All evidence indicates that NDP leader Jack Layton conceived a scheme to overturn Canada's last election results, possibly before the election was held or immediately after the votes were counted.
A leader whose party was rewarded with 9% of the seats in Parliament, a leader who pranced about saying he was running to be prime minister of Canada, swallowed so much of his own bath water that he began to believe he should be prime minister and went about concocting a plan to make it happen.
Mr. Layton's coalition of NDP, Liberals and Bloc Quebecois, while technically legal, stems from our historic links to British-style parliament. What Mr. Layton ignored was the long-standing tradition of parliamentary government allowing a minority government to be replaced by a coalition of smaller parties only when the "reasonableness" of such an act has been satisfied. Mr. Layton and his cohorts tried to create such reasonableness out of thin air and manufactured grievances against Stephen Harper's government.
Unwilling to wait or listen in their thirst for a coup d'etat, the coalition managed to destroy the world's impression of Canada as the most stable government in the world. The coalition managed to cause a five-cent drop in the Canadian dollar in one hour. The losses in our stock market are impossible to calculate.
Jack Layton's actions require a heartfelt act of contrition to all the people of Canada. Canadians are unlikely to forgive him until he does so.
Senator Bert Brown, Ottawa.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/politics/story.html?id=1059823
