Liberal Member of Parliament Justin Trudeau (L) and Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau fight during their charity boxing match in Ottawa March 31, 2012. REUTERS/Chris Wattie.

Well, my first foray back into the world of blogging about federal politics didn’t go so well the other day, as my piece about Justin Trudeau’s three round love tap with Senator Patrick Brazeau was resoundingly disliked by both Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals, because I dared decry the dauphin his due, and Conservatives because I questioned whether Patrick’s black belt had been dipped in the wrong colour dye.

Indeed, one fellow who commented on my blog suggested both his three-year-old son and Brazeau would maul me in the ring, should my courage ever approach a level whereby I would be willing to test myself against both a politician and a toddler. And while I suggest the fellow might be correct about his son, I’m still not going to give poor Patrick a break here. And anyway, being beaten by a three-year-old would not be some kind of great feat, as my own children can attest in victories of both a physical, but more definitely a psychological nature.

I also received fan mail from Liberals, who suggested I doth protest greatly or something, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and that Justin was every bit the champion of his father. One even demanded I email him a picture of myself, so that he could ascertain to what extent my physical appearance might be responsible for the obvious intellectual deficit that God Himself had saddled me with at birth.

But it didn’t end there. No, friends and frenemies, I also received a very terse letter from the “Sun News Network” about referring to their TV channel as “Sun TV” when they very clearly are not just “Sun TV”, but the “Sun News Network.” And although the word “Sun” and the medium on which they deliver their message is pretty much a colloquial commonality on Twitter, I suppose you’d get the same sort of angry reaction if you referred to Wayne Gretzky as “The Great Juan.” And I have now watched the full broadcast, thanks for asking.

I digress. Clearly, I was not clear enough that I did not view this gladiatorial debacle as the touchstone for our generation, a sort of 2012 version of my father’s 1972 Summit Series, or in any way, shape, or form, an indictment or validation of the grit and character of either fighter. I mean, if we were to adjudicate the character of men based on amateur boxing matches of a real or fictitious nature, then Sylvester Stallone would the President of the United States (which given the present state of affairs might not be such a bad idea).

But some writers and columnists went farther than I did in interpreting the meaning of this boxing match. My fellow Afghan war tourist Andrew Potter suggested that the two fighters “demonstrated more courage, sportsmanship, mutual respect and yes, honour, than most of their colleagues will in their entire careers in Parliament.” Which I suppose just goes to show that when you set the bar in ankle-deep water, nobody should be surprised when it turns out those people can swim. Or to put it another way, hyperbole hath no bedfellow so great as the managing editor for the Ottawa Citizen.

Even Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star took the opportunity to one-up Potter’s upsucking, opining that the sort of leadership demonstrated inside the ring has reawakened his contention for the Liberal leadership. How did he do this? Why, by proving that “a wealthy socialist dilettante who had once tried to paddle a canoe to Cuba” can best a man in a boxing ring, a thing that truly has never been done by anybody in the history of the world, excepting Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps a few thousand other people who I’m sure aren’t important.

But look, I do admire the courage it takes to get into a boxing ring for a gruelling six minutes with heavy 16 ounce gloves drenched in sweat and wearing nothing to protect one’s face but two inches of absorbent padding. I’ve never done it myself and to be honest I’m unsure I ever will. But then, I don’t think the prospect of my getting the stuffing knocked out of me would generate very much money for charity except in pity, nor would the Sun News Network have a vested interest in broadcasting my hubris unless I were hired by the CBC tomorrow.

Sufficed to say, for those people who were hurt by my comments about Justin, I’m certain he’ll find a way to carry on despite those remarks at four times the annual income of the average Canadian and who will be eligible for an MPs pension in about two years time, which is 40 years earlier than I’m ever likely to retire. And as for Patrick Brazeau, he too is likely consoled by his 38-year job security in the Canadian Senate, which is about 38 years longer than most Canadians enjoy.

