The Labourers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) today endorsed Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal Party of Canada for its commitment to help ease the economic pressure on middle-class families. "LIUNA represents working men and women in a wide range of industries — and Michael Ignatieff s platform and the Liberal Family Pack offer solutions that fit the priorities of our families."
"A Liberal government's policies will support stronger public pensions, create good-paying jobs for our workers, defend Canada's universal health care system, and help those in our society who need an extra hand – while at the same time offering a responsible fiscal plan that puts families first." LIUNA is a one of Canada's most powerful and respected trade unions with the goal to help improve wages, benefits and working conditions for its members. It has represented workers in North America for over a century, with diverse membership including )N workers in building construction, heavy construction and highway construction, manufacturing and commerce, health care and the public sector.
"The Liberal commitment to investing in middle-class families is in line with LIUNA's priorities. These are commitments that are important to us – but the Conservatives aren't interested in middle-class families and the NDP don't have a reliable plan to deliver on their promises. "On May 2nd, we encourage all of our members to vote Liberal because they offer voters the choice of a credible plan to help families now and defend public health care."
Let's hope it works. The NDP spending platform would be great if we were in better financial shape.
The Globe and Mail are endorsing Harper because he's kept on message and blah, blah, blah.
Of course he's kept on message. He doesn't take questions. Anyone can stay on message when they allow no one to challenge it.
Right across the country Conservative candidates are avoiding debates and all-candidates meetings. How can they be assessed when they can't be accessed?
John Baird refused an invitation to a media event at a homeless shelter, Rob Anders and Cheryl Gallant stormed out of meetings and most just fail to show up.
I don’t say this lightly. But the breadth and depth to which Harper has dismantled our environmental safeguards and failed to address significant threats to our health and prosperity, such as climate change, is beyond anything I could have imagined – and should be of grave concern to Canadians.
This is why I am speaking out. Over the past five years I worked endlessly to try to compel, convince and cajole the Harper government to take meaningful action to protect our environment.
We have to be realistic here. The NDP is not ready to form a government. They have a lofty platform filled with big expenditures, and no plan on how they will pay for them.
The only real alternative to the Conservatives are the Liberals. It's that simple. And as Dr. Raynolds says:
I want a Prime Minster that will listen to Canadians, who will respect democracy, who will respect the majority of Parliament that has said time and again that we must take action to reduce pollution, protect our environment and safeguard the health and well being of our kids and grandkids. This is why we need to do everything possible to get Harper out.
The conclusion that I’ve drawn is that the only way we can achieve this is by making sure that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff becomes Prime Minister. I believe he is a man that listens first, and then takes real action. I believe Mr. Ignatieff will respect democracy, will respect Parliament and will respect Canadians.
Forget the "surges", the "waves" and the polls. Our country depends on it.
For me there are two issues of overwhelming importance in this election. The first is the economy, not only in its own right but for what it means for our ability to finance the social programs we have created for ourselves. The second is the alarming state of our democracy: the decaying of Parliament’s ability to hold governments to account, and the decline, not unrelated, in Parliament’s own accountability to the people.
I can eliminate two options off the top. While both the NDP and the Greens offer appealing proposals for democratic reform, I can’t bring myself to vote for either. It isn’t only their policies—the enormous increases in spending and taxes, the ill-judged market interventions—but their personnel. Simply put, neither party is ready for government.
So the choice for me is between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And as I have wrestled with it, the ballot question that has occurred to me is this: would the Liberals do more harm to the economy than the Conservatives would do to democracy? Or perhaps: would the Liberals harm the economy more than the Conservatives would? Would re-electing the Conservatives do greater harm to our democracy than electing the Liberals? And: which concern should weigh more heavily in the balance?
This is what I try to tell people about Kingston. We are a moderate, Conservative, military town. People here usually see two options: Liberal or Conservative. I don't see a major shift to the NDP.
At the end of the day, with so many problems facing the country today, are we really prepared to go with an untested party? Neither the NDP nor the Green are prepared to govern.
As Coyne says, the economy is important, but our democracy is worth more. The Liberals already have a good record on the economy, and it was the Liberals who put things in place that safeguarded us from economic collapse.
