So your telling me that the Liberals were elected because they were such a great opposition??
They consistently raised real issues and offered alternatives. They had far more scandals to choose, they could have spent the whole time doing nothing but being scandal-mongers, but instead they concentrated on policy.
The combined IQ of the Liberal caucus could have been 200 in 1992, they were getting elected because the Canadian public couldn't stand Mulroney and the conservatives and the Reform party was branded a "Bloc Quebec party from the west" by the Liberals.
Mulroney was gone, remember? Kim Campbell was PM. Reform started because of Mulroney's policies. The grass roots meetings started before he was even in office. The Conservatives were defeated because nobody wanted more of the same. They lost Ontario and Quebec. Harper still hasn't learned that lesson...you need Ontario and the non-BQ seats in Quebec to form a government in Canada.
When it comes to the opposition, their only purpose is to find problems with the government because in our political system the government will never act on opposition motions.(At least very rarely)
Apparently you don't understand politics, tibear. To have a chance at winning the next election the Official Opposition must give the impression of being a government in waiting. That means putting up credible arguments and offering realistic alternatives. The Conservatives do not do that.
Chretien's rallying slogan in 1992 was "Kill the GST". I'm still waiting.
Me too. That was a political battle within the Liberal Party though. Chretien let Martin win that battle in order to win the larger war. It worked too...Martin couldn't become leader until Chretien retired. Nobody in the party gave a rat's ass about the GST one way or the other.
As I've stated earlier, the only reason the Liberals are in power is because at first the Reform/Alliance and Conservatives were fighting with each other and splitting the vote and then when they stopped fighting the Liberals were successful in painting the Conservatives as Anti-Christs.
If the Conservatives hadn't split they might have had a shot at forming a government in the last election. Maybe. Martin was in trouble before the election even started. The truth is that things got a lot better under Chretien than they'd been under Mulroney though. People had jobs, people had money.
The hard fact is that the Conservatives got less of the popular vote in the last election than the PCs and Alliance combined had gotten previously. That's not because the Liberals painted the Conservatives as anti-Christs. The Conservatives did that all by themselves. All the Liberals had to do was nod and point.
I agree with you that Mulroney is one of the most hated PM's. However, the two policies that people hated the most Free Trade and the GST are still here. Why haven't the Liberals taken steps to eliminate these policies??
Why would they? The GST would just have to be replaced with something else...the income is still required...and business likes the GST just fine. Free trade has been an on-again, off-again Liberal policy since Confederation and is a pet project of the corporations that fund both the Liberals and the Conservatives.