I just caught Deb Gray, Carolyn Parrish, Daniel Turp, and Buzz Hargrove doing the usual partisan panelist thing on The Current. The winners: Grey and Turp. Loser: Parrish. Huge loser: Hargrove.
Turp won largely because his favoured party, the BQ, is sitting at 53% in the Queb polls and is going to come close to sweeping the province. He also got to bask in the disgust that the other panelists were willing to express over the sponsorship scandal.
Grey won because she repeatedly skewered Hargrove. Hargrove made it clear he didn’t want an election, giving reasons such as 1) Canadians are worried about their pensions, and this parliament was the only chance to make things work, and 2) the election is a waste of $300 million.
Hargrove’s arguments were bugs under the wheels of Grey’s Harley of Logic. First, she pointed out that Hargrove was falling into the classic Liberal trap of portraying themselves as the only party the NDP can do business with, indeed, as the only possible party of government. Nice work, Buzz. Now Jack understands better the regular flight of NDP voters to the Libs.
As for the $300 million pricetag: We can’t have an election because it costs too much? What a classic losers move. As Grey noted, Parliament itself only appears to run on hot air. Besides (says Deb, moving in for the kill), what about the $1 billion a day in pork that the Libs were dishing out?
When he wasn’t doing his level best to endorse perpetual Liberal government in Ottawa, Hargrove was giving succour to separatists. Asked how his union’s membership was going to vote in Quebec, Hargrove replied that they were mostly going to vote for the Bloc. “And I can’t blame them,” he said, given the nauseating way the Liberals had tried to buy their votes with measly sponsorships. In fact, (said Buzz), “If I lived in Quebec I’d have a hard time not voting for the Bloc myself.”
Cue Turp lotflhao.
Parrish didn’t say much for a change, but when she did it was as idiotic as always. Protesting a winter election, she said that when the weather is bad, only the extremists will vote: “The 55-year old white male is the one who is going to trudge out into the snow, and he votes Tory.”