Meet your new Quebec NDP caucus.

The jokes write themselves. Will they vote for a national nap time program? Will Jack Layton implement the buddy system to get them to work? And how can they talk to Canadians when they’re not allowed to talk to strangers?

Among the NDP’s 57 new MPs, nine are baby-faced graduates, some of whom are just out of University and one who probably still belongs in high school.

The dissolution of the Bloc Quebecois gave way to what appears to be a rather mindless shift to the NDP, as evidenced by the fact residents in Quebec did not even bother to check what candidates they were voting for.

Pierre-Luc Dusseault, who captured 43 per cent of the vote in the riding of Sherbrooke, is a month shy of his twentieth birthday, having only just completed his first year of University. He becomes the youngest MP in Canadian history and the new centrefold for Barely Legal Canadian Politician Magazine.

More bizarre still is the story about Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who decided to go to Las Vegas during her own campaign in Berthier-Maskinoge, a region of the country she doesn’t live. Even worse, Brosseau can not parle Francais, but it didn’t stop her from defeating incumbent Bloc Quebecois MP by 6,000 votes.

There are other stories similar to the above, with NDP candidates winning in Quebec despite having no political experience, never mind very little life experience. The sudden changes in fortune for the party appear to be more a philosophical change of heart than one rooted in the campaign efforts of the challengers.

I’m not sure what this says about our democracy, when a group of neophyte nobodies can win jobs that pay a base compensation of $157,000 by simply entering their names on a campaign form. As noted by others, Dusseault can qualify for his pension in six years, giving new life to the term “Freedom 25.”

Prime minister Stephen Harper wants to call the House back into session by mid-May, but the NDP said they aren’t ready with 57 new MPs to train. I assume they mean potty train. As I said, the jokes write themselves, good and bad.

I don’t really feel so bad any more about not voting. After all, I could have done worse. I could have elected a 19-year-old.

All jokes aside, it’s just as well Jack’s newly minted MPs are as green as their favourite Sesame Street puppet, since the four years they will serve in opposition voting on bills of no consequence will be invaluable experience.

The greater fear would have been 57 rookies expected to lead a minority government, something the province of Quebec doesn’t seem to have cared much about when they cast caution into the wind and stabbed blindly in the polling booth.

This really puts paid to the myth that in order to attract the best and brightest talent to politics we have to compensate people with exorbitant salaries and generous benefits.

But so long as Ottawa is looking for young people with no practical political experience, I humbly offer my services. After all, unlike Dusseault, I can actually legally drink if I need to visit the United States.

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.

New BC NDP leader Adrian Dix. Photograph by: Adrian MacNair

This was, again, rather a fluke, but when I returned from North Vancouver today I saw that the BC NDP leadership convention wasn’t over yet so I headed over to see who the winner would be. When I arrived at 5:30 they had just showed the second ballot and Adrian Dix was the frontrunner with 7,748 votes, Mike Farnworth at 6,951 votes and John Horgan at 5,034 votes. So Dix and Farnworth went to a final ballot, with Dix being chosen the new leader at 9,772 to 9,095 votes.

You can get this information on any news website, but I thought I’d post up some of the photos I managed to take. It was funny because during the lull the large screens showed the Canucks game and the crowd was louder for the two goals that were scored in the second period than they were for Adrian Dix.

My camera didn’t perform very well inside the building either, so I’ve chosen only the best six. Click on the images for the high resolution version if you so desire. I took pictures of MLA Jenny Kwan and city councillor Kerry Jang but those didn’t turn out.

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.

If you listen to the NDP, hiking minimum wage and burdening businesses with greater operating costs is a good thing because companies can afford it. But increasing the cost of applying for criminal pardons is “a commercial transaction” of the justice system, even if keeping the costs at $150 for 17 years is straining that system.

Well, what’s wrong with increasing the fees for a pardon request? These people committed a crime against society, and now they’re asking to have that transgression permanently removed from their record:

NDP public safety critic Don Davies is now calling for a committee hearing into the issue, arguing there was no warning and no good reason given for the increase. He is also warning that it’s dangerous to bring in the concept of user pay to the justice system and that new pardon cost will be prohibitive to some Canadians.

That’s right. To criminal Canadians.

Here’s the thing. Even if you only apply the 2011 rate of inflation of 2.3 per cent, $150 in 1994 is now worth $221. But the rate of inflation is historically low. The rate has actually averaged 3.26 per cent over the past 90 years, which would set the value of $150 in 1994 dollars as being $259.

The Conservatives are setting the new fee at $631, which is really only an 8.82 per cent annual increase compounded to the value of $150 in 1994 dollars. It doesn’t sound like a giant leap or much of a financial risk, considering as many as 75 per cent of pardon requests are granted.

Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters

Sometimes I think that Jack Layton exists just to delight in teasing the Liberal Party. At any moment when the Liberals seem like they might be in danger of finding a section of vertebrae, the NDP sidle up to Stephen Harper and play “let’s make a deal.”

Not that I really think the Liberals will ever defeat this government on a confidence vote. Their near-perfect record of supporting the Conservatives has been untarnished for half a decade now, and there doesn’t seem to be any danger of that changing with Ignatieff’s suitcase at the helm.

Even as the socialists were having a frank talk with the Conservatives, I suspect Michael Ignatieff was still busy mulling over the possibility of doing something. With political reflexes like that, you’d imagine this man would have got around to declaring war on Germany in 1946.

What I find even more surprising is that the NDP made the deal in the maelstrom of the Bev Oda affair, which I suppose in the world of the 24-hour scandal cycle in Ottawa may as well have happened in ancient Babylon. Still, I expected a half-hearted squeak from the NDP, and the rattling of a few paper sabres. Sheesh, they don’t even go through the formality of impotent threats anymore.

The reason for the NDP’s eager announcement that they have wrung hard-fought socialist concessions from the Conservative government — like cutting taxes — is pretty clear. They’ve taken a beating in the polls of late, and would lose as many as 16 seats if an election were held today.

This is interesting, because even though the Liberals would gain 15 seats, it wouldn’t come at the expense of the Conservative Party, projected to gain a single seat. They would come all from the boys in orange, which makes their unwillingness to oblige even the unrealistic prospect of defeating the March budget nothing more than a spectacularly irrelevant work of fiction from Gloria Galloway.

It’s amazing that some pundits even entertained the idea that the opposition would play parliamentary roulette with the current poll results showing a resurgent lead over the Liberal Party. We’ve established the gutlessness of the Liberals, and the NDP have no interest in trading away their tiny presence in the House of Commons on the basis of principle.

And some might even ask what principle has to do with anything? The actual policies of the Conservative government are difficult to assail from a socialist perspective, their “sullen, haughty, can’t-be-bothered-tone” notwithstanding, of course.

It’s also rather difficult to criticize the Conservatives for their apparent flexibility of ethics, when the other contenders for the government seem to so willingly let these transgressions gather the dust of irrelevance in time for the weekend. Like so many other grievances that have disappeared in arrogant, contemptuous refusal to address them, the opposition has dutifully returned to their rightful place at the dog’s water bowl of power.

So, when do I expect the Conservatives to be answerable to the past two and a half years of malleable principle and rubbery promises? Well, I don’t know the date, but I do know that it will come at a time and in a manner of the choosing of the ruling party. To expect any differently would be to ignore the “not” in Oda’s memo.

That appears to be the argument put forth by pollster Nik Nanos, who raised fears of a two-party state in Canada just as it is in the United States.

The current $2-per-vote subsidy is given to qualifying federal parties who win at least two per cent of the national vote. Currently all parties but the Conservatives are heavily dependent on this form of democratic welfare, with the former raising $4 million more than all other political parties combined last year.

Nanos said the smaller parties would have too much difficulty raising financial support without the $2 per vote, which would eliminate $5 million from the revenue stream of the NDP.

“If we took the proposal to its logical conclusion, this would probably lead to a two-party state, that would be the logical long-term conclusion,” he told The Hill Times. “The current regime, whether you love it or hate it, sustains minority views with funding. The green party is probably a good example.”

I suppose you could use the same argument to subsidize newspapers, television stations and magazines. Since people are too cheap to spend a couple of bucks on their favourite source of news and information, perhaps the government should subsidize that involuntary participation?

It seems to me that if 2.5 million people in Canada can bother to get out and vote for the NDP, then they can bother to scrape a toonie from the bottom of their Bolivian fair trade coffee fund and ante up for democracy. Otherwise, quite honestly, I couldn’t care less if the NDP went the way of the flying donkey.

And let’s face facts. Although the Conservatives have an incredible fundraising team that goes to the well to squeeze every last drop it can get, at least the party is hustling and rustling up enough money to sustain itself. The other parties, in particular the Bloc Quebecois, are coasting through the effort, proving that age-old axiom that welfare only creates complacency.

Former Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan suggested Canada allow political contributions on their tax forms as in the United States. This might work, I suppose, in a kind of passive participatory way. It’s sort of like a democratic afterthought.

Truthfully, at $27 million annually, politically subsidies are but a pebble in the pothole of the federal deficit. But I don’t see the point in financially rewarding either party or people for partaking in what is supposed to be voluntary democracy. Incentivizing voting with bribery is hardly an inspiring message for our anemic politics. Remove the political welfare and let’s see whether Canadians can put up or shut up.