Nevertheless, and at the risk of now flogging the rotting equine corpse, I do agree with Potter on one thing. It took “an honest-to-goodness fist fight” to raise the level of civility in Ottawa from passive aggressive swearing and sarcastic Twitter updates to settling the issue as our forebears used to, which is likely where the expression “beating the sense into him” comes from.

The kind of scene that terrifies Lawrence Martin. Photo: Shaun Best/Reuters

Of the various conspiratorial-driven hyperbole-prone Canadian political writers, people like Murray Dobbin or Heather Mallick spring to mind. Which is why I was surprised it wasn’t either writer who penned this ridiculous piece about “rightwing nationalism”, but long-time author and journalist Lawrence Martin.

It takes quite a bit to rile me up these days enough to get me to sit down and put my own thoughts foward, but Martin’s diatribe could not stand. I suppose what bothers me most about the piece is that it seems to ignore all of the evidence pointing to the contrary of his position, which is that far from becoming a more rightwing country, Canada has probably never been more staunchly socialist. I’ll address each of Martin’s points in kind:

Message Control. It’s not central to rightwing nationalism, so much as it is central to modern public relations. You don’t just see it at a federal level either. Increasingly these days you see provinces and municipalities vetting the comments of their public servants, hiring communications officers or spokespeople, in order to deliver a consistent message to the public.

And why is that of primary importance? Well, without disparaging every journalist, which is my occupation, the answer is that the media play a lot of “gotcha” politics with the stories of the day. It’s often safer and prudent to ensure that communications be filtered through a central command, less because anybody has anything to hide, but more because the appearance of deviation from one consistent message is often distorted by the media into something malign.

As a person in the media I find this frustrating. I didn’t like the fact I had to have my interview with a biologist in the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources approved by the bigwigs in the B.C. Liberal government. But, by stepping outside of my job as a journalist I can see the necessity.

Flag-Waving Populism. This one confused me. If anything, the most avid flag-wavers are the newly-minted South Asian and African citizens who want very badly to be Canadian. You see the same thing with the Punjabi and Mandarin penetration of the foreign language broadcasting for NHL games, as immigrants want to feel Canadian by joining in our traditions. Unless Lawrence Martin thinks that a largely multicultural country in which almost everybody is a dual-citizen will somehow start a multicultural fascist party that suddenly becomes xenophobically opposed to sponsoring their own relatives, I don’t quite understand his point.

Less Tolerance. Indeed? Admission targets for 2012 are 259,900 people, not including foreign temporary workers and students. This is consistent with previous years under Conservative rule, although if you include foreign temporary workers and students, the Conservatives set a record for allowing foreigners into Canada in 2007 with 429,649 people. Pretty intolerant, eh?

Having said that, Martin makes a point about the oddly selective decision to uphold who is a Canadian citizen and who isn’t, as evidenced by the Abousfian Abdelrazik fiasco. Either Canada upholds citizenship as a paramount right, or else enshrines in law naturalized and dual citizens as a secondary class.

Anti-Intellectualism. In some respects he’s right. The government’s battle against Vancouver’s legal heroin injection site is baffling, mainly because they’re not fighting it on moral grounds but on medical grounds. But by the same token, many of the Conservative decisions to buck the scientific consensus have been vindicated, particularly by opting out of the Kyoto Protocol, which would have devastated Canada’s economy even more than the financial meltdown has already. Although support for spending money to fight climate change is still strong, it’s clearly declining year over year.

The Smearing of Opponents. And this is a rightwing tactic? It’s true the attack ads on Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion were unethical, relying mainly on misquotes and half truths, but it isn’t as though the Conservatives are the only ones playing that dirty game. Having said that, the Conservatives do play the dirtiest, probably because they have a fundraising machine that outearns all other political parties combined.

Anti-Labour Bent. I think the anti-labour movement has been prevalent for more than a decade, long before the Conservatives took power. And the reason for that is obvious. A perfect example is in the recent job action by the B.C. Teacher’s Federation, which has caused teachers to refuse to do their jobs properly, opt out of any non-essential work duties, and pretty much make demands that are unaffordable and unreachable for any government in the current economic climate.

