One of the most raucous sessions in recent memory ended with a Tory chorus of O Canada in the government lobby. Minutes later, Duceppe was at the microphone saying he'll continue to work in the best interests of sovereignty.

"(NDP Leader Jack) Layton and Dion won't change. They're federalists and I'm a sovereigntist," he said. "I think every gain we're making here is good for Quebec, and what's good for Quebec is good for a sovereign Quebec."

The Governor General will not grant him an election, so he'll hold one anyway.  After a disoriented performance in the Commons yesterday, Stephen Harper is slowly returning to form, launching passionate attacks on Dion during Question Period today.  There will be no graceful bow out, no waiting until the coalition destroys itself.  He intends to fight.  Rumour tonight has it that he will prorogue the House until late January.  What follows will be a 6-8 week war.  The Prime Minister had hoped to bankrupt his opponents by removing political subsidies, he will get his wish through other means, far more direct and bloody.  Drawing upon the Conservative Party's large reserves - and new donations from an enraged base, seeing a long sought for power slip away - he will launch wave after wave of attack ads.  He will campaign across the country.  The hope is that a swelling of public outrage against the coalition will frighten at least one of the three leaders - most likely Duceppe who is the weak link in the chain - to climb down.  If he does not prorogue he will be removed from power next week, if he does he can survive until the end of January, when he can be defeated on a budget. 

The second option allows him to fight a war of attrition against the opposition he can win, even if he loses.  The topic is changed from Harper, the so-called political genius whose arrogance lost him power, to Harper a political martyr to democracy.  Leaving now he leaves a loser, leaving in January he leaves a leader who went down fighting.  Should the coalition last so long as mid 2011 - as the Monday accord outlines - the public will still retain the image of Harper the Fighter.  Beyond simple electorate calculation is the man himself.  Three years of prudence, tempered by occasional sessions bullying the opposition, have made Harper seem rather bland.  We're about to see passion and energy we have never seen from this man.  Some Canadians will begin to like him for it, even just a bit.  It is utterly personal now, for him and the party.  The shock of near death has tarnished the Prime Minister's image, this pseudo-campaign will subdue these memories.  

The Conservative line of attack is obvious and has already been stated.  A weak and failed leader - on his way out - has conspired with a socialist and a traitor to remove the democratically elected leader of Canada.  The Coalition's constitutional case is impeccable, it's political case is weak.  Their hope is to survive long enough for everyone to forget how they came to power, to say nothing of who they are.  The Conservative's job is to make sure no one forgets.  Another message needs to be included in the campaign, not directly from the Prime Minister, but from his ministers, staffers and partisan bloggers:  This crisis is NOT ultimately Stephen Harper's fault.  As the leaked tapes from the weekend NDP meeting suggest, this Coalition has been in the works for some time.  Political moves of this scale are not made lightly.  Behind the scenes - though barely concealed - is the figure of Jean Chretien.  Since his departure almost exactly five years ago, the Liberal Party has been run by a collection of amateurs.  The Coalition is a shrewd, ruthless masterstroke from the old master himself.  Papa Jean was many things, but he was never stupid.  The collapse of the Dion leadership has created a power vacuum which the former Prime Minister has probably exploited.  It will be years before anything like the full story of this last week's events can be written, including how far back the planning for the Coalition stretches. 

Minority parliaments are always places of intrigue and overheated speculation, they live on such things, even if their reality is usually far more mundane.  If the goal of the Coalition was merely to achieve a stronger stimulus package, or save the the vote subsidy, they accomplished that goal by Sunday morning.  This was a premeditated coup.  The vote subsidy cut was a stroke of good luck, allowing the three leaders to cement their alliance while at the same time making Harper seem like a fool, tarnishing his strongest image point - his competence.  As Scott Reid was energetically explaining this weekend, calling for Harper to be "killed," this isn't about removing the Conservatives from party; this about the party losing its greatest strategic asset. Those pushing to remove Harper from the leadership would turn an opposition triumph into an absolute rout.  Anyone who has the slightest interest in seeing a Conservative government in the near future has only one realistic option, support Stephen Harper.  Donate, volunteer, blog and canvass.  This is Total War.  Conservative MPs who seem less than enthusiastic in supporting the leader should be not so gently nudged in the Right Direction.

