Eugene Forsey Liberal

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Iggy & Mulroney, Sitting In A Tree...

<< "I have respect for the character of the person." Mr. Ignatieff said he even sent the former prime minister 70th birthday congratulations...>> O Iggy, don't go changing now. Even I thought I was just being satirical when I foresaw the LPC becoming the CLP or Conservative Liberal Party. But Iggy never fails to come up with unforgettable money quotes that will haunt the LPC & Himself for years. Sadly hilarious. In a couple of weeks, that "character", when Mulroney is testifying, that quote will again reflect upon Iggy's already much-derided judgement. Hard to believe that the Harper Cons are now known as the harshly anti-Mulroney bunch, and our Iggy Libs are now Lyin' Brian's biggest fans. Geez, that Harper's a fool to let word out about just how much distance he's keeping from the man. Isn't he? Right?

posted by Eugene Forsey Liberal @ 4:04 PM  

13 Comments:

  • At 4:40 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Someone should really point out one policy difference between Ignatieff and Mulroney. Ignatieff is a neoconservative!

     

  • At 5:22 PM, Blogger Ted Betts said…

    "one policy difference"

    --> gun registry
    --> as a bonus, national childcare

    You are welcome.

     

  • At 5:28 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    this is about as funny as liberal senator Francis Fox being proud to be associated with Mulroney. what has become the liberal party canada?

     

  • At 6:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Kinsella must be conflicted since he's written more damning condemnatiosn of Mulroney's character AND his record than one count. I guess Iggy is taking someone else's advice on this.

     

  • At 6:08 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Hmmm....Bob Rae also called Mulroney.

    You don't have to agree with someone to send them a birthday greeting.

    Childish to think otherwise. But again, this one of those hate Iggy sites that are obsessed with it.

     

  • At 6:38 PM, Blogger Steve V said…

    Happy 18th birthday Eugene.

     

  • At 9:15 PM, Anonymous Liz said…

    It is very embarrassing, even the Tories know Mulroney is so dirty they are not allowed to be associated with him. As for being disappointed with Francis Fox, nothing this party hack says can surprise me - the only thing he has ever been good at is getting secret abortions for people ... oh, wait - he's not even good at that.

     

  • At 1:18 AM, Blogger John Larocque said…

    The best Mulroney policies were carried over into the Chretien years, even the stuff that was left undone like deficit reduction. It was Mulroney's need to be loved that did him in with voters, and his obsession with the constitution. Those who credit him for two back-to-back majorities (such as Ignatieff) conveniently leave out 1993. I laugh at Liberals now describing him as a victim of the Harpercons.

     

  • At 10:18 AM, Blogger Comrade One said…

    Now that you have been admonished by aggregate cop Steve, do you feel sufficiently diminished?

    Hello Quebec says Iggy. See me over here? I like your Mr. Mulroney too. What's a brown envelope or two among friends?

     

  • At 3:56 PM, Blogger Eugene Forsey Liberal said…

    Interesting array of comments. Comrade One is correct in his analysis of the motivation behind Iggy's Silliness. But that just goes to show how disconnected the OLO & Pablo et.al. are from reality. When I voted in the last election, and those previously, I don't remember any Con voting-acquaintances saying, before or after, "well, since Harper's tight with Mulroney, I'll trust him and vote Tory...". Only the most unilingual anglo from outside QC, like Fife et.al. (well, basically entire anglo Parliamentary Press Gallery), could believe that a positive association with Mulroney has the slightest effect on moving votes in QC. Even if one was to accept such a false assumption, then one would have to also accept, which is far more likely, that it would also have a much more negative impact outside QC. Unfortunately, people are much more motivated to vote against someone/thing rather than for. Mulroney is not a Lévesque-Lesage figure in QC - his political accomplishment was to be of bicultural origin, with a clearly non-French surname, yet be accepted as "l'un des nôtres". Doesn't mean he's greatly admired, he's not, at all, but he's not actively disliked either. However, he is vigourously despised by most Canadians outside QC, which will only increase when his Oliphant testimony contradicts, as it must, his previous statements and testimony to Ethics Committee (anyone catch implications of Lalonde's testimony for Mulroney?). Lyin' Brian hoist on his own petard, yet again (sneak preview "I misremembered/misspoke previously.."). And Canadians' blood will boil again. And who, a couple of weeks previous, praised his character, of all things? The Great "We Americans" Ignatieff. Crikey.