Another example is the greedy Canada Post union, which for whatever reason wanted to keep salaries at $23 an hour to start, which is probably about 120 per cent higher than the free market starting wage for unskilled labour. There is very little sympathy among those of us in the private sector, many of whom have more education and responsibilities, for public sector workers earning inflated salaries that simply don’t compare to the real world. In fact, union collective bargaining agreements are one of the largest source of local government inflation in Canada.

Cult of the Leader. Yes, the cult of leader issue with Harper has been strong, and borderline disturbing. But is it any more disturbing than the orange crush love affair on Jack Layton? What about federal Liberal-supporter and current B.C. premier Christy Clark putting her name in the logo of the B.C. Liberals? Talk about megalomaniacal.

Frankly, most of Martin’s argument don’t wash. What he fails to mention in his column is that social spending by the Conservatives is the highest level Canada has ever seen. He’s expanded social programs like Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan, created regional development agencies, bloated the public sector, and overseen a 22 per cent rise in spending since taking power in 2006. The Harper party governs by a Big Government style that eschews fiscal responsibility for political expediency.

And any of the socially conservative fears of the Harper government have failed to come to pass. No move to restrict abortion, no repealing of the rights and benefits for homosexual marriage, and no infringement of the secular state with religion. All of the fearmongering simply has not come to pass. Even the axing of the gun registry has had moderate support from rural NDP MPs.

Finally, the pro-military shift has been a collective change in Canada, not a rightwing one. After decades of relative pacifism, Kandahar finally thrust Canada into a war where we the public were confronted with casualties on a regular basis. The reaction to that was universal across partisan lines. The loss of life was mourned and the recognition of what our military represents and who they serve was finally brought to the forefront of public consciousness. Though people differed in opinion as to the political reasons for being in Afghanistan, Canadians uniformly supported our men and women in uniform.

I interviewed an Afghan veteran for Remembrance Day, and his thoughts were expressed at the end of this newspaper article:

“Before [the mission] there were times I was afraid to walk down the street in uniform. Now, I walk down the street in uniform, no matter what city in Canada, and someone stops me and thanks me or wants to shake the hand of a soldier.”

No matter what side of the debate you fall on in Afghanistan, says Midan, it has made Canadians realize we have an army and that it’s important.

Photo: AFP

I suppose some readers might be here to gloat about the Conservative majority and see if I’m lamenting the fact Canadians finally gave them the complete trust to lead the nation as they see fit. If so, they may be disappointed.

Although I don’t believe the party deserved this majority, it is gladly received for it will put to the test the question of how conservative this Conservative party really is.

There are many reasons to celebrate a Conservative majority. For the first time in five years the party won’t be able to make excuses and justifications for choosing expedience over principle. They have the political capital to make real priorities and the power to put their proclaimed visions for Canada into action.

With that power comes responsibility. Although I don’t expect radical changes — indeed, I suspect this will put paid to the myth of the hidden agenda once and for all — I do expect a greater amount of fiscal prudence and restraint.

This is a government who chose to inject billions of dollars into the economy during the recession in the belief it would stimulate the country back to prosperity. The jury is out on whether that worked, but the fact is that the government would have gone deeply into deficit with or without the stimulus spending.

We are now almost $100-billion above the spending budget of the 2005 Paul Martin government, and even if you take all of the military spending increases into account, there’s absolutely no reason we should increase the country’s budget by 33 per cent over six years.

Indeed, Maxime Bernier said just last July that the government should aim for a $250-billion ceiling with zero growth (and that’s zero growth without adjustments for inflation, population and GDP increase). The 2011 budget was nearly $50-billion larger than that.

So there’s finally hope for fiscal conservatives in a political party that has made every possible excuse to explain why it has had to outspend all previous governments in the history of the nation both as a percent increase and as a sum total.

It would also be a good time to start cutting government largesse, trimming programs and finding efficiency where there is undeniable fat. Fat that was put into place by this government.

Now the true test begins for the Conservatives. Can they finally implement policies that are true to the principles of the patient and faithful base who have endured the incremental shift to the centre to usurp the Liberals?

