The secret plot to destroy the Liberals

[tuvor]

What's with all the back-scratching between the Tories, the NDP and the BQ? 'We want to remove the Liberals from the game board,' says one MP.

PAUL WELLS

The first week of Canada's 39th Parliament was the latest instalment in the endless fight between the serious and the frivolous in Canadian politics. For once, seriousness had a good week. The new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, set a brisk tone and tempo for his new government. Senior ministers set about their work with diligence and good humour. Parliament set to work with a minimum of fuss.

And the least qualified of the prominent candidates for the Liberal leadership abandoned the race -- although Belinda Stronach managed to insist with a straight face that the party had failed to meet her standards, rather than vice versa. The victories of seriousness are almost never complete.

Stronach's surreal, half-hearted concession to reality notwithstanding, it was also a bad week for the Liberal Party of Canada. The party that governed Canada for the last 13 years (and for 33 of the last 46) is in greater danger than it seems to understand, with more enemies than its leaders seem willing to count. Harper's Conservatives are the government, but it is the Liberals, under the temporary new management of Bill Graham, who are alone with their backs to the wall. Much of the week's drama came from watching this startling new dynamic on display. Much of this Parliament's drama will come from seeing whether the Liberals understand their peril and can find any way out.

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20060417_125314_125314

[V. Kid]

1. They're the competition so to speak, so of course this will happen...

...although one should point out that the Bloc isn't very bright for doing this. Because they could well make the Tories look too good, and endanger much of their support. Who would've really thought that the Tories would've won 10 seats in Quebec this election? I was shocked, some seats that the Bloc won by massive landslides last time, switched hands. One of their young stars, Richard Marceau, was upset by a Conservative nobody. So while people may criticize the NDP consistently for being "Stephen Harper's best friend", they don't have nearly as much to loose, whereas the Bloc could easily find its self loosing even more "pure laine" seats to the Conservatives in Central and Eastern Quebec.

[Minstrel Boy]

2. We come not to praise the Liberal Party,

yadda yadda. Strategically it makes good sense. The Liberals remain every other party's principle competition. I don't think the Liberals are about to be removed from the board, but hey - good luck to 'em.

[IntravenousDemilo]

3. Hey, Jeff, I just went to your blog

and then I googled your book. You used to be the main satirist at Frank magazine? I think that's wonderful. I have just about every edition from about 1990 to about 1995, and I also have a question about the mag, which I hope you can answer even it was before your time there. The Michael Coren column, "The Aesthete" -- was that written by him, or by someone else to take the piss out of him? After having read the column and surmising that he was a flaming queen, I was really surprised to find out that he is actually quite homophobic.

But then, a lot of evangelical Christians, even those who have converted from Judaism, sound really gay when they talk.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. Still with Frank

FYI, Frank's back, after almost a year shuttered, under old management and with a subscription website and a biweekly print edition. I write Dick Little and do the photo funny shit and other gags.

Yeah, that was really Coren who wrote that. Hard to figure, eh?

[IntravenousDemilo]

5. Good on ya.

Yeah, it's hard to feature Coren actually writing that. He seems like such a humourless prig now, incapable of laughing at himself (other people are fair game, though, apparently).

Do you guys still use fun terms like "fartcatcher" to describe the political underlings of such people as Byron Muldoon? I thought the magazine was wonderfully scurrilous, and you know what? Even if a lot of it was said to be speculation, I'm betting that the vast majority of the articles were true. Where there's smoke...

[Minstrel Boy]

6. sure - fartcatcher, legover, bust a headvalve -

they never go out of style for us!

[MrPrax]

7. I was thinking about dick

the other day ...hehe

Somebody posted in another forum asking what happened to the 'Bob Boudelang' column and I was thinking...maybe Dick Little's lawyers finally caught up to him. ;-)

After Bob, then Ed the Socket's lawyers can go after Triumph the Insult Comic...I swear Ed is older than Smigel's creation on Conan.