Canada is gearing up for the October 16 Throne Speech in which Stephen Harper will lay out a revamped agenda. As a minority leader, he will need the buy-in from at least one of the opposition parties in order to survive and there are increasing rumors that he will serve up a menu of conservative initiatives that will leave the largest opposition party, the Liberals, in no other position than to vote against the speech and thus the government down in a no-confidence vote.
Harper is well-positioned to take this risk. The Liberal party is in disarray: its leader’s position is far from secure, its organization in key battleground province Quebec is collapsing and its coffers are not nearly as full as the conservative party’s healthy campaign fund. On top of that, Canada is on a roll: it once again produced a record budget surplus, it today released the lowest unemployment number in 30-years and the dollar, better known as the “Loonie”, has now comfortably surpassed the US Dollar.
Harper has two options: use the Throne Speech to engineer his own defeat and gamble on doing well in a general election or force the opposition parties to eat up a menu of tax cuts, tough-on-crime legislation, an open-ended involvement in Afghanistan and a new homebaked climate plan that will render Canada’s signature on the Kyoto Treaty meaningless.
Stay tuned, exciting times ahead in Ottawa.
I dunno much about contemporary Canada that much. I guess in order to find out what the conservatives have done right and wrong, and what can be learned from the example, I’d need a good blog or compilation site for news. Anyone know a good one?
Canada’s top 100 political blogs, a good place to start:
http://paulitics.wordpress.com/2007/08/15/top-100-canadian-political-blogs/
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