    1/3 of QC is hardcore separatist and will never vote for the LPC.

    1/3 wants a strong independent QC within a strong united Canada. As long as the the LPC is self-respecting federalist party, it's somewhere between 3rd & 5th choice.

    1/3 is hard core federalist. The more you dally with the soft federalist/nationalist 1/3, the less motivated they are to support you. They can stay home or protest by voting Greens, NDP or Con (however défaillant their own federalism, but QC LPC supporters, who've stuck by the party through the toughest of tough times here, take betrayal seriously, as some may have noticed with the Dion-Rae vs. Iggy struggles here.)

    So nothing about this statement makes sense, unless one is living in AngloMediaFantasyLand, or one actually does think Mulroney is a man of character. Shurely not...takes one to know one, maybe?

     

  • At 4:55 PM, Blogger John Larocque said…

    Meech Lake and Charlottetown in the ROC, even Ontario, proved to be toxic to every politician who embraced it. David Peterson's Liberals were solidly trounced at the polls (there's fascinating stuff at 1AnxiousLiberal's blog on that era). And after Rae there was Mike Harris. We seem to be back in moderate/centrist territory again, but we went through a political revolution here in Ontario.

    After 1993, Ontario was solidly in the Liberal fold. That's not because voters here became magically more left wing or liberal. For many years you simply could not get Conservatives elected in Ontario. In defence of Chretien, his policies (including those imported from Reform or PC), kept Ontario solidly behind the Grits for over a decade. And so the Liberals became the party of Free Trade/NAFTA, the GST and deficit reduction.

    Dave Barrett made a statement that if the NDP embraced Charlottetown, they would lose the West. And indeed they did, with many voters going to Reform, the new default protest party out there. The NDP, like the Conservatives, took years to recover. The constitutional wars was a Pandora's box that benefitted every party that opposed them (including sometime Meech/Charlotetown opponent Chretien) and hurt every party that touched it.

    As a PC supporter from the 1980s, I think the Mulroney legacy is a pretty good one, and I'll defend many things like Free Trade. But you have to also factor the role the endless constitutional games had in the rise of both Reform and the Bloc, and the psychological near-death of the PC party in 1993. It's a mixed legacy. Too many people took a viscceral dislike to him, and it's something that transcends ideology or voter preference.

    As for Quebec and Mulroney and the PC party, there's a couple of points to reememeber. If you analyse where Conservative seats are today, a healthy chunk of them are in the Quebec city region and the Beaucerons, which was where Reform (!), and later the Alliance Party, made their greatest inroads in the early 1990s.

    Bluntly put, these aren't old PC seats from the 1980s, and it wasn't the Mulroney nostalgia that moved them to the CPC. It was years of working in the ridings at the grassroots level and getting the message out to receptive voters. I believe there is some overlap with the ADQ ridings at the provincial level

    After Harper prevented his cabinet and the party from having dealings with Mulroney, there was actually a small up-tick in the Quebec opinion polls in favour of the CPC. Isolating one of Quebec's sons didn't make much of a dint in the polling data. Harper's clueless ADQ advisers did a lot more damage than the mythical "he was mean to Brian" vote. Andre Arthur did an excellent interview for Maclean's detailing the role of these advisers (and Charest in effect cutting off the ADQ from its Ottawa support base) shortly after the 2008 election. Charest should be happy, both the ADQ and the CPC are marginalized.

     

  • At 9:32 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Mulroney was in favour of a gun registry. Check your history.

     

  • At 3:04 AM, Blogger John Larocque said…

    Actually it was the Liberals who introduced the gun registry in 1995. Bill C-10 and the one that preceded it (which died on the floor) both tightened up existing firearm regulations, but neither version of Conservative gun control featured a registration component. That being said, it wasn't popular with elements of the party's support base. I imagine some of those people unhappy with C-10 in 1993 voted Reform, which in a weird way helped make C-64 possible...

     

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