The strategy, it should be noted, has been a resounding success. The move to the centre pushed the Liberals to the left where they clashed with the NDP, ultimately leading to an exodus of soft support for the Liberals on both the right and the left.

The rise of the NDP can be attributed to the Conservative strategy to become the Natural Governing Party in the centre, leaving the Liberals with nowhere to go but implode.

In its place is a strong but ultimately impotent NDP, who will now symbolically represent the opposition in a House of Commons where it can defeat no votes. Still, they have to be pretty pleased with themselves.

A fortuitous coalescence of a weakening Liberal Party and a weak Liberal leader resulted in the near devastation of that party tonight. As if it were not embarrassing enough that Michael Ignatieff’s failure exceeded his predecessor Stephane Dion, at least the former leader won his seat tonight. The future for the former Harvard professor looks grim.

But it wasn’t just the collapse of the Liberals that was satisfying. The separatist party who formed the most unpleasant ally in the axis of “socialists and losers” also saw the death of sovereignty in Quebec tonight.

Gilles Duceppe accepted responsibility and defeat more humbly than his Liberal counterpart, stepping down. (Updated: Ignatieff resigned Tuesday). The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois now present a mere 37-seat coalition.

Last, and perhaps least, in the election “nobody wanted”, Elizabeth May secured the first seat for the Green Party in British Columbia. Proving what, I don’t know. Perhaps it was sympathy for having excluded her from the televised debates for yet another year. Voters are nothing if not vindictive and unpredictable in their predilections.

A Conservative majority now offers a hope for Canadians that hasn’t been available for decades. After years of reckless spending, government largesse, bloated programs, increased bureaucracy and hazardous government intervention, the Conservatives have a chance to scale back the obscene dependence Canadians have on the state.

Though I don’t expect miracles, I demand some inkling that their protestations of being hampered by the opposition were true. We can begin that good faith by eliminating the vote subsidies, which precipitated the massive about-face of the Conservatives in 2008.

It should be an interesting next four years.

It would seem that many of the pundits and plaudits have endorsed their favourite candidate or party for the imminent 2011 election. As one who predicted on Jan. 1 that no such election would even be happening, it would be consistent that whoever or whatever I endorse will lose.

The Conservatives lost my vote a long time ago, when they turned principle on its side in favour of political power and broke their 2008 election promise. For almost anyone and everyone I’ve spoken to, they don’t seem to have a problem with the shamelessness of this act.

Nobody could have known the extent of the financial meltdown, they will say. Nobody could have anticipated the sort of economic upheaval and revenue shortfalls that would result in the massive deficits that the Conservative government authored in 2009 and 2010, they will say. But I have little sympathy for that argument.

Stephen Harper was unequivocal in his promise to never go into deficit spending, under any circumstances, ever again. Believing him to be a man of principle, I voted for the party in 2008. It won’t happen again, or at least not until “regime change” puts someone with more conviction behind his own absolutist statements.

Had the man said he would prefer not to go into deficit, or would try his best not to, it could be something. But the only way the Conservatives could win the previous election was to run on the simplistic platform that it was the only political party not offering an economic collapse, juxtaposing itself to the grossly negligent Liberal Party and their Green Shift.

Sound familiar? They’re doing pretty much the same thing this year. And though I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea the Conservatives would run the fiscal ship better than the Liberals, and certainly better than the NDP, when you’re setting record debt levels it comes as little consolation.

It isn’t just the deficits either. It’s the way the Conservatives do business in power. They’re controlling, secretive, openly contemptuous of procedure, disrespectful, assumptive, patronizing and self-serving. It isn’t so much what they say as how they say it, as the old expression goes.

So more of the same doesn’t seem very appealing at all. More contempt for what Canadians think, the media who inform them and the voters who believed their lies. As a voter I couldn’t in good conscience go with them, even though I believe they may be least damaging to the country.

In some respects I agree with Andrew Coyne’s invented dichotomy of how badly the opposition parties might ruin the economy versus how badly the Conservatives might ruin democracy. But in the end he endorses the Liberal Party, who under Michael Ignatieff might just represent one of the weakest political choices since Kim Campbell.

