Maple Leaf Rag

I’d call it post election blues, but it doesn’t have the swing. A week after the ‘Clayton’s’ government was returned in Canada – that is the government you have when you aren’t having a government – the devastated Liberal leader has resigned.

I don’t want to attack Stéphane Dion, I expect we’d almost get on well despite the language barrier, but he’s made yet another bad choice. Dion has decided to stay on until he is officially replaced next spring.

“[Dion] will work to rebuild the party's finances to ensure that his successor will be equipped to counter Conservative “propaganda”

The bloke is politically dead! He isn’t going to inspire much needed donations to the party coffers and he won’t have the grunt to hold a team together, particularly one including a “long list of potential candidates for the Liberal leadership”

A Conservative partial administration
So we are left with an unworkable opposition to a Conservative government which doesn’t really have the numbers to govern. I guess Canada doesn’t have an Obama, or a Rudd or even Britain’s Gordon Brown; and try as he might France’s Sarkozy can only manage to inflame Canuck sensibilities.

The real problem is that Harper’s true conservatism is aided and abetted by the dubiously informed Canadian banking fraternity… “The banks, moreover, don't want no stinking government funds in their equity mix -- a message delivered last Friday by TD Bank Financial Group CEO Ed Clark.” A global overreaction Terence Corcoran

Corcoran, a strangely shortsighted conservative commentator, goes on to say: Two sources say Mr. Clark noted that "the Canadian banking system is the only major system in the world where no nationalization has occurred in the current crisis."

An interesting observation from Clark and a lapse in research for both he and Corcoran. Mind you, terms like nationalization, socialism and communism are being bandied about by the Canadian conservative elite as though the were still card carrying members of the McCarthy witch hunts.

Australia has certainly put instruments in place to ensure confidence in our major banks, but in reality they won’t be called on and those banks would certainly lose their revered international status at the slightest whiff of nationalisation. I presumed, despite idolizing the former John Howard regime Harper’s buddies don’t see Australia as major in any sense.

Canada is really aiming for a stretch in isolation with the sort of views being expressed by the fragile conservative minority. Never mind opposition at home, world economies are now too closely intertwined to simply go off and play by your own rules. Harper is yesterday’s man, but I guess no one wants to tell him that right now.