harper’s image, and attacking his government’s economic performance, competence and the huge deficit.

The provincial Conservatives are using the same approach against the provincial Liberals — accusing them of economic mismanagement and of incompetence and launching personal attacks against McGuinty.

Another characteristic of the federal Liberal campaign was trying to push hot buttons that divided Canadians, such as abortion. Hudak is doing the same. Last week the Toronto Sun wrote that Hudak decided not to get involved in education issues because “there is little to be gained by messing around with something that is not a hot-button issue.”

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Can you be thin-skinned and have a chip on your shoulder at the same time?

It’s funny. I was talking to a certain, er, very successful Liberal politician yesterday and we touched on this very subject. “They’re a bunch of babies,” said he. “They’ve never been able to take a punch without crying about it.”

Well, get ready, Dippers. You’re in the big leagues, now. Comes with the territory. At least the Reformatories can take a punch.

Thus, check this out in the LFP: I mean, I was just having fun!

Wait’ll this sucky sucky socialist baby sees me when I’m actually mad:

“Regarding Warren Kinsella’s column NDP not very new or democratic (May 31): Wow. I hope Kinsella feels better, having got that off his chest. Keeping such anger inside cannot be good for a Liberal, or anyone else with mountains of work to do. The substance of his rant is less impressive. I looked for the meat to back up the juicy headline and found he really didn’t have much to say.”

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