I was a progressive Conservative supporter for much of my adult life, despite the fact that most of my family was Liberal. It caused a few disagreements around election time, but I've always been a realist. Centrist I guess you'd say.
My parents were both strong Liberals. Not in a hyper-partisan way. My dad was always politically engaged and I'd heard him criticise Pearson or Trudeau at times, and praise Diefenbaker and Stanfield.
Like me, he was a Canadian first. And like me he loved reading Dalton Camp's columns, though you got a sense that he might be holding back some expletives for my benefit.
I'm not sure why I was drawn to the Conservatives. Maybe it was just teenage rebellion, since my mom had pictures of Trudeau everywhere, including an almost full length one in the dining room. I started cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs in a Montreal Canadian household, probably for the same reason.
But perhaps it was more fundamental than that. I came to view the PCs as fiscally responsible but socially conscious. That was until Brian Mulroney blew that all out of the water, and blew up the party in the process.
Then Stephen Harper became leader of the Alliance Party, took over the PCs and gave it a right-wing, Republican style brand. As Flora MacDonald said, it was: "the destruction of a 150-year-old tradition that had done so much to develop this country" (The Toronto Star, November 14, 2003).
I voted NDP for the next two elections, the first time in protest and the second because I liked the local candidate. In 2008 I voted Liberal strategically, because I didn't like the direction this country was headed. And I also really liked the idea of the revenue neutral Green Shift.
My eventual endorsement of Michael Ignatieff did not come from a sudden shift to the Liberals, but from a personal liking. During the latest Liberal leadership race, I made a point of studying all contenders.
Dominic LeBlanc was the son of Romeo LeBlanc, from New Brunswick and of Acadian stock. So am I, so a definite plus. Bob Rae I already liked from his days in Ontario. My mother-in-law, one of the brightest women I've ever met, was a union activist and strong NDP supporter. However, I was afraid that Harper's National Citizens Coalition would just dredge up their old campaigns, and it could hurt his chances.
I wasn't as familiar with Michael Ignatieff, but knew he was an author, so I picked up a couple of his books. The first one I read was the Rights Revolution, from his 2000 Massey Lectures Series, and I was hooked.
He wrote like a Progressive Conservative. A Red Tory. Not "lefty drivel", as some might think, nor was it a testament to political correctness. He just clearly laid out our unique rights, as part of our Canadian culture; and the responsibilities that went along with preserving those rights.
If you watch the full half hour interview with Allan Gregg below, you'll see a man not at all like the man that the right-wing noise machine is portraying. Frank, open, honest, but above all Canadian.
His books have been translated into 12 different languages. He has covered both the atrocities of the Kurdistan and Rwandan genocides, and the uplifting tearing down of the Berlin Wall, for the BBC.
Gregg calls him a "big idea guy", but he can also see small wonders in big stories.
One of my favourite, dog eared passages from his award winning book Blood and Belonging tells the story of a grieving father who found solace in the photos he carried with him.
I am standing directly in front of the Moscow Hotel in downtown Belgrade in the middle of a listless, slowly disintegrating demonstration against the Milosevic regime. A crowd of several hundred people has been there all morning and is slowly discovering that it is too small to make anything happen. In the middle of the crowd is an old man wearing a Chetnik hat. I go up and talk to him. He is in his 70s and he fought with Mihailovic against Tito during the Second World War. Does he have sons, I ask him, and if so, have they seen fighting this time?
Calmly, he takes out his wallet and shows me three passport-size colour pictures: each of his sons, all young men in their 20s. Two are dead, killed on the front during the Croatian war. The third is in prison. Why? Because, the old man says with grim satisfaction, he took his vengeance. He found the killer of one of his brothers, and killed him. Then he takes out a small folded news clipping from a Croatian newspaper, and there is a passport-size photo of another young man's face. 'The bastard who killed my son. But we got him. We got him,' he says, neatly folding the picture of his son's assassin back into the wallet with the pictures of his sons.
From father to son, from son to son, there is no end to it, this form of love, this keeping faith between generations which is vengeance. In this village war where everyone knows each other, where an old man keeps the picture of his son's killer beside the picture of the son who avenged them both. (1)
Anyone can write of battles and bloodshed, but a true journalist will seek out the small stories that say more of the war than the battles ever could.
