I don’t know, when the Prime Minister of Canada tells everyone a hundred times how he anticipates the outcome of the next election, I just can’t resist writing it down. Kinda nutty. Anyway, here’s my column from the print edition, in which I parse Jim Flaherty’s barn-burner speech and some recent Harper remarks to re-ignite — yet again! — the old Conservatives-vs.-coalition debate.
I don’t know, when the Prime Minister of Canada tells everyone a hundred times how he anticipates the outcome of the next election, I just can’t resist writing it down. Kinda nutty. Anyway, here’s my column from the print edition, in which I parse Jim Flaherty’s barn-burner speech and some recent Harper remarks to re-ignite — yet again! — the old Conservatives-vs.-coalition debate.
But here’s the fun part: it’s a debate among opponents of the Harper government, who just can’t decide whether a coalition is a silly idea that Harper keeps raising as a red herring, or whether it’s a perfectly natural alignment of Parliamentary forces that nobody should dare criticize. Which cognitive dissonance is, as I admit I’ve written on several occasions, at least as much his opponents’ problem as Stephen Harper’s.