Harper, "Your Time is Up"

deception · Sep 1, 2009

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/689296

SUDBURY – The Liberals will no longer help prop up Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, paving the way for a fall election if the other opposition parties also vote no confidence in the Conservatives.

"Mr. Harper, your time is up," Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said in a speech to troops today. "The Liberal party cannot support this government any further."

The declaration today by Ignatieff, greeted by cheers from his MPs at their retreat in Sudbury, sets events in motion for a fall election campaign that could come as soon as the first week of October.

And Liberal sources said they'll be looking to bring the government down at the earliest opportunity — probably the first week of October. That would mean the country going to the polls as early as Nov. 9.

Liberals have been repeatedly told that they need one good reason to plunge Canada into an election, and many MPs at this week's strategy session say they have an entire array of reasons to declare a lack of confidence in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.

With Ignatieff sounding hawkish yesterday about election prospects, some of his MPs are firing up their own rhetoric against the Conservatives.

Former B.C. premier and federal cabinet minister Ujjal Dosanjh, a Sikh who emigrated to Canada as a teenager, said the breaking point for him lies in how Harper's government has been treating Canadians in trouble abroad --specifically, non-white Canadians.

"If you don't belong to the mainstream, and you don't happen to be white and you happen to be stuck in another country, in most cases, your citizenship doesn't matter," Dosanjh said. "I have three sons, born and raised here. I have three grandchildren. I want them to feel part of this country and I want a prime minister of this country who will stand up for them if they ever get stuck abroad anywhere in this world."

Dosanjh acknowledged that he risks portraying the Harper government as racist with this accusation: "I feel so strongly that this prime minister has let down Canadians time after time after time. And I for one do not want to see him as prime minister for one more single day."

Meanwhile, Montreal MP Marlene Jennings, who's been part of the Liberal-Conservative panel looking for a compromise on employment-insurance reform this summer, rattled off a whole list of issues this morning on which she said the government deserved to be defeated.

She said that Conservatives had not presented any ideas to the EI panel this summer, simply rejecting all the suggestions the Liberals brought to the table. Jennings compared the Conservatives to a "two-year-old child" refusing food being offered.

"It's time that Mr. Harper and his government started acting like a responsible government and act in the best interests of Canadians, which they have not been doing. And not just on EI — EI is not even the tip of the iceberg," Jennings said.

Last week, Senator David Smith, campaign chief for the Liberals, said they would not be provoking an election over EI this fall. Jennings said yesterday that there were plenty of other reasons to vote no-confidence in the government.

"Let's talk about the medical isotopes. Let's talk about the drought that farmers are living with, and having to leave their farms, give up life careers on that. Let's talk about the salmon disappearing out in B.C., millions of salmon disappearing and the government isn't doing anything. Let's talk about the fact that we have a deficit now — an import deficit that we haven't had in how many years, how many decades — under this government. Let's talk about 1.6 million Canadians who are out of jobs and this government is doing virtually nothing for them except saying 'no, no, no, no, no.' Well, the government needs to grow up. That's what they need to do," Jennings said.

Mississauga MP Paul Szabo says that it's not important for the Liberals to have just one reason to call an election - it's the collective picture of all the reasons.

"There's no one issue that is a critical mass to say an election is necessarily. But all of those things collectively paint a picture that the government cannot be trusted and there's no confidence that they have a plan to get us out of a structural deficit situation and to address the litany of problems that Canada has right now," Szabo said.

Parkdale MP Gerard Kennedy is the Liberals' infrastructure critic and he believes Canadians should have faltering confidence in the Harper government because it has shown "fairly miserable" results on stimulus and job creation.

In the coming days, Kennedy is due to issue a report showing that of 750 projects he's been studying in the past months, only one in five of them created jobs. Moreover, the Conservative government had vowed to create employment with federal stimulus and there are now 120,000 fewer construction jobs in Canada, Kennedy says.

"What we do expect is that there's a bottom line that they signed on to," Kennedy said. "It's getting tougher and tougher to see where the will is going to come from. They don't have the will to make government work when we need it."

Ignatieff is due to address the Liberal troops early this afternoon and again at a Sudbury rally later tonight. Yesterday, with very little conciliatory words, he hinted that the Liberals were not going to keep the Conservatives on "life support" much longer.

"In June, I made it clear that in a whole number of areas, the government's performance was letting Canada down. And it hasn't got better over the summer," he said.

Under the arrangement worked out last June by Harper and Ignatieff, Liberals will get their first chance to defeat the Conservative government somewhere between Oct. 1 and Oct. 9, and if not then, several more chances present themselves through subsequent weeks.
Click to expand...

deception · Sep 1, 2009

it was recently announced that canada suffered its first trade deficit since 1976 under this govt. i encourage canadians to join the liberals and take down this incompetent govt!!!

Log in or Sign up

Harper, "Your Time is Up"

deception JBB Banned Member

deception JBB Banned Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Harper, "Your Time is Up"

Moderators

deception JBB Banned Member

deception JBB Banned Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches