I for one welcome David Emerson
I've gotten a little tired of the whole outraged waving of hands, clawing of eyes and tearing of hair. The horror, one of the best MPs on the Liberal side of the house jumped off a sinking ship. While Harper made a move to further court Quebec by temporarily appointing a senator and putting him into cabinet. Sacrilege! Hersey! Rampant abandonment of principle! Harper's clearly lost his mind, abandoned his base, etc etc etc..Quite frankly these are knee jerk reactions and I have trouble taking them with any great deal of seriousness. Evidently some members of the party think they could run the party and the government better than the Prime Minister who picked up the pieces of a Canadian Alliance party in dissarray, merged it with the Progessive Conservatives. Thereafter held Paul Martin who was touted to win a majority as large as that as Mulroney or Diefenbaker to a minority, and a year and a half later formed a minority government of his own. Yes, all the evidence of past behaviour CLEARLY shows that Stephen Harper is given to whim and caprice and has absolutely no identifiable plan and at the moment he's mostly just going out of his way to tick people off.
Now lets be perfectly clear what this is actually all about. David Emerson and Michael Fortier have one thing in common. They are both extremely well connected and well respected businessmen. For the last decade Paul Martin had Canada's business community firmly in the court of the Liberals. If we want a majority the corporate community is a group of people we want to "come home", David Emerson crossing is a visible sign of that, and elevating Fortier is a further olive branch. It also happens to address some regional criticisms that were leveled, but honestly I think that's entirely secondary to the consideration that we need big business to get on board. After all, we get relentlessly accussed of being their toadies so they really ought to be onside if we're going to take that sort of flak on their behalf.
Chantel Herbert gets it right. Our Prime Minister is in this for the long term and already at work building a majority coalition. Sadly, some people refuse to look past their superficial outrage over suposedly democratic concerns. Rather people changing their minds is how governments change. If more Liberal supporters and members of parliament find the leftward drift of their party both odious and unsavoury, I welcome their conversion to the proverbial side of angels. Just as I welcome David Emerson to our party and believe strongly that he has a lot he can contribute to our party and to the cabinet with his wealth of experience and talent.
As my last post indicates Conservatives have to realize this is simply a singular battle, not the war. We've two years to basically campaign for a majority. Conservatives need to remain united in that goal as we are likely sooner rather than later to become aware than many of the things we long to see implimented in government can neither be done within a two year span, nor can they be done when we must rely upon the NDP, the Liberals or the Bloc. This is a team sport. We must stick together. That means people who should know better than to run their mouth off to the media and stir up controversy should keep quiet or be subjected to a nomination challenge by members who recognize that criticism should be kept internal to party not issued forth daily to CTV.
posted by Chris @ 2/16/2006 02:34:00 a.m.
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