Confidence

Opposition's fiscal support of Harper could paint them into a corner

Michael Ignatieff may be disappointed in a few days' time when he watches his fellow opposition parties vote on the ways and means measure being introduced by the Conservative party.

NDP leader Jack Layton has tenuously voiced his support for the motion -- although he's noted that "the problem with the Conservatives [is that] the press release comes out, but then the devil is in the details."

Now Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe has followed Layton's lead and announced that he will support the bill -- the last fiscal bill the Conservatives will introduce before the Liberals' planned confidence motion at the end of this month (or early in October).

The Conservative party will remain secure in office for at least that time, pushing the time for a possible election back to mid-November or early December.

But there is one thing that even Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff will have to admit when he watches the BQ and NDP prop up the government to fight another day: it undermines any credibility for Ignatieff's own promised non-confidence motion.

In Parliamentary terms, there tends to be a word reserved for the sentiments of the opposition whose fiscal bills they support:

Confidence.

It would be hard for the NDP or Bloc to jump behind a Liberal non-confidence motion when they've been helping that government advance its fiscal agenda -- in this case, extending additional Employment Insurance coverage to long-tenure workers and supplying funds to pay for the Home Renovation Tax Credit.

Regardless of whatever campaign strategy-related goals are actually motivating the Bloc and NDP -- and speculation has been all the rage for weeks -- this dilemma is particularly distressing for Michael Ignatieff.

As Margaret Wente speculates in the Globe and Mail, Ignatieff himself is facing a severe crisis of political identity.

Ignatieff needs to establish himself as a "warrior king" before he gets saddled with the wimpy label applied to his predecessor, Stephane Dion.

Ignatieff once seemed to think that being a warrior king was a lot like being a philosopher king, just with tougher words.

But, as Wente notes, "The trouble is that up till now it's been all talk. You can only bluff and bluster so many times without looking silly."

"It's not hard not to conclude that Canada is a stage set for Mr Ignatieff's fantasy life," Wente continues. "He has always been torn between being a man of letters and a man of action, pulled between the ivory tower and the battlefield. He has spent time in nasty war zones."

Wente notes that Ignatieff lacks the political instincts and the killer instinct to defeat Stephen Harper in an election.

"Stephen Harper does not deserve such luck," she concludes. "His opponent is yet another man who vastly overestimates his own abilities. Mr Ignatieff is looking more and more like Mr. Dion, without the accent."

Like Dion, Ignatieff seemingly cannot only not command the confidence of his fellow oppositon leaders, but is seemingly losing the confidence of his caucus as well.

If the opposition parties cannot muster enough confidence in Michael Ignatieff to support his non-confidence motion they'll essentially be painting themselves into a confidence corner.

If they aren't willing to pull the plug on Harper sooner by voting down his fiscal bills, it will take a matter of substantive consequence later to convince them to vote him down at all.

In the meantime, it seems that Stephen Harper may enjoy greater confidence than Michael Ignatieff does as opposition leader.

That bodes all kinds of troublesome for the would-be philosopher king.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Dan Shields - "The BQ Blinks First"

Counterweights - "'Separatists' will keep Harper minority government alive (once again, with feeling?)"

Chuckman's Choice of Words - "Ignatieff: Can You Trust This Guy?"

Leave This One to the Pros, Kids...

Cruickshank, Carlin not alone in their assessment of Mallick's "Mighty Wind"

In the wake of the CBC's mea culpa regarding Heather Mallick's "Mighty Wind" op/ed column, a distinct odour is spreading through some of the darkest corners of Canada's left-wing blogosphere.

It's the familiar stink of outrage.

The CBC is merely being gutless, and caving into right-wing interests, the consensus seems to be.

Yet the consensus among media professionals -- people who actually confront issues such as those surrounding the infamous Mallick article -- is that the CBC was precisely right in its judgment. As the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente points out, one need not even be a Palin supporter to figure this out:

"It's fun to bash Sarah Palin. I should know. I've been doing it for weeks. But nobody has bashed her quite as viciously as a semi-obscure columnist named Heather Mallick.

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look ... the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression," she wrote in a column that was posted Sept. 5 on the CBC's online news site. And she didn't stop there. She went on to refer to Republican men as "sexual inadequates," small-town Americans as "hicks" and "hillbillies," Bristol's boyfriend, Levi, as a "ratboy," and the Palins as terrible parents. "What normal father would want Levi 'I'm a fuckin' redneck' Johnson prodding his daughter?" she wondered.

Vitriolic drivel is all the rage these days. The blogosphere is full of it. But this drivel was bought and paid for by the CBC. And soon the organic waste material hit the fan. The National Post went ballistic. So did Fox News, which loves nothing better than denouncing the left-wing loonies who live up here in Canada.

"Is this what actually passes for commentary at a publicly funded broadcasting company in Canada?" seethed a Fox News babe. Even Fox's Greta Van Susteren got into the act. She called Ms. Mallick a "pig." Ms. Mallick was deluged with hate mail, and the CBC with hundreds of complaints. Ms. Van Susteren said it was all in fun and invited Ms. Mallick on the air, but she declined.

Ms. Mallick has professed shock at the hate mail she's received (tell me about it), while revelling in her new-found notoriety. But Sunday, the CBC finally ate crow and yanked the column from its website. "We erred in our judgment," said news publisher John Cruickshank, who called the column a "viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan" piece of political invective that should never have been published. The ombudsman had looked into the matter, and found many of her "most savage assertions lack a basis in fact." I'll say. For one thing, she obviously knows nothing about the sex lives of Republicans.

The Mallick affair is bad news for the CBC, because it reinforces the widespread belief the place is a hotbed of left-wing bias. That's not good news when a Tory government controls the purse strings. Nor is it entirely fair. The CBC's online commentary arm is not exactly the flagship of the network. It is a backwater that has served as a sort of semi-retirement home for aging lefties (think Judy Rebick) who could no longer find an outlet in the mainstream media and, one suspects, supplied copy cheap. They had little oversight and less influence - until now.

The truth about the CBC is more complicated. Its problem isn't an overt left-wing bias. Its problem is an earnest, mushy-liberal mindset that can scarcely entertain a contrarian idea. Its editors, producers and directors strive to be fair-minded. It's just hardly any of them would ever vote Tory. Oh, they try. Once they even had right-wing commentator David Frum guest-host The Current. But people were so shocked they never did it again.

Ironically, no one is more bothered by this groupthink than the top CBC managers themselves. More than one have told me that it drives them crazy. And it's no accident that left-wing faces such as Avi Lewis have recently decamped for the greener fields of English-language Al Jazeera. Although I haven't talked to Mr. Cruickshank (a former colleague), my guess is that part of his mandate is to vigorously encourage a wider range of world views. Too bad Ms. Mallick popped up to prove the critics right.

Meantime, I'm not feeling too sorry for Ms. Mallick. She is a sour, narrow-minded writer - the kind of who makes Michael Moore look like a world-class wit. Her reflexive anti-Americanism is heavy-handed and stale, to say nothing of casually racist. There are many, many ways of dissing Sarah Palin. But Ms. Mallick's naughty, coarse puerility is not among them."

This may be hard for lunatics like Lindsay Stewart to come to grips with, but plenty of people -- not merely right-wingers or denizens of the Free Republic website -- find Mallick's column objectionable, and unworthy of publishing.

But, hey, don't ask them -- they're merely professionals. What do they know?