Now that many Canadians have recovered from the shock that on Monday, January 23rd, 36.4% of us voted to place a Conservative minority government in Ottawa, the focus has begun to shift to speculation on the legislative programme that Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper will attempt to implement in his first 100 days in office.
With congratulations from President George Bush out of the way, the Conservative party can now get down to the business of implementing key commitments made to the Canadian electorate during the course of the just ended 55-day election campaign. The five key initiatives include …

• Introducing accountability legislation, toughening the Lobbyists Registration Act, eliminating secret donations to political candidates, establishing a Public Appointments Commission to establish merit-based requirements for appointments to government agencies, and strengthening the power of the Auditor General and the office of Ethics Commissioner.
• Tax reform, most particularly the introduction of a modest reduction in the GST, from 7% to 6%, and beyond that it’s anybody’s guess.
• Implementation of a Tory law and order agenda, including a reform of Canada’s justice system, “to make it stronger and to ensure that we turn back the growing plague of guns, gangs and drugs in our cities and communities,” thus working toward filling more than 1,000 RCMP positions across Canada, working with provinces and municipalities to hire 2,500 more police officers, cracking down on firearms smuggling, strengthen security at border crossings and, most importantly to the Tories: implementing mandatory minimum sentences for major firearms offences.
• Killing the Liberal Party child care plan, and in its place introducing a new $1,200 per year child care tax credit for children under six. The daycare initiative will be controversial — and is unlikely to receive support from the Liberals or the NDP — but pundits believe that the Bloc Québécois will rejoice at the prospect of wresting more money from the federal coffers, given that they’ve already got their own province-wide daycare programme (so much for parents and children in the rest of Canada).
• Introduction of a health wait-time guarantee, which inevitably will mean the privatization of health care in Canada, the thin edge of the wedge which could lead to the dismantling of Canada’s public health care system.

In addition to the five key initiatives, look for the Conservatives to kill the gun registry; implement fixed election dates and introduce legislation that will look into some form of proportional representation; rewrite Canada‘s climate change plan — although any plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Accord would likely meet with stiff opposition from the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc; pursue a vote on same sex marriage (sure to fail); and resolve the federal-provincial conflict over transfer of payment to the provinces.
Politics To Be A Fun Spectator Sport In Canada
Yes, Stephen Harper‘s weak minority was the best of all possible outcomes for those of us who are non-Tory voters. While Canadians gave the Liberals a time out, the Conservatives have been given a chance to strut their stuff. As Lynda Hurst writes in the Toronto Star …

Somewhere in (the Conservative minority win) … is the feeling among many that Canadian politics in the next year or so is going to be fun to watch (well, interesting at least) as the Tory party goes about striking the deals and compromises now necessary for its survival.

First order of business will be to appoint what will most assuredly be a smaller cabinet.
The next order of business will be to keep a lid on the extremist elements (read: social conservatives) within his party, who are dedicated to their goals of rescinding Canada’s long accepted legislation covering a woman’s right to choose, bringing back the death penalty, eliminating same sex marriage, making divorce more difficult, taking sexual orientation out of the Canadian Charter of Rights, opposing legislation decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, bringing prayer back into the public education system … well, the list could go on and on.
Make no mistake. The Conservative Party in Ottawa will not have an easy time of it. The honeymoon will be over sooner than you think, and most certainly once the Liberal leadership race gets fully underway.
VanRamblings’ prediction: there’s no way that Stephen Harper’s Tories will keep it together for any prolonged period of time. The party will soon begin to tatter at the edges, the infighting will commence, and before you know it the newly elected government could come unraveled altogether.

Everyone from the gamblers at UBC’s Election Stock Market, to the team predicting the election outcome for CTV, and the generally reliable folks at SES Research are suggesting the Conservative Party of Canada will achieve minority government status in Ottawa with a win at the polls on Monday.
The time has come then, one supposes, for VanRamblings to weigh in on the current federal election, to offer our two cents worth and reflect on what a Conservative Party win will mean for most of us hapless Canadians.

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Much of what we wrote during the 2004 federal election still applies. Stephen Harper is just as scary as he was last time around. The issues are still the same. This time around, though, the Conservative Party has found a way to keep their social conservative contingent quiet, effectively silencing the wingnut portion (73%) of their party. All in service of gaining power.
In the coming months, will soon-to-be-deposed Prime Minister Martin be proven correct when he states that a Conservative government would imperil a woman’s right to choose, or stack the Supreme Court with right-wingers?

Election Prediction Project

Should Canadians, in fact, beware a far-right Tory government that would, as Mr. Martin states, “roll back the Liberals’ proposed national day-care plan, Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto protocol as well as a recent federal-provincial aboriginal deal?” Yes, VanRamblings believes Canadians should be damned scared of losing the Canada we — and our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers — have built over the course of the past 139 years.
Oh sure, it all sounds like so much rhetoric now, to target the Tories as right-wing ideologues. But aren’t they? Isn’t the Conservative Party of Canada just like the Lie-berals in B.C. (hardly a Liberal party), or the Republican Party under George Bush, or England under Maggie Thatcher?
You’re damn right they are.
Even small-c conservative commentators like the Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe warns Canadians about what a Stephen Harper-led Tory government would mean for Canadians …

Harper is an adherent of a set of beliefs that even has a name associated with it — the Calgary School. His advisers, nearly all white and male, adhere to the brand of hard-line, U.S.-style conservatism associated with this school.
And, let’s not forget, as recently as 2002 Harper was leading the National Citizens’ Coalition, a right-leaning, libertarian-inclined group.
He still accommodates within his caucus old-style Reformers, like Myron Thompson, Cheryl Gallant (RealPlayer required) and Stockwell Day. (To be fair, Liberals have their own eccentrics.)
In this election, Conservatives have run the lowest percentage of female candidates of any mainstream party.
It would also be hard to believe that Harper’s own personality — a reserved loner, reluctant to take counsel from others — has suddenly morphed. Indeed, his own dominant personality has stripped the party entirely of the populism that characterized its precursors, Reform and the Alliance.
Voters should not fool themselves into imagining that Conservatives, once in power, would … downsize government, stubbornly persist in trying to limit the definition of marriage to the cookie-cutter man/woman model … (not) be bound by the Kyoto protocol … (and) appoint judges with ‘a judicial temperament’ …
After a relatively brief fling with one of Canada’s least ideological prime ministers, voters are about to embrace an ideologue.

The Conservative Party slogan in this election campaign calls on Canadians to ‘Stand Up for Canada’. VanRamblings would ask that you do exactly that.
Stand up for a Canada where a woman’s right to choose is enshrined in law. Stand up for a Canada where tolerance, cultural and ethnic diversity, our role as a peacekeeper on the world scene, and protection of the interests of our most vulnerable citizens define who we are as a people.
You know what the issues are. You know what’s on the line. And you know that you do not, we do not want Stephen Harper’s Canada.