Pictured: CTV Global Media — Bought and paid for by the Conservatives!
Our good friend “Trusty Tory” wanted me to check out this video of today’s Mike Duffy Live program (which I missed, darn it), presumably so that I could enjoy the spectacle of CTV’s corpulent, chrome-domed clown prince of political spin gleefully rubbing his flabby grubhooks together and mordantly chortling, not only over the woeful state of disrepair the Liberals find themselves in with respect to the province of Quebec (e.g., Paul Martin’s riding of LaSalle-Émard has no money and no candidate! Outremont has no candidate!), but at the juicy prospect of a supposed “civil war” within that particular wing of the party.
Yes, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Mulroney has been completely forgotten and the “big blue wave” is rolling in again! And this is news on what planet? It’s a well known fact that the Quebec wing of the party has been an absolute trainwreck for years now for a variety of reasons and that support from the Bloc has been decaying as the romance of separatism inexorably fades away. Dion can’t count on anything outside of Montréal and even those ridings can’t be considered entirely “safe” anymore. Likewise, much the same can be said of Duceppe’s former strongholds. And so Duffy presents us with the completely obvious scenario that the entire election might hinge on the Conservatives winning big in Quebec. Well duh!
If that actually turns out to be the case, which by no means is an entirely certain thing, there will be a delicious irony of sorts in seeing the party that started as a populist movement in the West that shared much in common with grassroots separatist movements joining forces with disaffected Quebecers, many of them former separatists also it has to be assumed, to form the next government of this country. That seems like a rather unlikely and potentially quite volatile mix to me, but it could work I suppose. One has to wonder however what it is that unites them ideologically speaking… is it perhaps a foggy kind of “autonomist” position that both camps seem to find quite attractive, or is it simply the desire to be in power and rake in all the privilege and federal pork that naturally comes with power?