We have to be smarter than the partisan nonsense. The attack ads suggesting that because his career was international he is somehow unfit to lead our country.
Stephen Harper has to go. There is no dispute about that. But we would not be getting Ignatieff as a consolation prize. Instead we will be getting a prime minister whose head is filled with big ideas and small wonders. The true definition of a Canadian.
Sources:
1. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, By Michael Ignatieff, Vintage Press, 1994, ISBN: 0-09-938951-7, Pg. 40-41
An obituary notice appeared in the paper asking mourners in lieu of flowers, to instead vote for the Liberals. Some thought it was a hoax, but indeed it was not.
When John Bolan’s family sat down to write his obituary last week, they decided to give him one last chance to convince undecided voters to pledge their support to the Liberals in the upcoming federal election.
The lifelong Ontario civil servant died unexpectedly after surgery in Toronto on Thursday at the age of 78, and had spent most of his life as an ardent Liberal supporter. What better time to give him a platform than when all of his friends were engaged readers?
And Margaret Atwood gives us a paper napkin guide to the election. And she concludes: "Then vote, and — as they say — cherish the moment. People elsewhere are dying for it."
Following is an excellent video on strategic voting:
It's not too hard to figure out what the media is trying to do. Skewing numbers to make it appear as if Jack Layton is now Harper's biggest competition.
Harper himself saying he's focusing on Layton now as if Ignatieff is no longer a threat. He was becoming too popular and Steve was having trouble.
He feels he can beat Layton since the NDP have no history with the economy, while the Liberals are already experienced at cleaning up Conservative messes.
It would appear that only a few Conservative candidates are allowed to participate in debates, one being Gordon O'Connor. But he got into a bit of trouble recently, with the crowd clearly against his party. As one man said: "This is the first election where I'm afraid the Canada I grew up in is going to disappear." That is a feeling shared by many.
He also took a bit of heat over the Nortel pension issue, when the disabled became victims of Harper's senate.
O'Connor may be in a bit of trouble with the Liberal contender Karen McCrimmon, though. O'Connor's military record appeals to some, but before entering politics he was a lobbyist for military contracts with Hill and Knowlton.
McCrinnon is also ex-military and her resume astounding:
McCrimmon is a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the Canadian Forces. She has the distinction of being the first woman ever to command a Canadian Forces airforce squadron. As Commanding Officer of 429 Squadron, which flew tactical transport C130 Hercules, Karen and her crews carried out many humanitarian and military operations around the globe. Karen served in the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and was also a senior staff officer at NATO headquarters in Germany. In 1995, she was awarded the Order of Military Merit, one of the highest peace time military awards.
Not too shabby.
O'Connor defended his party with talking points, but we've heard them all before. Time to change the channel.
In his book Harper's Team, Tom Flanagan discusses the 2008 coalition and Michael Ignatieff's role. Ignatieff has taken a lot of heat from progressives, because he was the last one to sign on, and then only after being coerced.
And yet to hear the Conservatives, you would have thought that he drafted the agreement. He can't win.
Almost as soon as he became leader, Ignatieff began hinting that he might depart from Dion's bargain with Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe. He said he would wait to see Jim Flaherty's budget before deciding whether to vote for it, whereas Layton and Duceppe were ready to defeat it sight unseen. "A coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition," became Ignatieff's mantra."
Harper, therefore, continued with his strategy of crafting a budget that would get Ignatieff's support. There was a veritable blitz of consultative efforts in December and January –appointment of a high-level citizens committee to advise the minister of Finance; consultative sessions by Flaherty and other ministers across the country; private meetings of party leaders with Harper and finance critics with Flaherty; even a first ministers meeting. The Liberals preferred to play dog in the manger and refrained from making specific demands, but there was enough highly visible consultation for the budget to look some?thing like a national consensus.
For Layton and Duceppe to simply turn down a budget sight unseen, is hardly fair to their constituents. Canadians were tired of the coalition drama and just wanted parliamentarians to get on with the business of running the country.
But what did Michael Ignatieff get for his role in ending, what was turning into a fiasco? Constant attack ads from Harper and grandstanding from Layton.