Has Stephen Harper been arrogant and high handed in his handling of this, and the last, minority parliament?  Yes.  So would Jean Chretien or Pierre Trudeau faced with the same circumstances.  Calling a leader arrogant and out of touch is a standard bit of rhetoric.  Either a leader is arrogant or weak, in the media and the public's imagination there is no middle ground.  Harper made a minor tactical error last week.  Had he not done so, we would have discovered this wondrous Coalition on the eve of next month's budget.  Harper did not create this Coalition, he merely provoked it prematurely, possibly curtailing its organizational strength by a good two months.

There is something to be said for simply allowing the Coalition to come to power, to practice patience and allow their internal divisions to destroy themselves.  There are, even in a time of grave crisis, advantages to incumbency.  Perhaps not something so lightly surrendered to the Natural Governing Party.  The Coalition is a product of desperation.  On October 14th the Conservatives won a clear majority of the seats in English speaking Canada, and came second in Quebec.  The Liberals have been reduced to an urban rump.  The Bloc was saved by arts funding cuts.  The NDP is at the mercy of public whim, a substitute vote for idealistically minded Grits.  This is how much havoc the Prime Minister has delivered in five years as Tory maestro.  Another five might prove fatal for one of the opposition parties.  Just as the feared Martin juggernaut forced the Right to Unite, so the threat of Harper has united the Left. This is election is about one man.  Beneath the bad haircut, the enormous brain is still plotting tonight.  Amen.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Let us anger some more westerners shall we? The one billion has to come from somewhere:

Even the sovereignty movement can put up with Stéphane Dion as prime minister of a coalition government in Ottawa if it means an additional $1 billion in equalization payments for Quebec, Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois said last night.

Turning the news that the separatist Bloc Québécois is part of a coalition propping up the federal machine along with the Liberal and New Democrats into something positive, Marois said the immediate consequence of the agreement is the Conservative formula for equalization payments is dead in the water.

Instead of a $75-million increase in transfer payments, which Marois had denounced as too little to help the province through the economic crisis, Quebec now stands to bag $1 billion in 2009-2010 because the old formula will apply.

That, she said, is because of the work of Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, who she said accomplished more in a few days and in signing the agreement than Liberal Premier Jean Charest has in six years of friendly talks with Ottawa.

"Listen, Mr. Dion has already been judged," Marois said at a hastily called news conference an hour after it was announced that Dion, a man reviled in sovereignist ranks because of his post-referendum role working for Jean Chrétien, would head the coalition.

"He's leaving. Quebecers did not give them their confidence (in the recent federal vote).

"The Bloc Québécois has acted in a pragmatic and responsible way. We sure aren't going to sacrifice $1 billion because Dion is going to be there five months. There's a limit."

Asked about the image of Duceppe playing the role of "Captain Canada" in making the federal system work, Marois laughed.

"I think, on the contrary, there is a Captain Quebec (in place)," in Ottawa, she said. (Montreal Gazette h/t Last Amazon)

I think the separatists are the only ones being honest.

This Andrew Coyne piece seems like something out of another time, before talk of the Grand Coalition dominated Canadian politics.  That happy time.  Thursday morning.

So, to add to his ever-lengthening list of jaw-dropping about-faces, the former deficit hawk has become a believer in fiscal stimulus. How convenient.

If only it actually worked. Yet neither theory nor evidence gives us much reason to believe it will. However many times it may be invoked these days, and whatever its appeal as an economic cure-all (just add spending and stir!), it remains a fact that deficit spending has never actually worked as advertised. It didn’t work for Rae in 1991. It didn’t work for Marc Lalonde in 1982. It didn’t work for the Japanese in the 1990s, the French in the 1980s, the British in the 1970s, or the Americans in the 1960s. For that matter, it didn’t work for Franklin Roosevelt. (It wasn’t the New Deal that finally ended the Great Depression, but the war.)

