The Day After

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This is pretty interesting. So Harper got his stay from the axe. Given it was a two-hour meeting with the Governor General, I would have loved to have been in that room! Hopefully we'll know someday what was said, but interestingly it seems that it is unfolding kind of in line with my post last night... kind of...

Harper is still being inflammatory, of course, and I expect he will go down in history as one of the chief separatists Canada ever saw. I think he's done more for breaking apart Canada than any Bloc politician ever has. By continuing to refer to the Bloc consistently as “separatists”, he's done nothing to build any bridges with Québec. But then, why would he… not his style.

So it will be really fascinating to see what happens next. Harper has a really hard row to hoe. In his speech today after his meeting at Rideau Hall where he hid behind the skirt of Michaelle Jean instead of facing a confidence vote in Parliament (a vote he brought upon himself), he talked about consulting with the opposition parties, and indicated he will try and find consensus. But will he actually be able to turn this around enough to survive a budget vote in January 2009? His inconsistency has destroyed his credibility, and I don’t trust him. How can his colleagues? And he certainly shows no signs of contrition here.

It also raises a good question within the Conservative party. What to do with Stephen Harper? As one journalist noted this morning, it’s pretty likely now that they’ll not win a majority government with him at the helm. With so many opportunities for him to be a real statesman in the last couple of weeks, he clearly cannot rise to the challenge. At least Dion in his reaction speech opened the door to being able to support the government’s budget in January 2009, but only if there are huge changes in the demeanour of the government. And as I’ve said before, I don’t think that’s in Harper’s DNA (sorry, Stockwell, but I just had to take your expression there).

So what will happen now? Well, I think there will be very minor consultation with the opposition parties over the next six weeks. I think Harper will also crack into the Conservative war chest and mount a campaign to continue to discredit the opposition parties, and drive further wedges into the cracks he’s created, increasing the furvour over national unity, all as part of centrifuge. Behind-the-scenes lobbying (and who knows what other tactics) of non-Conservative MPs will occur to either try to get them to cross the floor, or vote with the Harper government. Parliament will reconvene in late January 2009, where not enough will have been done for the opposition parties to support the Harper government. The budget will fail a vote, and we’ll be watching Rideau Hall again to see what happens.

The hard part then, of course, is that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals will have a leader that Canadians will want as a Prime Minister, and the NDP are not exactly in a position to form a government on their own, no matter how much Jack Layton would love to live at 24 Sussex. The coalition is fragile, because while the NDP and the Liberals can likely work together given their national perspective, the Bloc will have a difficult time if it maintains its Québec-first-and-only focus. It might work, but I’m not convinced. And I’m not sure that Canadians will be happy to be going back to the polls again only months after the last General Election.

So here we are, in a political and national unity mess, in the midst of a global economic crisis that is affecting Canada, thanks to you, Stephen Harper. The economic stress was enough, thanks very much, without you making a bloody mess of everything else. Your arrogance has not served Canadians. And I don’t think you have the ability to fix this and do the right thing. Will you surprise me?