Chretien carrying on after 2004? Now there's a scary thought. The Liberals would have been slaughtered even worse than they were, perhaps even to the point of a Conservative majority. The sponsorship scandal happened on Chretien's watch, and it was run out of the PMO, *his* office. Martin at least had some credibility in claiming he didn't know about it, Chretien would have had none and he and his party would have gone down in flames. Besides, it was time for a change, and a Conservative minority is a lot less alarming to me than a Conservative majority. I remember that smarmy Mulroney too clearly, and the Conservative government of Grant Devine in my home province too clearly. After that I am unable to trust people who call themselves Conservative, and please note that the upper case C matters. There are some thoughtful and intelligent conservatives on this board, but thoughtful and intelligent Conservatives are, since Dalton Camp died, an endangered species. Joe Clark may be the last of them. I regret to say that my understanding of Canadian politics over the last 25 years strongly suggests that the modern political right is ethically bankrupt and intellectually sterile. I am not, and cannot be, a Conservative.
I'm not a LIberal either. I'm sorry that Harper's going to make that motion in the House about the Québécois being a nation, because it removes the sting from Ignatieff's ill-considered remarks about it a few weeks ago and makes the debate at the upcoming Liberal leadership convention on a similar resolution moot. The Liberals deserved to squirm a bit; Harper's motion makes it too easy for them.
Nor am I an automatic NDP supporter. Most days I think the current version of the NDP is stuck in the 1960s: promise them pie in the sky and scare them with depression talk.
What I hope for is an intelligent and thoughtful candidate running in my riding, for *any* party. I haven't seen one of those for a long time. Makes me wish I'd bought a house in Regina a few kilometres south east of where I did. Then I'd be in Ralph Goodale's riding; that's somebody I could vote for with a clear conscience. But most of the time when I vote I hold my nose and vote for the least offensive alternative. And that's not the way it should be.
