Iggy probably doesn't care about his and the Liberals' chances, which, according to this poll, aren't looking promising in the least. He's a-goin'-to-electoral-Vegas, baby, so it's double or nothing.
Complicating it for Ignatieff:
"If there is an election issue there will be two things. Obviously the economy, and where we're going as the economy improves, and what kind of deficit we may or may not have as a result and how we pay for that," Docherty said Monday during an interview with CTV News Channel.
Clearly, the Tories look good on "the economy", bringing Canada out of recession pretty much first in the world (first, in fact, if you don't trust the numbers claimed by such nations as China, who tend to lie pathologically). The Tories can also say that it wasn't their idea in the first place to run a monstrous deficit, as they were literally blackmailed/forced into it by the Liberals and other Leftist parties, who can't credibly say that the deficit is the Tories' fault- not at all.
Besides, it's not the Tories' recession; it's the world's. And the Left's, too, as they caused it in the first place with their US Democratic Party's forced policies of making the banks give loans to many folks who couldn't repay them, causing a massive crash which had a devastating global domino effect. I can't help but wonder whether it was gross stupidity and insanity on the part of the Left, or if some socialist masterminds amongst them deliberately set things in motion, building in a trigger mechanism available for the purposes of forcing a crash at a time convenient to them (during the Presidential election to give the Democratic candidate an edge).
"And the second issue will be leadership. It will be very much Mr. Ignatieff, Mr. Harper, who is the better leader? The Liberals are much more comfortable now with Mr. Ignatieff than they were with Stephane Dion. So they're not afraid to make leadership a bit of an issue in this campaign."
Sure, but Canadians already know and are reasonably comfortable with PM Harper, who's done an admirable job in the face of overwhelming hardship and horrific luck. Harper succeeded on so many fronts against daunting odds, and this proves his leadership acumen. Ignatieff? He can't even get the formerly-automatically-resilient Liberals to top Tory popularity during a terrible depression!
Speaking of leadership, the Tories are about to neutralize Employment Insurance as an election issue by bringing forth their own reform package for the program.
I predict that this move will prove quite strategically brilliant and take it off the radar screen as an issue that could have been a problem for the Tories with respect to some swing voters, particularly those who might've swung from the NDP to the Liberals, and who might not see any reason to thusly swing if they perceive the Tories' reform to be reasonable. Thus the reform may well keep the votes split on the Left, denying the Liberals their hoped-for strategic-voting advantage on that side of the ideological spectrum.
Sounds reasonable, boding well for the Tories. Job retraining and extending benefits specifically for that purpose, not just for the helluvit like the Liberal socialists want to do. Other sensible innovations like allowing the self-employed to benefit from coverage, which makes sense and is fair, plus would spread the risk by adding their contributions to the pot, helping keep the premiums reasonably under control. They're good reforms in the minds of a conservative like me, making far more sense than just, simplistically, communistically, giving folks a check for working a few weeks (just six?) and then doing nothing most of the year. You'll agree that the Tories have a reasonable, prudent, workable, sustainable, fiscally-responsible reform package, unless you're a brainless commie who'd only consider either the mostly-leftist Libs or, even more likely, the NDP or the Bloc, both of whom are always communistic.The reforms will be targeted at helping long-tenured workers who have lost their jobs during the recession, the minister said, adding there will be improvements to job training programs. This may mean extending benefits for those needing more time to acquire new job skills.
The minister also suggested that further expansion of the reduced work week and work sharing programs was also being examined. And so was the idea of introducing more generous maternity and parental leave benefits especially for the self-employed.
The Minister accused Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff of being more concerned with his own political future by wanting to go into an election this fall rather then working for the welfare of the unemployed.
Well, duh... of course, being "liberals", despite their cloying, annoying, unbelievable we-care-and-have-compassion-and-the-other-guys-will-steal-candy-from-your-babies rhetoric, the Liberals pretty much only care about themselves, not about ordinary Canadians, after all. We know those guys, those Liberals. Everything they do is designed more for the purpose of helping them get and keep power and get more money flowing their way and their cronies' way. They're smarting from not being able to keep the tax-dollars-to-Liberals cashflow running as whitewater-rapidly as they want it, as fast as they're used to having it coming. This is a chief reason why they're so badly itching to try to regain power right fecking now(!!!), to hell with the odds, for they're desperate, like a hopeless problem gambler who feels it's his final faint hope to put everything he's got on the table and roll the dice and hope for his luck to change. Plan B? Simple- as Ignatieff said, he'll just go back to Harvard. As for the Liberal Party, hey, what does he care? Why would he give a rat's bumhole about the Liberals, after all- I mean, the Liberals, whom he knows well enough by now, are rat's bumholes anyway. Oops- now I sound just like that scary Obamite, Van Jones!
Poor Michael Ignatieff. Should've resisted the urge to pursue a chance to achieve false glory and stayed in his comfy Harvard ivory tower and just been himself, been true to his self. He coveted. He
I guess Michael Ignatieff really doesn't care if he wins or loses... or if the Liberal Party wins or loses. Like hell he even cares about the Liberal Party. He'd have tried to be Conservative leader if he saw the remotest possibility of that happening (of course, then he'd be a bigger liablity for the Tories than he was for the well-protected-by-the-Liberal-Friendly-Big-Media Liberals, with the Liberals using all of his dirty baggage, eg. being AWOL for 34 years, his praise for Bush and the war on Iraq, favoring torture, etc., against him at each and every single opportunity, successfully making swinging voters think he's "scary").
Of course, there's still a chance that some Liberals will talk Iggy out of dragging the Party kicking and screaming into the political tar pit, deep within the proverbial dark, woody political wilderness...
Now for a little interlude, which I'll call "The End of the Liberal Menace: A Documentary".
The End of the Liberal Menace: A Documentary
That fooker was hard to finish off, wasn't he?
Oh, and here's Warren Kinsella, the guy who'll most likely be running the Liberals' election War Room and telling Ignatieff et al what to say:
Well, Warren, I'm sooooo a-shakin'...