Clearly the Liberals are not a serious choice for Canadians, hence the reason the NDP are polling at nearly 30 per cent of the electorate for a full week now. And though the NDP have the most unrealistic economic plan of all the choices, there is an allure there for many voters in the same way the allure existed for disaffected voters in Ontario in 1990. Sick of the blue and red, voters gambled with orange. Unfortunately for Ontario that was a poor gamble.

The NDP do not present a viable alternative for anybody with an ounce of fiscal conservatism. Their party is full of people who have program wish lists that would quickly bleed the federal coffers and require either an increase in taxes or a reduction in spending, likely coming from such unpopular places as the military. We don’t need one anyway, right?

The Green Party isn’t worth considering even as a protest vote, steeped as they are in the irrelevant environmental activism of a carbon tax economy, which has already proven a staggering failure in British Columbia. It isn’t just that the Green Party has no hope of becoming relevant soon, but the leadership under Elizabeth May has pushed it from a mainstream centrist party of sustainability (a good idea in and of itself) to a fringe leftwing group echoing similar NDP-Liberal policies that already exist.

What choice remains then? Well, none. But that’s still a choice. On May 2, I intend to walk into a voting booth and select nobody, as that is precisely who is out there representing my interests right now. Should that change in future elections I’ll certainly consider it. But Monday is a vote for a more representative democracy, beginning with my expression of contempt for what it is now.

The headline isn’t meant to be offensive to the NDP leader. It’s just the bizarre circumstances that has thrust the man, for whom the moniker was invented for his stance on Afghanistan, to a close second in the latest political polls.

The orange revolution or orange crush, whichever you prefer, has culminated with the newest poll showing the NDP within the statistical margin of error of reaching the front-running Conservative Party.

The latest Forum Research poll shows the NDP polling at 31 per cent, just three points back from the Conservatives, while the woeful Liberal Party is down to 22 per cent under the frail leadership of Michael Ignatieff. Indeed, it’s only the former Harvard professor who doesn’t seem to realize how far his party has plummeted as soft Liberal support has decidedly moved to the NDP in the past week.

Ignatieff is once again openly discussing the possibility of leading a coalition government following the imminent demise of the Liberals in next week’s election. The only problem with that scenario is the NDP would have little incentive to allow Ignatieff to lead the government while finishing in a dismal third place. No, that honour would fall to Jack.

Given that 34 per cent is only 3 per cent lower than the 2008 Conservative showing, the NDP fortunes can only really be attributed to Michael Ignatieff’s inability to connect with Canadians. In fact, the public appetite for the bushy-browed leader is so feeble that the party is polling six points below one of the worst showings in Liberal history, accomplished by the charismatically-challenged Stephane Dion.

The orange revolution is not a blip on the radar either, as the latest Ekos poll shows the NDP trailing the Conservatives by six points, but still solidly in second place with a six point lead on the lowly Liberals.

The most optimistic numbers show the NDP growing to a staggering 108 seats in the House of Commons, with Jack moving into Stornoway and forming the official opposition. The Liberals would be reduced to 60 seats, and the Bloc Quebecois nearly decimated to three seats. Combined, the coalition would have 171 seats to 137 for the Conservatives, meaning the government could be formed without the help of the separatists, but an NDP-heavy cabinet.

The idea of both an NDP opposition or coalition government led by the NDP has to send shivers down the spines of many a voter. Although the Conservatives haven’t exactly been the best fiscal stewards during the past three years, much of their spending was wholeheartedly endorsed by the other parties, who demanded stimulus during the recession. Much of the the most vocal calls for spending were made by NDP MPs in the House of Commons.

It’s already been admitted by the party that an NDP government wouldn’t be able to bash its round peg platform into the square hole of economic reality, nor do I suspect the NDP really ever expected to have to make good on many of its hare-brained promises.

Gone, however, is the belief the NDP would sap away Liberal support, enabling the Conservatives to win their long-coveted majority. Instead, it would seem that a flood of hand-sitting voters from 2008 decided to make it out to vote in the advance polls, with a record 2 million people casting their votes over the Easter weekend.

