• So my Mom and I drove up to the cabin, yesterday, to open it up for the first time in 2011. It’s a late start. Last year I opened it at the start of April. So we drove, and talked as we passed the Liberal and Conservative and NDP signs.
• My Mom, like me, is an Alberta Liberal. That’s hardcore. If you’re a Liberal from Alberta, you believe in your party like no else does in Canada. Because your party never wins.
• She asked me how bad it’s going to be. I said things were moving around, quite a bit, but that it might get pretty ugly. We might even be reduced to third party status, I told her, for the first time I think ever. She didn’t like that. How did that happen, she asked.
• Three reasons, I said.
• One, those ads. Ignatieff has run a pretty good campaign – surprisingly good – but the Cons defined him before he could define himself, I said. “Those ads were disgusting, but they worked,” I said. “And you can’t fix in 36 days what took almost 36 months to break.”
• Two, Ignatieff himself. It’s not that being cool and aloof and distant is a sin – Harper is all of those things, too. “But we already had Harper, and knew Harper,” I said. “Why trade one cool and aloof and distant guy for another one?” My mother nodded. “He doesn’t have the passion of Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Chretien,” she said. “Your father loved those men.”
• Three, Harper himself. “He’s tricked everyone,” I said. “He’s used his minorities to convince a lot of people that he can be trusted with a majority. That he won’t be radical.” My mother shook her head. “He will be,” she said. “People will be sorry, but it’ll be too late.”
• And that’s how it went. We headed North to the lake, and we passed a lot more Conservative signs than Liberal ones. “Get ready,” I told her. “It’s going to be something else.”

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• GOTV! Get Out The Vote!  In this morning’s Sun column, I argue that there is only one day that really matters now – Election Day.  And that, when it comes to GOTV, it is the Reformatories – not the Liberals (despite their NGP rep) nor the NDP (despite their Quebec-based surge) – that have the edge.  To wit: “The televised leaders’ debates now behind us, there is really only one more day of significance in Election 2011 — and that’s Election Day itself.  The party platforms have been released and analyzed; the leaders are as known as they are ever going to be; the candidates have all done plenty of door-knocking; the media have covered all there is to cover.  Following Easter/Passover, many voters are going to have a pretty good sense of who they plan to vote for (if they plan to vote at all, that is).  The polls are all over the map, and some days it’s pretty hard to predict the outcome. But if you put all the polls together, the aggregate strongly suggests what we had is what we’re going to get.”
• I won something! David Olive, who is being so kindly to Yours Screwly that it makes me nervous, has suggested that best quote of campaign 2011 has emanated from this space: “Stephen Harper: hook him up to a lie detector, and he’d knock the power out from here to Mexico.”
• Mabel, where’s the smelling salts? Check this out: Lorne Gunter lauds the Dippers – for being alone in offering a positive vision for the country. Meanwhile, pigs are flying by my window with reckless abandon, and a snowball fight has commenced in the Ninth Circle of Hell.
• Me, I’m off to open the cabin with my Mom and my youngest! Here’s pic of the day – with an interesting link/theory, if you click it…

 

 

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I promise, Senator Olive, to maintain this web site, and to be as much of a pain in the ass as ever.

So help me God, etc.

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• This one’s gonna be short. It’s Saturday, I have to ferry my boys to and from hockey tryouts (yes, the GTHL, like Elections Canada and its advance polls, actually scheduled tryouts on the holiest weekend of the year for Christians and Jews).  So I’m putting up some videos instead of writing a bunch of stuff.
• But first…first, let me say thanks to the 200-almost folks who commented on yesterday’s soul-baring post, and the equally-big number who emailed me.  I’m honoured by the kind words, the support, and I don’t have much more to tell you at this point.  Just that I’ve decided I want to be part of the LPC’s rebuilding as a candidate – and that I’ll need help (psychiatric and otheriwse).
• Now, to the vids. First one is from David Akin’s show last night, wherein a couple of us attempt to explain Wacko Jacko’s huge popularity in Quebec and what (if anything) it means for the rest of Canada.  The second video relates to a story, and assorted Tweets, that were pinging around yesterday – and how some were saying Stephen Harper is a rank hypocrite on the coalition question.  I posted the video quite a while ago, as did others, so I guess some folks missed it.  Here it is again.  And, finally, the Libs are getting in on the bash Wacko Jacko fun.

Warren winces whilst visually demonstrating Wacko Jacko’s uplifting polls.

Stephen Harper: hook him up to a lie detector, and he’d knock the power out from here to Mexico.

 

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Looking for info on “harrypickup@hotmail.com,” 99.224.115.63.

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• Are yesterday’s polls so astonishing? Seen here and here and here, there can’t be much doubt anymore: we seem to be at the start of a realignment in Canadian federal politics.  About two years ago, you’ll recall, I was tossed on the political barbecue pit by Michael Ignatieff and his Super-Smart Senior Staff (4S, for short) for having the temerity to suggest, out loud, that Messrs. Chretien, Broadbent and Romanow were right.“I have no relationship with Warren Kinsella,” sniffed the fellow for whom I’d busted my hump for a couple years, and that was that.  My sin? Agreeing with, you know, the most successful Liberal leader in history: suggesting that those of us who opposed Conservatives clearly needed to get together if we were ever to defeat Conservatives.  And, more broadly, that Canada – like other democracies around the world – seemed to be heading towards a binary political universe, whether the political classes approved or not.
• What now? Well, that’s a really good question.  If the NDP make history, and carry their current popularity past the weekend and into next week, they could very well form the Official Opposition.  The instant that happens, as I told this PostMedia reporter yesterday in a long chat, the aforementioned Ignatieff and 4S are gone.  They’ll all have to resign on election night if they are to escape the enraged, pitchfork-wielding grassroots Grits. Even in 1984’s rout we held onto Opposition status.  With that gone – and the staff, and budget and influence that brings – it will be a long, hard slog back.
• We get emails, etc. Yesterday afternoon, not a few Gritty folks called and emailed to say, ruefully, “Damn, I guess Chretien and Broadbent and dinks like you were right.  We should’ve gotten together with the NDP when we had the chance.” My response, and as I plan to write in my Hill Times space on Monday:  “Uh-huh.  Forgive me for repeating myself, which I do all the time, but why the Hell would the NDP be interested now?  They look like they’re going to be the Official Opposition, and are on their way up.  Why would they want to get together with a party on its way down? The opportunity has passed.  Enjoy the next decade of misery.” Well, okay, maybe I wasn’t that harsh, but I was certainly thinking it, in my smallish cranium.  I’m just pissed off, you know?
• Now is the time for all good persons to come to the aid of the party: I’m pissed off, I’m gloomy, I’m mostly sad about what has happened.  And, in fairness, it’s not all Michael Ignatieff’s fault: every federal Liberal is to blame.  The leadership wars, the policy vacuum, the lousy fundraising and recruitment, the lack of election readiness, the self-defeating culture within the party itself: all of those things, taken together, have taken us to this remarkable moment.  Personally, I don’t plan to sit out the rebuilding.  After sifting through yesterday’s polls, I announced to myself – and now to y’all – that it’s time for me to take another stab at elected office.  Not sure where, or when, but that’s what I’m going to do.  You read it here first, etc.
• Pic of the day: Get used to this, too.  He deserves to be happy.

 

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Or, as I sometimes remind myself:  “I have no relationship with Warren Kinsella.”

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An anonymous reader send me the full transcript of the analysis of Peter Kent’s anti-Israel “documentary” by Daniel Kamin and George Gruen for the American Jewish Committee’s Institute of Human Relations.  It makes clear that Peter Kent’s NBC program promoted some despicable anti-Israel propaganda – and that he is a hypocrite, or worse, to now claim to be a pro-Israel advocate in this election campaign.

A sampling of what Kamin and Gruen said:

• “[Kent’s documentary] on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank neglected the context of the occupation, failing to give any historical perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.”
• “[Kent’s approach was] misleading and unbalanced.”
• “NBC was quite clear on what it saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be all about. Showing pictures of the subdued Palestinians who were rounded up after a Jew was stabbed in Hebron’s Casbah (marketplace), NBC’s Peter Kent asserted: ‘This is what Palestinians fear every day: Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . . This is what the occupation is all about’…As John Cony of the New York Times wrote in his July I review of the program, NBC should have included a map and a brief history lesson to tell its viewers what the occupation is all about.”
• NBC’s Peter Kent reported (p. 4) that “every day Arabs are arrested for resisting the occupation. ‘Security offenses’ like promoting the outlawed PLO, or flying the PLO flag, or displaying a picture of Yassir Arafat, mean jail.” Other security offenses, such as planting bombs and stabbing civilians were notoriously absent from Mr. Kent’s litany of Palestinian security offenses. Indeed, a Jewish civilian shopper was stabbed by a Palestinian on the very day Peter Kent visited Hebron, but Mr. Kent’s report focused solely on the Israeli reaction to this act of terror.”
• “There were repeated references to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the spokesman for the Palestinians…NBC neglected to state that the United States also considers the PLO to be a terrorist organization.”
• “Why did this NBC special not include these significant developments which occurred in the weeks before the program was aired? Had these events been noted, they would have challenged the simplistic view that the Israeli occupation is the  problem and a monolithic, peace-loving PLO is the solution.”
• “[In Kent’s documentary] the Palestinians were portrayed as genuinely favoring a two-state solution, when, in fact, a poll taken last year revealed that 78 percent of West Bank Palestinians rejected a state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the ultimate solution to the conflict. These Palestinians saw the establishment of an independent state in the occupied territories as only an interim step toward full control over all of what is now Israel.”
• “Unbalanced coverage of the conflict…. It is reprehensible that NBC hung this [terrorist] label only on Israeli Jews (p. 22), while refraining from categorizing either the bus bombing or the stabbing as acts of terrorism. There were no visual images to show the wounds of the victims or the suffering of the families of the six Israelis killed in the bus incident. This sympathy was disproportionately with the Palestinians.”
• “[In Kent’s broadcast] the clear implication was that Israel is responsible for the failure of the peace process. The program neglected to mention the Arab and Palestinian intransigence which has blocked peace negotiations.”
• “When [NBC] mentioned apartheid in connection with Israel, [they] exploded an emotional powder keg. The inflammatory linking of Israel and South Africa served only to confuse and prejudice the salient issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is difficult to promote dialogue between the parties concerned when one prejudges one of the sides so completely. A more objective, impartial inquiry by NBC would have helped promote public understanding and not simply strengthened misconceptions and fanned passions. We hope that future NBC programs will clarify the issues and also examine viable options for a just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

