Remember the other day when I pondered whether there would be a conservative backlash against Harper's big spending budget? Well apparently the answer is yes. According to the CBC the rumblings have begun.With a federal budget projecting that Canada will be $85 billion further in debt by 2013, some Conservative party faithful are questioning what it means for the party's ideology.Conservatives will no doubt scoff at this. It does, after all, come from the CBC a bastion of rational thinking with an exreme bias (that favors reality). So how about the ultra right Canadian Free Press?
"The Reform Party, for instance, stood for fiscal responsibility, but since taking hold of power the Conservative Party has spent government money at a rate that would put the Liberals to shame.Or the Tory 'Searching for Liberty' blog?
Nor does the Conservative Party embrace the old Reform idea of direct democracy; Conservatives never talk about referendums, plebiscites or recall. "
Harper tried to pull a power-play, seeking to use the financial crisis to withdraw political funding - gambling that the Liberals were so decimated, that they would never force an election over the issue, and never in a million years, imagining the formation of a left-coalition.There is also some argument about starting a new party over here and this is just a brief, cursory search from someone who knows little about the Conservative blogosphere. The fault lines underlying the CPC are starting to show. Harper may have said that Canada didn't need 'another Liberal Party' but when push came to shove, rather than give up power, he wrote a Liberal (or at least Liberalish) budget. This should show, once and for all, that conservatives cannot take and hold power in Canada. We can only hope that the rift on the right continues.
Well.. we know how that turned out - so, in a move that I would have thought could be accomplished by no one but the Liberals, our government did whatever it took to hold on to power. End of story. If anything thinks Harper would have produced this budget if he held a majority, they are dreaming. This budget is a lifeline to hold power. And that is not only disappointing, it's sad.
The Reform Party, for all its warts, held promise at one point. It was a party formed to try and change the "business as usual" culture in Ottawa, and when Harper succeeded in becoming the PM, well, there was a small glimmer of hope. That glimmer today has faded to black.
On Edit: There is way more over here.
2 comments:
I just followed the link "over here" and read this:
"Harper isn't a conservative in the Canadian sense. He's a neocon, in the mold of George Bush and John Howard. It about time real Canadian Conservatives reclaimed their party and booted the idiot out.
I miss the good old days when being conservative was about greed, making poor people poorer, wealthy people wealthier and tossing the mentally ill people out on the streets like Harris did during the common sense. Now its about death and destruction. "
Do people really think like this? And they wonder why Canadians identify with the democratics in the states and think of themselves as generally liberal.
Here's to women's right to pay equity being preserved! There is no valid economic argument against it.
I'd be happy to answer your question, if I could figure out what it was...do I think like what? I didn't write any of the posts on the other sites..I'm just demonstrating the divisions that are opening up on the right.
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