Filibuster Cartoons
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Canadian politics really hasn’t been very exciting lately. Prime Minister Harper suspended parliament yesterday and will reconvene it in October. When it does resume, a vote of confidence in his government will be the first item on the agenda.
All three of the opposition parties will be under a lot of pressure force Harper out with a non-confidence vote, in large part because they’ve all turned pretty strongly against the war in Afghanistan in recent months. They demand a withdraw of Canadian troops from the conflict as soon as possible, but Harper refuses to set a timetable.
I can understand the NDP and the Bloc demanding a withdrawal, because they’re reliably anti-war and anti-American on most issues. The Liberal Party, however, was the party that sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan in the first place, and they’re supposed to be the party of great and noble foreign policy initiatives. Afghanistan is different than Iraq, and most liberals used to be able to admit that.
Liberal leader Stephane Dion is a shrewd politician however. His gamble is that voters will turn against the war so long as Canadians keep dying in combat. There’s not really much more too it than that.
