Okay, so the consensus on these boards seems pretty much unanimous in favour of bringing down the Tory government and replacing it with this coalition. I ahve to admit that I ahve some doubts and concerns and would love to hear some arguments that might convince me otherwise.
My doubts are as follows:
-I don't believe, for a second, that this is really about the lack of a stimulus package in the economic update. I think that was jsut a pretext, jsut the excuse they could use to topple the government and take power.
-I don't know what kind of stimulus package teh coaliton would be proposing but I certainly don't want it to involve racking up massive deficits in order to provide multi-billion dollar bailouts for auto companies who ahve operated incompetently and for years made shitty cars that nobody wants to buy.
-I think the motivation is more anger over teh plan to end government subsidies of political parties. It is spiteful and vindictive towards Harper who was spiteful and vindictive towards his opponents. But I don't think that's a good enough reason to topple the government.
-I'm not a constitutional lawyer and whatever teh actual law may be, this simply seems incredibly undemocratic to me. Love him or hate him, Harper won the last election fair and square. He was about 10 seats shy of a majority and got twice as many seats as the Liberal party. Having a prime minister whose aprty only won 77 seats simply seems undemocratic to me.
-I know that there ahve been some precedents in this area but this seems different somehow. For example when there was a coalition in Ontario between teh Libs and NDPers after the 85 election, the Liberals that formed the government were still the party with the most seats, very close to a majority.
-In 1979 when Trudea defeated teh Clark government that had been elected less than a year earlier, he did not become PM immediately. The GG called an election, Trudea won it and he became prime minister. I am not comfortable with the idea of Dion taking office without having an election first. I also know the Liberals do not want to go into an election because they know they will lose and lose badly. If they are so scared of an election, it's clear they know that they do not have the public support.
-Dion did not jsut lose the last election, he was overwhelmingly rejected with extreme prejudice. He became the least successful liberal leader since confederation, became a national punchline and looked future to a career as an answer to an obscure trivia question. How he could go from overwhelming ass-kicking to PM in 6 weeks with no election strikes me as absurd.
-In the midst of a global economic crisis, I have absolutely no confidence in the leadership abilities of Dion.
-This coalition is handing a veto to a separatist party. I worry that this will mean massively disproportionate funding of Quebec and could lead to the implementation of French-only policies for federal departments and services in teh province.
-Given that teh GG was appointed to this plum position by a previous Liberal government and given that her husband is alleged to have strong separatist feelings, I question how neutral she can be in this situation.
If anyone wants to take a crack at addressing these, I'd love to hear it.
