Turmel's Turmoil Is Bad News For The Liberals

It began with the hysteria over the Sherbrooke Declaration during the recent federal election, moved on to outrage over ambiguous comments regarding their views of Quebec separatism from a couple of new MPs and now revelations of past party memberships has Canada's political class apoplectic with anger. The it of course is the political narrative being crafted that the New Democrats are the New Separatists. It's a silly narrative to be sure, but not unexpected. Creating silly narratives (see: Dion is not a leader, Harper is scary, Ignatieff is not here for you, etc.) is what the political class does best and if they weren't creating this one they'd be creating another. As far as silly narratives go though, I'll take this one any day of the week.

Why? Because seldom does a silly narrative work in your favour and this one does for the New Democrats. It has the effect of losing an entire province of voters for their opponents. And lose the province is certainly what this Quebec/separatist bashing will do for the Conservatives and Liberals.

For the Conservatives this won't be a problem. Harper has demonstrated that Conservatives don't need Quebec to win a majority. They've built a powerbase in the western provinces that offsets the need to win any seats in Quebec. But the same is not true for the Liberals. They need Quebec votes if they hope to form government or even regain official opposition status. By taking part in the crafting of this silly narrative however, they're shutting themselves out of the province. And without Quebec, they have no hope of unseating Harper which means the Canadian voters in the rest of the country that didn't vote for his party will turn to the only party that can.

Brian Masse Scores...

...On his own net. I'm watching CPAC's coverage of the budget debate and NDP MP Brian Masse asked LPC MP Bob Rae to respond to his party's flip flopping on their support of corporate tax cuts. It was idiotic of Mason to bring this up considering the NDP just spent close to an hour asking the CPC to reconsider their position on the budget. If they did exactly what the NDP wanted, would Mason then ask one of their MPs to respond to their party's flip flopping. I think not, so why badger the Liberals for changing their minds. It makes no sense and only undermines what the NDP is trying to accomplish.

Update: Oops, while getting the transcript of Brian's remarks in the HOC yesterday, I noticed I'd pointed the finger at the wrong Brian. It was Brian Masse, not Brian Mason. Anyway, here's what Masse said that bothered me.

I have a question with regard to corporate tax cuts. For a number of years these tax cuts have been put in place and what is interesting is that the Liberal position on this has shifted in the last six months. I have been here since 2002 arguing for better responsibility for corporate tax cut reductions. In fact, Liberal after Liberal would literally light his or her hair on fire in this place and scream at us about the fact that corporate tax cuts actually create jobs. We never saw that result. We have seen a change of position in the Liberal Party. I would sincerely like to know when that change took place and why.

    The Liberals continued to call for corporation tax cuts even when we were borrowing money to do so. The previous Liberal leader actually called for them to be deeper and broader than they are today. Why the change in the Liberal Party position? When did the Liberals actually realize that tax cuts do not actually create jobs? At what point in time and what specific thing changed their position, considering what was driving their ideology prior to that?

Politics is all about changing your opponent's mind so it simply makes no sense to harass someone whose mind you've successfully changed.