What a downer! All of Dion's idealism and coalition-building, all of Ignatieff's bluster, and it has come down to this:
support for the Harper's budget, conditional on mere progress reports. The topics of the progress reports (see sidebar at the link above) would not even include the impact of the budget on the environment in general, or on Greenhouse Gas emissions in particular. In any event, this reporting "condition" was so easy that Harper & Co.
agreed to accept Iggy's budget amendment within hours.
The whole thing was clearly just a face-saving move by a Liberal leader who wanted to avoid bringing down the Conservative government -- while appearing to be tough with empty talk of "Conservatives on probation". Instead of real progress toward a sustainable economy, we will have four more wasted years of
Harpernomics HarperIggiocy.
Now that the Liberal-NDP coalition is sadly R.I.P., it is time to take the pro-coalition badge off the sidebar of this blog. The only federalist opposition in Parliament to the new Conservative-Liberal
Coalition Alliance Mish-Mash is the
NDP. The Greens have been busy
keeping their eye on the ball at
post-Kyoto negotiations and
promoting a
green economic recovery. But they are still
being kept out of Parliament due to our antiquated voting system, despite getting the votes of almost 1 million Canadians.
For more on the missed environmental opportunities in this budget, see this
Toronto Star article. (The
CBC story on this topic has clearly missed the point.)
Alas for our children and their children.
No comments:
Post a Comment