The reason it does not work is that an economy is not so simple as the highly restrictive assumptions of Keynesian models would pretend: raising government spending does not, beyond the very shortest of terms, increase aggregate demand, but merely alters its composition, the public sector expanding at the expense of the private. It turns out you can’t get something for nothing, even in macroeconomics: the money the government spends has to be extracted from elsewhere in the economy, a process that rapidly unwinds any transitory gains in output.

Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty should know this.  Bob Rae and Iggy haven't gota clue.  What is this obsession with a stimulus?  Does it rest on sound economics?  Not really, as Andrew has pointed out it's an exploded Keynesian fallacy that should have been buried with Keynes.  The reason Keynes lives is not because of his talents as an economist - though he did refocus economic study on macroeconomics - but because his arguments and theories appealed to generations of politicians.  Here was an excuse, from a top flight economic thinker, to spend, spend and spend.  Politicians always want to be seen as doing something in a crisis, even if someone else is doing most of it.  In the case of a modern economy most of the doing is by businessmen and consumers.  When government starts doing the rest of us have to stop.  The conceit behind these lofty economic pronouncements is much older than Keynes.  The attitude is paternalistic and contemptuous of the great mass of average people.  You cannot be sensible in a crisis and behave as you're suppose to - spend when you can't afford to - so we'll seize your wealth - one way or another - and redistribute it.  Government knows best.  In a panic people follow what's moving, even in the wrong direction.  This is the Grand Coalition's only hope for survival, that enough people are frightened into voting for them and a massive increase in the size of government. 

Caramelized Corsican Apple Tart

Holiday time in Wisconsin:

How come I can never find Christmas beer in Canada other then that seasonal slop from Big Rock?

A lefty coalition government will of course stack the deck with other lefties and Green Party leader Elizabeth May is pining for a senate seat:

Green Leader Elizabeth May, who is a keen supporter of the coalition, said she would be open to an appointment to the Senate so she could play a role in Mr. Dion’s government.

"Of course," she said. "The Green support for a coalition government is unconditional. The nearly one million people who voted Green in Canada would much prefer a coalition government that will support climate action, that will support immediate action for the economy."

Mr. Dion dodged the question when asked at the news conference where the leaders of the coalition pledged to form a new government, but he suggested his deal with Ms. May was the first step toward the kind of multi-party co-operation that made the coalition possible.

"The only thing I want to say is I have strong admiration for Elizabeth May. Indeed, we had an agreement. We may say that we made the first step toward the idea that we need to reconsider how we act with partisan relationships in our country." (Chronicle Herald)

We always said she was just another Liberal. Heck, she even urged her own supporters to vote for them. Also it is neat how she suddenly jumped on the economy bandwagon as just last week she said it didn't merit the attention in comparison to the climate change 'crisis'.

Poor, sad, George W Bush.  He is easily the most universally detested man in the world today.  His wife and mother seem to be his only remaining fans.  If he is undeserving of love right now, he deserves our respect and even admiration.  When I began this blog, near the end of the President's first term, I described him as a modern day Harry Truman.  I stand by that description and so will history.  Truman too was utterly despised, mocked for his vulgar manners - compared to the patrician FDR.  When his daughter's singing was derided by a ccolumnist Truman threatened to clean the writer's clock.  He wore loud Hawaiian shirts.  He recognized the State of Israel after reading passages from the Bible.  He failed to win the Korean War, which he legalistically described as a police action.  Bush the Younger lacks Truman's Horatio Alger life story, yet he possesses his predecessor's integrity and moral clarity.  There was nothing quite like Truman Derangement Syndrome, the politics of the day were rather less shrill, yet few were sorry to seeHarry make way for Ike in 1953.  Former Bush speech-writer David Frum notes eight concrete policy achievements of his former boss:

2) Last week, the Iraqi parliament approved a status-of-forces agreement authorizing the continuing presence of U. S. troops inside Iraq. The Iraq war is ending in political reconciliation within Iraq -- and with hope of an ongoing alliance between Iraq and the United States. Since the 1960s, Iraq has been the most destabilizing state in the Arab world, ruled by a succession of radical anti-western regimes. Bush leaves office with Iraq ready at last to become a more normal country, at peace with itself and its neighbours.

4) No new international terrorist attack inside the United States since 9/11. No Islamic terrorist attacks on a European ally since 2005.

