Yesterday’s postings by me, GritChik, Dammit Janet and others led to an eruption in nasty comments by partisan Conservatives here and elsewhere, some even paid Hudak staffers. Their responses took three forms:
Hudak’s desire to defund abortion is old news, who cares, blah blah blah.
I’m glad he plans to defund abortion, and it’ll happen when we win the election, blah blah blah.
You can decide for yourself whether any of those arguments are compelling. Me, I intend to continue to highlight what – in any political race – is a very important issue: namely, shouldn’t people know that PC leader Tim Hudak has never renounced his stated desire to defund abortion?
Here is that position, in black and white, which has never changed:
It hasn’t captured many peoples’ attention, yet, but it has been known in Ontario political circles for a long time. For instance, Hudak became a strong supporter of rabidly anti-choice Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day because of his position on social issues like abortion (he called Day’s stances “great policy,” Hamilton Spectator, July 8, 2000). Back when he actively opposed John Tory’s leadership bid (Globe, July 26, 2004), and was co-chairing Jim Flaherty’s campaign, Hudak defended published attacks on Tory’s pro-choice stance. And so on.
Tim Hudak would defund abortion. It hasn’t partcularly been a secret. It’s just that some people hadn’t noticed.
If you’re like me, you get up every morning, check the moat, check the drawbridge, observe the changing of the guard, swill some grog, and then start reading National Newswatch!
I’m about to do Sun TV – on guns, and on the Hudak PCs’ claim that keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is “useless.”
Then again, maybe it all makes sense: Hudak wants to put criminals in your neighbourhoods (see below) – and now, apparently, he thinks it’s okay to make it easier for them to get their hands on guns, too.
And the Globe’s Siri Agrell is right, as I wrote in this book: some may say that they don’t like critical ads about a politician’s public record. But they pay attention to them, and are motivated by them. As I’ve said a million times before, there’s nothing “negative” about shining a bright light on an opponent’s public record.
The ad released yesterday – seen again above this post – is merely a collection of things the media, not Liberals, have said about Tim Hudak. The PCs, who can’t take a punch without crying like little babies, have been shrieking mightily about them – on this web site and elsewhere. It seems their hero Harper is permitted to do ’em, but not anybody else. Uh-huh. Pot, kettle, black, etc.
Ontario Liberals are indeed in a tough fight to win the support of Ontarians. After being in government for nearly a decade, and after having made some tough decisions, I’d expect nothing else. In fact, I had frankly expected we’d be further behind, at this point, than we are.
What you shouldn’t expect is that we will simply roll over and hand over the keys to a dishonest, facile politician like Tim Hudak (cf., said he’d “stop the HST in its tracks,” now plans to keep it; said full-day kindergarten is a “frill,” now claims he’ll keep it; attacked human rights laws repeatedly, now insists he’s changed his mind, etc. etc.). We won’t do that, because we genuinely believe Hudak is in it for himself, and not Ontarians. He’s a phony, fatuous fratboy.
And we will therefore fight for every vote until the very last moment.
Most of the calls came from smear-for-hire call centres in Florida or the Dakotas, which were beyond the reach of Canadian law.
“A good Conservative friend informed me they had actually been utilizing a central office for phone calls and that none of them emanated from London itself,” Pearson wrote on his much-read blog. “They had poured big money from afar into influencing my riding.”
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