The Globe & Mail sums up the Liberal predicament in today’s issue:
“It's a strategy that the struggling Stéphane Dion may have no choice but to copy – abandon the script that was designed to win the election and replace it with something aimed at keeping the party whole for next time.
“If you threw the right scare into people about Stephen Harper, and Dion was the guy leading that charge, then he could probably climb back out of hole and may get over 80 seats,” said Greg Lyle, a pollster with the firm Innovative Research Group, Inc. “That would be a win right now.””
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080926.welxnliberals27/BNStory/Front
How can Dion find the winning issue, and prevent a massacre of Liberals in the election, which is a scant two weeks away?
The Cat’s suggestion would do it.
How?
Change tactics, change issues, and wrap a ferocious fight against Harper in the next two weeks around one simple, over-arching, unifying concept.
And that concept is that?
That Harper and his Tories will sacrifice the soul of Canada if they win a majority.
We can see clearly that Harper is in reality a Tory-manufactured Canadian political subprime mortgage disaster just waiting to happen.
Check out what Harper has written in the past. How he wants to strangle the life out of a strong central government in Canada, cutting the revenues, scrapping programs, reducing the federal government to just a handful of powers (defence, banker for the premiers, not much else).
One point really needs emphasising. Trudeau commented caustically about Joe Clark that he really wanted to reduce the federal government’s powers and role so much that it became the head waiter to the provinces.
Well, Harper’s plans are to go much further than Joe Clark wanted to.
What Harper wants to do is reduce the federal government – the heart of Canada – to the role of banker to the premiers.
He wants to reduce the money used for nation-building, and divert taxes paid by Canadians to the premiers, for them to use as they wish. Harper, as banker to the premiers, wants to give the premiers blank cheques, and when they have filled them in, to funnel our hard-earned income, paid by us as taxes, into the coffers of the premiers. In doing so, Harper wants to subvert centuries of political development in Canada, scrap the role of a strong, nation-building and nation-preserving central government, and let the premiers run amok.
Is this what Canadians really want?
Well, it is what they will get if Harper wins a majority.
Dion can turn this hapless election around if he listens to the Cat.
Go for Harper’s jugular, Stephane. Use this central theme, and wrap everything around it.
And press it hard, unrelenting, for the next two weeks: Harper and his Tories will sacrifice the soul of Canada if they win a majority.