5) Plan Colombia worked, and the Colombian insurgency has been weakened if not broken. Mexico has completed its second multiparty presidential election. The United States has resisted Hugo Chavez's attempts to make himself a Castro-style martyr, putting the Chavez regime on the way to collapse due to its own economic incompetence.

Bush's drug prescription plan - the most dramatic expansion of the welfare state since LBJ - is also listed by Frum as an accomplishment.  Along with the budget deficit it ranks as one of the top reasons conservatives feel betrayed by the Bush years.   Yet his reputation will stand and fall on Iraq.  It was his war.  Another President, possibly even Al Gore, would have felt obliged to invade Afghanistan.  In the white heat of those nervous months after 9/11 there would have been little choice.  Iraq has not been a stunning success, yet, but it shows signs of becoming a credible liberal democracy.  It took Taiwan nearly fifty years to establish a multi-party democracy, South Korean nearly forty.  By those standards Iraq's progress has been swift, all the more remarkable given the attempts at subterfuge by Iran and the ethnic pluralism of the country.  Bush has said that we wants to be remembered as the liberator of millions.  He will be, eventually.  As he leaves office next month we should remember him as one of the bravest - whatever his many philosophical or political faults - politicians in the world today.  Where have all the leaders gone?  Here is one, about to be replaced by a pragmatist with Clintonian instincts.  We will miss him.  It was, above all, George W Bush who in the darkest days of 2006 sought for and found new men and ideas to win the war in Iraq.  Many in his own party, virtually all of the opposition (which was fierce) wanted a quick surrender.  He stayed the course and has change history for the better.  It will be up to the people of Iraq to see if they are worthy of this remarkable man's gifts.  In his clumsy, inarticulate, moralizing way, George W Bush has made the world a better and safer place.  His unpopularity should be signal, to those who know better, that this January we will be losing a true leader and visionary statesman.

Neil Waugh of the Edmonton Sun reports that Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has a red flag up on this possible coalition government. This stems from NDP leader Jack Layton's 'shut down the oil sands' declaration and Liberal leader Stephane Dion's promise of a cap- and-trade system in Canada for carbon emissions. Ed Stelmach is calling it a scam and a 'massive wealth transfer' but apparently he has a plan:

However, if the government does fall and unelectable Dion gets to be Canada's unelected PM, Steady Eddie hints at a Plan B.

"We do have a strategy in place," he reveals. Then clams up. "I'm not going to play the cards until we know who we are dealing with," he says. "And what the issues are."

But the premier's office phone lines were buzzing yesterday.

There's talk of a Coalition West to fight off the eastern invaders.

Saskatchewan's solid Premier Brad Wall is contacted. So is B.C.'s flaky Gordon Campbell.

"I'm here to represent the best interests of Albertans," Stelmach vows. "And to protect Albertans."

Cap and trade comes quickly to mind.

Alberta's opposition MLAs prove to be less than useless.

Liberal Leader Kevin Taft grills Stelmach about oilsands projects on hold.

While NDP Leader Brian Mason says he is "very excited" about Layton as co-prime minister.

Wildrose Alliance Leader Paul Hinman says what has to be said.

Branding the coalition a "divide-and-conquer government" and "economic bullies."

"This could be very painful for Albertans," Hinman snapped.

Then he demanded Stelmach bring back the "firewall" legislation to protect the province from the new Ottawa raiders.(Edmonton Sun)

As I noted yesterday, the three stooges with their Alberta can blow me cheerleaders are going to make history one way or another. 

