Thank You Paul Wells For Confirming My Suspicions

I've been writing a lot lately on how Jack Layton and Stephen Harper colluded to bring down the Liberals.

Forget that Layton's complicity meant that we lost a national childcare program, an aboriginal agreement that would have gone a long way toward righting years of wrong, and any real attempt at addressing climate change.

Jack Layton has had one goal and one goal only. Improving the lot of Jack Layton.

James Laxer, an NDP insider agrees, and wrote two scathing articles on the direction that Layton was taking the party.

Fake Left, Go Right: An insider’s take on Jack Layton’s game of chance

How to rehabilitate the NDP: With its exclusive fixation on winning more seats, the NDP has sacrificed the opportunity to build a truly progressive movement. On the 75th anniversary of the CCF, James Laxer argues that to save the present, we need to remember the past

I've been angry with Layton for abandoning us, but now realize that he was never on our side in the first place.

I'm giving his new MPs a chance, judging them on their own merit. But no more free rides for the NDP leader.

Journalist Paul Wells also recently had a lightbulb moment, and dug up an article he had written in 2006. From the archive: The secret plot to destroy the Liberals

... the contours of the emerging parliamentary battlefield became clearer. It quickly became almost as interesting to watch the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois as to watch the two larger parties. Something big is afoot.

Jack Layton's first question: “Mr. Speaker, 13 years ago a Liberal government was elected on a commitment to build child care spaces across the country. Three majority governments, eight surplus budgets, and not a single child care space was built.”

Not mentioning that a national childcare plan had been hammered out with the provinces, but never saw the light of day, because Layton had joined with Harper to bring down the Liberals before it had a chance.

Besides, the opposition is there to hold the government to account, not attack their political opponents.

And Harper was well pleased with his protege: “The NDP managed to substantially increase the number of seats that [it] won in the last election. As we know, it is important to everyone, including the government, that we have an opposition party that is both national in scope and principled in its approach. We wish the member well in building that kind of opposition, as long, as, of course, he remains in opposition.”

The next day Layton was hammering away at the Liberals environmental record, not mentioning that fact that it was he who sabotaged Kyoto.

This last election campaign was the most bizarre on record, and the most fraudulent. I can't help thinking that the entire thing was engineered in advance. An NDP "surge" that came from nowhere, and based on extremely convoluted figures, with a margin of error that put them in the fiction category.

But if it was a scheme, did it turn out the way Layton was promised it would? Did he expect to become leader of the Opposition in a minority, where he would have had teeth. But if he was also swindled, I feel little sympathy.

The Liberals did not collapse, they were assassinated. But it looks like the accomplice, may be the only one paying for the crime.