Now the NDP are running ads that look more Republican than Harper's. And Layton is wooing Quebec with promises that are convoluted at best, and divisive at worst.
This election is supposed to be about restoring our democracy, not saving his career. He knows he won't be prime minister and his posturing is damaging. I find myself wondering why Jack Layton is so determined to give Stephen Harper a majority. What will be in it for him?
He should campaign for the NDP, but stick to policy. In the Star today he said that he will now be targeting Ignatieff. To what end? He can't be pm so instead, as my mother used to say, he will "cut off his nose to spite his face".
If he feels like he has little power now, what voice will he have in a Harper majority? None. The target here is Harper and the prize our democracy and healthcare.
If Harper gets his majority I'm going to send Layton a "thank you very much" card. Canada had a good run and who knows. Maybe we'll be Harper-Laytonland. Nah.
He agreed to make Harper prime minister in 2004. He sided with Harper in 2005 to take down Paul Martin, leaving a national childcare plan and the Kelowna Accord on the table. He agreed during that campaign to go easy on the Conservatives because Harper convinced him that getting rid of the Liberals was the prize. In 2008, he campaigned against the Carbon Tax, aping the Conservative ads.
Maybe we should be worried about a Layton-Harper coalition.
There is some speculation that if Harper doesn't win this election, or even if he only manages to get a minority, he will resign.
I think he big question is, will the party keep him on. He has angered so many people. The moderates, the former PCers, are jumping ship, and the Social Conservatives have given him enough of their time and money, to have our abortion and same-sex marriage laws repealed. He's not getting it done.
“You know I’m not going to take the bite on that one,” Mr. Harper smiled wearily. (He was visibly more tired today than usual, which could account for the mixing of metaphors.)
Telling that the media is now raising the possibility of a Harper loss.
Vote mobs are taking over as young people are trying to make voting a social event. What a wonderful idea.
We have 'Oscar' parties and 'Super Bowl' parties, why not voting parties? A BBQ and then everyone heads to the polls. Back home to wait for the results, cheering on your favourite. Make it a day worth remembering.
Maybe you could even run a pool, guessing just how wrong the pollsters will be this election. They are not listening to the youth who may very well make history.
The vote mob – a video, posted to the Internet, of a huge and upbeat crowd of students running around a campus, or onto a field, or down a city street, with signs saying they plan to vote – started at the University of Guelph, west of Toronto. It was a direct response to Mr. Mercer’s rant, with the overriding message: “Surprise, we’re voting.”
The Guelph vote-mob team set up a website called www.leadnow.ca that challenged students at other campuses to follow its lead. And they did. At last count, there were 35 vote mobs organized across Canada. Other videos have been made in places like McGill and Ottawa and Victoria and Calgary and many more vote-mob gatherings are scheduled for this week.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff won the televised leaders’ debate after he stopped dumbing down his arguments and started acting like himself, say the three student debaters who participated in the Edmonton Journal’s live chat. Ignatieff’s impassioned plea for the role of the federal government in supporting equal access to health care across Canada was his strongest point, the three said.
“He had the most consistent message,” Kristen Pue said, adding he also backed up his statements with more examples than the other leaders. He looked relaxed, and when taking questions from Canadians he answered directly and remembered the questioner’s name, said Sheida Kayat, who judges debates for the University of Alberta Debate Society, the oldest club on campus.
Of Harper they said: he had difficulty engaging with the other leaders in the debate, Kayat said. “It looked really scripted. It looked like he was reading off something, anyway. He wasn’t really passionate about it and was avoiding some of the questions. He managed to keep his cool, but at the end he just looked tired.”
How the MSM gave him the debate is beyond me. As Parker at Contrarian says:
Ignatieff looked poised, serious, concerned, and easy to imagine as prime minister—nothing like the caricature painted of him in attack ads or pack news analysis. He was effective against Harper, especially in the first half. This is the first long look most Canadians have had of him, and many will be surprised and impressed. He will benefit from low expectations.
If the opposition members can expose his lies and deceit, he may be in trouble tonight.
There are so many satires out there and I've been burned twice, but this story appears legit.