So it looks like I owe Paul Tuns a beer.  I'd suggest he collect quickly, I might be unemployed soon enough, along with many, many other Canadians.  We are soon to receive the many blessings of a government of clowns.  A weekend is a very, very, very long time in politics.  It seems unlikely the Grand Coalition was a quickly improvised affair, something Stephane Dion and Jack Layton cooked up between lunch and dinner on Thursday afternoon.  They saw their moment and they took it.  Until this afternoon's press conference there was every reason to believe that this was an elaborate bluff.  Giles Duceppe's signature on the coalition agreement, though the Bloc will not received any cabinet positions, seals Stephen Harper's fate.  The mastermind of recent Canadian politics has been checkmated so thoroughly he'll be spending at least the next few months in the political wilderness.  If the Grand Coalition survives the winter there is every chance it will last its full eighteen months.  This is not to say that the Coalition will popular or prudent,  in fact quite the opposite.  The deeper the hole they dig for themselves, the less willing they will be to call an election.  In a year's time Prime Minister Iggy - or possibly even PM Dion, who has a patina of competence for the first time in two years as leader - will be clinging to power desperately, knowing what fate awaits him and the Coalitionistas. 

A weakening economy, an enraged Conservative base and a distrustful electorate will be matched with a massive deficit, which the Grits will try desperately to mask in the vagaries of public sector accounting rules.  The hope until this afternoon was that Larry, Curly or Moe would have a falling out, allowing Harper to continue playing the opposition off against each other.  Neither he, nor anyone really beyond Parliament Hill, thought the Liberals or the NDP would be reckless enough to get into bed with the Bloc.  Perhaps it was the sense of the acceptance the Bloc now has, the word traitors has lost a lot of its zing, after fifteen years in the House.  They have become another pressure group, simply the biggest of the lot who, as a matter of form, genuflect about an independent Quebec.  With Jean Charest cruising to a majority in Quebec, the separatist threat is minimal tonight.  In today's Question Period Harper snapped that Dion - now very smug indeed - was playing the biggest game in Canadian history.  Yes and he just won it.  Cold.  Precedents? 

The last coalition at the federal level was during the First World War when the Conservatives joined forces with English speaking Liberals to pushthrough Conscription.  The minority governments in the 1920s, 1960s and 1970s relied upon informal understandings.  The closest parallel we have to current events is the agreement signed by David Peterson's Liberals and Bob Rae's NDP in Ontario between 1985 and 1987.  Frank Miller, the PC Premier and successor to Bill Davis, had won a narrow minority government in the 1985 election, stumbling badly over the question of extending government financing through to Grade 13 for the Catholic school system.  Miller had expected, in the fashion of the Davisgovernments between 1975 and 1981, to play the NDP off against the Liberals.  After 42 consecutive years of Tory rule at Queen's Park, Rae and Peterson correctly guessed the public was willing to accept a change, even through extraordinary means.  Unlike in 1985, when the Tory basewas severely annoyed at the party hierarchy, today the Conservative grassroots will focus much of their rage on the Coalitionistas. 

Harper will be blamed for making a mistake, the Grits-Dippers and Bloc for having stolen a Tory victory.  The Miller Progressive Conservatives of 1985 had a narrow lead over the Liberals, unlike Harper's Tories.  Over the next weeks and months, as the full shock sets in, Harper will be severely grilled and his leadership questioned.  He needs to hold on and to be supported.  Do not imagine that a tactical blunder has caused the downfall of the government.  This was a plan long in the making which circumstances made possible now.  It was good (or bad) luck that Harper hit a very raw nerve - the opposition's weak financial structure - but some other pretext would have been found, linked somehow to the current financial crisis.  You can always accuse someone of not doing enough in an emergency and the Coalitionistas could just have easily waited until the budget; the cutting off of subsides simply brought forward the planned D-Day. 

There is a chance that the NDP is so desperate for power that, in exchange for some high profile spending increases - easily labelled stimulus - they will let the Blue Liberals run this coalition.  Canadians, especially Central Canadians, have a comfort zone somewhere between Red Tory and Blue Liberal.  If they're smart - which they've been so far - they might safely govern from the center for some time.  Are they prudent enough to do this?  That depends entirely on the moderation of the NDP and the Bloc.  The NDP has reasons to moderate, to stay in power - gaining control of key ministeries and imposing their agenda via regulatory fiat - and not to completely alienate those left-leaning Liberals who might have been tempted to vote for the party in the past.  The Bloc has no such limitations.  They are a party established and run on the basis of a gigantic piece of - highly successful - blackmail.  Do what we want, or we destroy the country.  Being the most reckless it will be they who decide the survival of the Coalition.  And our boy Stephen?  They also serve, who only stand and wait.