Although the most likely scenario is another Conservative minority, the NDP winning second place is a permanent game-changer, and could be just the thing to set off a leftwing coalition government. The polls leading up to voting day are going to make the election nobody wanted very exciting. Ironically, if the NDP do manage to win over enough votes in the final week to form the government, we could see the Liberals and Conservatives form a coalition of their own to stop the economic insanity of the NDP from prevailing.

Photograph by: Bryanna Bradley, Montreal Gazette

The federal NDP are backtracking on some environmental promises they made in their own economic platform for the first year if they were to form the next government. The party has since explained that the $3.6 billion in green spending would have to be delayed to coincide with revenue from a cap and trade carbon system that has yet to be implemented.

“We do indeed propose that revenues from pricing carbon (dioxide emissions) be put back into improving the environment — that’s how carbon use will be reduced,” the NDP stated in a press release. “If revenues from pricing carbon are delayed or are lower than planned, then the investments will also be delayed or will be phased in more slowly than planned.”

It should be noted that the NDP have criticized other political parties, but in particular the Conservatives, for not being able to provide concrete plans and numbers to price carbon or develop a sound environmental plan. Now it looks like the NDP are guilty of the same kind of flimflammery.

That isn’t surprising. No political party in its right mind would want to scare away voters by committing to solid industry-killing environmental plans other than the Green Party, who rightfully is poised to win zero seats on May 2. If the Conservatives have been evasive about an environmental plan, it’s because nobody can square the circle that is slamming the same corporate industry that provides the jobs each party leader is promising they can deliver.

But beyond that, the NDP know they don’t have to actually create realistic deliverables, which is why most of the time they serve as a good opposition party to whichever government is in power. They can advocate for any unrealistic spending program and policy because at the end of the day they don’t have to answer for it.

This is not unlike the manner in which the unions that support the NDP operate with the workers they represent. The unions aren’t responsible for the fiscal solvency of a corporation, so they’ll ask for whatever they believe they can get and not worry about how it affects the company. That’s part of the reason for the automotive industry collapse — though certainly not the whole reason — the unions thought that good times would always exist, or more probably they didn’t care.

An NDP party isn’t really advocating for government policy that is necessarily realistic, so much as it is presenting the kind of policies that will serve as opposition advocacy to the ruling party. It’s not possible to fulfil the kind of promises they make, and any rudimentary examination of their platform confirms this.

Having said that, occasionally the world goes crazy and the unlikeliest candidate with the most unrealistic promises wins. No, I’m not referring to Barack Obama, though that is a good example. I’m talking about the Ontario NDP under the Bob Rae government.

By the time Rae got into power he had made so many promises to workers and unions that the NDP had no choice but to make good on many of its fiscally incompetent policies, including social spending, social housing and tax increases. When the deficit soared to $9 billion, Rae tried to make pragmatic cuts to the public sector, ultimately alienating his own base.

The problem is the NDP are caught between two worlds and there’s little way to bridge them. On the one hand they want to make the kind of promises and offer the alternatives that is quite blatantly sapping soft Liberal support away in the polls. But on the other hand they must be cognizant that the more viable an alternative the party becomes, the more closely scrutinized and debunked their economic platform will be.

An NDP in the OLO, however, can be just as dangerous as one in power. If election day puts Jack Layton in Stornoway — the ultimate humiliation for Ignatieff by the way — then the party would be more than just a power broker in a minority government. It would be able to foist each of its infeasible policies on the Conservatives and use the Bloc Quebecois as further leverage. It would even put Layton in a strong bargaining position for a coalition agreement.

Only a Conservative majority will really render the NDP surge irrelevant. That, or election day restores the NDP to their former obscurity as panic sets in and the tide moves back to the red.

And here’s the proof:

Boy, life in Sweden must be really bad if it’s worse than here, where Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are destroying Canada.

John Ivison is an often underrated political columnist who really hits the nail on the head every once in a while. His Saturday column on Ignatieff needing to stop talking about Ignatieff is one perfect example of his perceptive proficiencies.

