parliament, from the French "parler", meaning to pout

I'm looking at that last post and I've decided it's clumps of horsepocky. Don't get me wrong: I haven't changed my mind about Harper and Duceppe. I think what they're doing goes against everything I feel about what parliamentary democracy is supposed to be. I just didn't explain myself well enough. I'm lucky noone reads this thing, or I'd have been shredded.

I should never blog when I'm in a rush to get out the door, basically.

It isn't that there is some protocol for a vote of non-confidence that hasn't been observed. The Conservatives and the Bloc obviously feel that they have a certain momentum towards toppling the Liberal party. They motioned for a vote, the vote took place, there were very few abstainers or absentees. The whole thing actually seems legitimate to me. Which contradicts what I said in the previous post.

What angers me about it is the fact that by pulling the non-confidence vote out of their asses, and consequently setting in motion a whole week of gear-grinding in parliament, the Conservatives have divorced the idea of an electoral mandate from the election we are soon going to have. Insofar as their impatience has had any effect at all, it has been to undermine the true value of the upcoming election. We'll be voting those bastards out of office, sure. But we won't be voting on policy.

Which is something that we could have had the opportunity to do, and insofar as this little premature evacuation has not had an effect, we still can.



What I am saying is that if there are any ideas heard over this coming summer about how to relieve Canada's crippled municipalities, create a potent defense strategy, creatively address the ever more rapidly growing divergence between the quality of life of our native population and the rest of Canada, posit a concrete strategy for foreign aid, or have any kind of effect on lots of other thing that we need to deal with yesterday, it will not be because of these childish dramatics we're witnessing now.

So some Quebec ad firms got pots of money for doing nothing. It's terrible, and it sickens me. But we have bigger problems than that to worry about, and if we're going to have an election we'd better take the opportunity to quit crying about our stubbed toe and see to the limb we've stuck in the buzzsaw.

(Why exactly Gilles Duceppe feels that he needs to take this stand before the budget is delivered is beyond me. His position on so many social issues would be well met by a Liberal-NDP budget. It shows a short-sightedness on his part that is distressing to see since he came off so sensibly in the last election's debates. Whatever. Separatist.)

This is not a Liberal apologia. It's perfectly valid to judge the governing party in light of what we know about them now, and it's reason enough to vote against them. But what does one who votes thus, vote for? Harper and Duceppe believe that this is not a very important question. If they did, they would wait for the budget to come down, and they would prepare a response to it.

The budget's release has already been bumped up. Not soon enough for some, I'm sure, but have you seen those things? They're huge. Making one has got to be pretty labour-intensive, and there's probably a lot of interns who are going to be broken in pretty harshly as it is.

Meanwhile, above the fray and lately totally impressing the hell out of me is Independent MP David Kilgour. He missed the vote to organize a press conference urging the PM to offer more, especially in the way of troops, in the Darfur region. Genocide: number two newsmaker this week!

We all need to calm the fuck down. People are waiting for us to get our act together. They'll wait a little longer, but we should, you know, make sure and do it. N'est-ce pas?