We, at the Etobicoke Centre riding, are trying to create a photo-op about all the multicultural groups that support Ted Opitz our local Conservative candidate and the Prime Minister. The opportunity is to have up to 20 people in national folklore costumes which represent their ethnic backgrounds. These people will sit in front row behind the PM – great TV photo op.
We are seeking representation from the Arab community. Do you have any cultural groups that would like to participate by having someone at the event in an ethnic costume? We are seeking one or two people from your community. Please let me know by Wednesday afternoon – 5:00 pm at the latest.
I apologize for the short notice.
Thanks again for your help!
Zeljko ‘Zed’ Zidaric
Ted Opitz Campaign Team
416.577.4000
His phone number's there. Give him a call and let him know how dispicable you think this is. Or his email address: zzidaric@gmail.com
I called him and just got his voicemail. I told him how inapproriate I thought the entire thing was. Then I asked if he would like me to show up in a clown suit to prove that Harper had a sense of humour.
Someone tweeted the other day that they were at a Conservative rally recently and the candidate was asked about the Colossal Fossil Awards that Canada has won for sabotaging climate change talks. And the candidate quipped that they were proud of them.
Sun Media is running a story of how Michael Ignatieff may or may not have voted in the U.S. election. They dug up an old interview from 2004, when his political allegiances were in question. He claimed that he was a Democrat and would be voting for John Kerry.
He also voted at least once in Britain when he was working there. That one seems probable, but highly unlikely that he would have made a voters list in the U.S.
But how does either make him less Canadian?
Does Wayne Gretzky vote in the U.S.? Jim Carey? Michael J. Fox?
We are drifting dangerously close to the "birthers" who are still demanding to see President Obama's birth certificate. How desperate are you, when this is all you have to dwell on?
The recent attacks on Michael Ignatieff's wife, show just how low the Conservatives will go to discredit the Liberal leader. I've met his wife and she is so sweet.
Canada is a nation of immigrants and we don't dwell on things like birth certificates. A Canadian is a Canadians is a Canadian.
Harper insider Davd Frumm (his sister was given a patronage senate appointment), was a former speech writer for George W. Bush and now has a U.S. citizenship. Tom Flanagan, Harper's former mentor and campaign manager, was born in the U.S. and has dual citizenship. No one asks either of these men where they vote.
The above picture appears in Pierre Trudeau's Memoirs. The caption reads: "Amid unusually comfortable surroundings at London School of Economics I chatted with Michael Ignatieff, son of distinguished Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff." (8) Igantieff not only taught at the London School of Economics, but also Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and the University of Paris.
On the campaign trail Stephen Harper brought up Pierre Trudeau as a "warning" of what we might expect with Michael Ignatieff as Prime Minister.
“I‘m not going to get into personalities here, but the comparison I am obviously making is the fact that we all know that in 1972 to 1974 we had a Liberal government that relied on the NDP for ongoing support,” said Harper.
“All they did was spend money. That led to two decades of not just runaway spending, higher taxes, double-digit unemployment, double-digit interest rates. We were a generation fixing those problems. And when I look at the Liberal platform today and its obvious appeal, and its obvious, frankly, mimicking of the platforms of the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, I’m saying that that’s the alternative. That is the route the country will go down unless it stays on the path we’re on with a strong, stable, majority Conservative government.”
The period when the Liberals and NDP worked together was one of our most prosperous. The record deficit was left by Brian Mulroney, and a new record set by one Stephen Harper, who spent us into a deficit before the recession hit.
This is a man who wasted $247 million of our money in a "Aren't I doing a great job" advertising blitz. Has the public service and Senate stacked with his cronies. Makes no apologies for paying a half million dollars in hush money to the former ethics czars, for burying 200 complaints against his government.
Is wasting billions and billions and billions on poorly designed and overpriced fighter jets. Billions more on new prisons for imaginary crime and billions more still for corporate tax cuts. And he wants to criticize spending?
And he wants to invoke Pierre Trudeau as a scare tactic? I wish.
Michael Ignatieff worked on Trudeau's campaign when he was just a young man, and if he takes some of Mr. Trudeau's passion and concern for our country with him to the office of prime minister, we'll be OK.
This is a very important endorsement, given that most unions typically go NDP.