As every political poll, survey and focus group has told him, Michael Ignatieff has failed miserably to build his image and brand as successfully as Stephen Harper. In fact, he’s failed so badly that only fringe party leader Elizabeth May has a less alluring leadership brand.

And of all the things that have hampered Ignatieff, nothing has been so pronounced as his expatriate days when Canada was little more than a vacation home to return to and renew his membership card. As Ivison writes, “it reminds voters that here is a man who is not like them,” in any way shape or form. Regardless of how many times the man tries to explain it in soft light video with archival footage of Harvard, he only serves to further validate the “just visiting” charge from the Conservatives.

But that’s the fault of the Liberal war room. They don’t seem to be able to perceive that the greatest asset of the Liberal leader isn’t what he provides, but what he doesn’t provide: the cult of personality that Stephen Harper has built around himself.

The Liberals are never going to match Ignatieff with Harper in some political gladitorial showdown, as the prime minister is going to win that match every single time. It isn’t about intelligence or experience or wisdom. Some people just “have it” and with Ignatieff, baby, you don’t have it.

What they’re missing, however, is the chance to juxtapose the Liberal brand as precisely the opposite to what many Canadians have come to dislike and distrust about the Conservatives. Instead of promoting the Liberal leader as the central brand, focus on branding the political party as a group of people all working equally toward some common goal.

Instead of the centralizing power of the Conservatives where all political messages have to be filtered through the PMO and Party HQ, where party candidates and workers have to be vetted for common media interviews, the Liberals could focus on being what the Conservatives are not.

The contrast could be remarkable if done properly. Ignatieff could step back and say that it isn’t about him, it’s about Canada and the kind of vision all 308 candidates have for a Liberal vision of the country. The Liberal brand is obviously enduring enough that it can hold a quarter of the electoral loyalty, despite having a weak leader for much of the past half decade.

Of course, that will never happen. Because part of the reason the Conservative strategy works is that it’s true. Ignatieff didn’t come back to Canada to stand out of the spotlight and campaign for a better Canada on ideas alone. He came back to be coronated as the returning monarch of Canada by virtue of his superior human qualities.

And even if that can’t be articulated on a perfectly logical plane of thought, it is the gnawing instinct of mistrust that is what most likely provides the negative feedback loop the Liberals are receiving in polls.

The exclusion of two apparent Liberal party supporters from a Conservative campaign event in London, Ontario is being blamed on a sinister plot by the PMO to screen out opposition supporters. The story has even led Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to directly accuse Stephen Harper of demanding more rigorous background checks on people showing up at his campaign events than advisers he hires to work for him.

Ignatieff went on to tell reporters during a stop in Newfoundland that “you are in a very un-Canadian place” when people get barred from public meetings for being friends with him on Facebook. One of the women who said she was barred from the event had to pre-register for the rally and that’s how the Conservatives screened her out.

First off, it’s an obvious bit of turnabout being fair play for Ignatieff, who is taking the opportunity to mock Stephen Harper for his party’s own campaign against Ignatieff’s own allegiance to Canada. And it’s clear that he’s exploiting the situation to create his own media spotlight, happily granted by the mainstream press.

Second, it seems to be taken for granted that this was deliberate, and further indicative of the sort of contempt for democratic practices that the Conservatives have displayed in this country’s most hallowed institutions. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

But does it seem logical, or even practical, to screen every person who pre-registers for a campaign event, and then exclude them if they’re seen to belong to another party? Wouldn’t it seem more likely that the party would be less interested in the decided Conservative voters who will do little more than wave banners, and more interested in the kind of people who might be pursued to abandon Ignatieff and add a vote for the Conservatives?

Lost in the narrative of this whole exclusion story is the fact the Conservatives are on a campaign to win over the soft Liberal support that will grant them the majority government they so desperately covet. The idea that Stephen Harper is ordering the PMO to draw up lists of political enemies to exclude them from campaign rallies is about as ridiculous as it gets.