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• Anyone see this NDP surge in Quebec coming? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I sure didn’t!  In fact, here’s a contest: can one of you point to a single member of the commentariat who saw this historic change coming?  Name one. They have to have made this prediction more than in the past week, and they have to have said the NDP was going to eclipse the Bloc.
• Your Daily Nanos Crack™: After falling in every part of the country, just two or so weeks ago, the NDP is on the move – and the other parties are super unhappy about it.  My Liberals are down, the Tories remain flat, and the Bloc is way down. Could the NDP become the Official Opposition?  I doubt it.  But if these results carry to May 2, Liberals (in places like the GTA) and Conservatives (in places like the Lower Mainland) are going to lose seats to Jack Layton.  And that’s incredible, baby.
• Why’d it happen? Well, I’ve been a broken record on this subject, but let me say it again: under Ignatieff, the Liberal Party has moved too far to the right – outflanking Harper on Afghanistan, calling the Oilsands an instrument of “national unity,” musing about charging user fees for Medicare. And, most notably, refusing to even consider getting together with Jack Layton – which further suggested Iggy was right-wing. All of those things, and more, has persuaded Quebecois – and progressives elsewhere in the country, too – that the Liberal Party of Canada has become a paler shade of blue.  And they don’t like it.  I know I sure don’t, and I’m writing about it for a coming story in The Walrus.
• Coalition redux: I did plenty of radio and TV on the won’t-die coalition subject yesterday. Here’s sort of what happened in every case. Q: Did Michael Ignatieff make a mistake by talking about cooperation with the other parties post-election?  A: Yes, because the Cons have been able to persuade Iggy and Layton that cooperation equals coalition.  It isn’t.  Q: Why is coalition so unpopular?  A:  It isn’t!  In places like Quebec, it’s hugely popular! Q: It is? A: Yes!  And even Stephen Harper could do it on the Right – bringing together Reformers, Alliancers and Conservatives – why can’t we do it on the Left? I mean, that’s the only reason why Harper won, right?  A: Er, right.
• More Con sleaze and scandal: Forget about Your Daily Nanos Crack™- it’s Your Daily Conservative Scandal Thing™, courtesy of Bruce Carson.  “[Harper] must explain fully to voters before election day what his relationship with Carson was and how the man got hired. Harper is a notorious control freak, yet he’s trying to pass the buck. He’s trying to blame everyone else. He said Tuesday and Wednesday the security clearance “system” had failed.  Nonsense. Harper has known Carson well for many years, employing him both in government and in opposition. Carson wasn’t some stranger answering a want ad for a job watering the plants.”
• Cons wary of Sun News? I was in there for most of yesterday, and you’d never know it. I think the new network is experiencing some first-week growing pains, and will eventually settle down.  I remember Newsworld looking like a fourteenth-century woodcut when it aired, many years ago – and how CTV was once seen as an extension of the Conservative Party’s comms team, too.  Sun News will find its way, as all the others did.  And, yes, they asked me to wear a pair of pumps and sleeveless number, yesterday, and I said no.
• Pic of the day: Look, it’s Tony Clement, illegally siphoning off millions for his riding! Caption contest!

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My first Sun News thing that I’ve seen, and it was a doozy.

I admonish Brian for making stuff up about the Liberal platform. He looks suitably chastened.

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