Thursday, May 04, 2006

Mulroney, in reverse?

Stephen Harper (and all players who have participated) has so far been successful in reversing the split that the PC party of yesteryear underwent at the end of Mulroney's tenure. I'll leave the effects of this to future ponderings. But I was recently thinking about the next obvious step in the process - the dismantling of the Bloc Quebecois, and the 'return to the fold' of those disaffected quebeckers represented by them. A recent poll in Quebec has the CPC (34%) out-polling the BQ (31%) in Quebec, with the Liberals a dismal third (15%). Certainly, some of Gilles Duceppe's calculations in supporting the CPC budget is that he stands to lose seats as the numbers now stand in Quebec. If the CPC support is sustained there, how long before BQ members decide separatism is a dead issue, and decide to fold themselves into one or the other of the truly federal parties? I'm definitely more to the right than Harper has shown himself to be on many issues (to be fair, he's probably more right than he's been able to express thus far in a minority parliament), but find the federal dynamics very intriguing, and I am willing to give him a lot of credit for it. What Paul Martin promised (but couldn't/wouldn't deliver on), it seems as though Stephen Harper is achieving (after what, 100 days?).

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