And if these women were excluded because of the Quixotic decision of one or more Conservative staffers, then it seems a little overdone to continue belabouring the point long after the party has issued a statement of apology and indicated it was a mistake. Assigning motives from the highest tiers of power to exclude potential voters from rallies is pretty much the textbook definition of Harper derangement syndrome.

Of course there is another, albeit equally implausible, version of events to this story. As ridiculous as it is to suspect the prime minister of trying to exclude voters from a campaign rally designed to gain more voters, is it at all possible the Liberal party hired young students to go to these rallies in order to make the claim they were denied entry?

I mean, is it at all possible that given the political fodder that has been made over the claims of two people in the entire country of Canada, that a calculation was made somewhere in Liberal party headquarters to further the conspiratorial theories that Stephen Harper’s anti-democratic government is out to be mean and nasty to young, innocent students?

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No. But neither is the sort of claims that are being given serious consideration by people who pretend to have serious minds in organizations that pretend to be serious dispensers of news.

The current selection of ideas being proposed by the usual faces in Ottawa has to be among the most deluded I’ve heard in quite some time. The only party that appears to be displaying any fiscal common sense is the Conservatives, and that’s only because they’re not going to open the floodgates again until 2015.

It’s positively bizarre, actually, to listen to the Conservative proposals for the 2011 election, since they all take place in 2015, or the year that Canada’s deficit will magically be balanced. From the announcements he’s made, one would think Stephen Harper was actually running in a different time period than the others. A $500 fitness tax credit and income-splitting are just two of the big ticket items voters can expect a half decade from now.

Whatever spending promises have been made by the Conservatives, however, they pale in comparison to those made by the “Nanny State Professor”, with $8 billion in big-ticket social spending over the next two years. And they’ll somehow be paid for without raising income taxes (which isn’t exactly true, since they plan to raise corporate rates back up to 18 per cent).

The Liberal plan is big on the party’s attempt to corral the family vote from the Conservatives, adding $8 billion in new spending. $1 billion would go toward Registered Education Savings Plans (which personally appeals to a parent like myself, since my RESP isn’t tax-deductible while RSPs are), $1.2 billion would go to daycare, $700 million to better GICs and $400 million to energy retrofits (which is a bit of a policy lift from the Conservatives).

To say the Liberal budget is unaffordable is an understatement, although this seems remarkably similar to the same sort of pie-in-the-sky promises made by the Ontario Liberals when Dalton McGuinty reached out to put a chicken in every pot that was hard done by the Harris era.

It would be one thing if we were running large surpluses for Ignatieff to make these kinds of spending promises, but during a deficit it is frankly irresponsible. The sheer enormity of it all suggests the platform is aimed more at election racketeering than good policy-making. The last thing we need are more social programs that can be expected to balloon in cost over the next decade.

As for Jack Layton, he’s mostly out-to-lunch as usual. He’d create a jobs program that would be funded by returning the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent, proving once again that socialists don’t understand the fundamentals of economics.

There is one aspect of the NDP spending platform that deserves a closer look. His $103 million promise to improve benefits for military veterans is admirable, and certainly affordable when compared to the fact the Conservative government is willing to spend $100 million on the commemoration of the war of 1812.

Not that Layton is really in this two-horse race. Nor is Ignatieff, if you look at the polls lately. But Harper is taking some deserved heat for saying today that he wouldn’t meet the Liberal leader in a man-to-man showdown in front of the cameras (though it has been pointed out that Sun TV is willing to accommodate when they launch in late April), giving CBC reporter Terry Milewski the opportunity to call him a chicken to his face.

The Conservatives are also constrained by the fact that they have said on the record they won’t change their budget, so the amount of vote-buying they can manage is limited to things that extend beyond the current budget projections, hence the reason for their bizarre tax promises in 2015.

Perhaps the best thing to hope for is a majority government, not because I believe the Conservatives deserve one, but because it would test once and for all the argument that the government’s fiscal credibility has been compromised by the demands of the opposition. That, and the fact we wouldn’t have to hear about unaffordable universal programs until sometime in 2015.