There are times when the partisan blindness of Jason Cherniak is so blatantly obvious that it renders him — and by extension, all Dion adherents — laughable. Such is the case with his latest blog entry.

He begins by saying he hates it whenever people treat politics like a game, then muses about the best time to call an election. And from his tone, you have to wonder how important, to him, an election really is:

They talk about local holidays and when it would be reasonable to hold an election. You cannot have it over Easter. You cannot have it during local elections. You cannot have it during the harvest. There are so many concerns about election timing that you have to wonder whether there is ever a “good time” for an election.

In Canada, we seem to have forgotten this. In 1997, Jean Chrétien memorably called an election in the middle of a huge Manitoba flood. I’m sure the 6 Liberal MPs who lost their seats in Manitoba did not appreciate that (along with most other Manitobans). In 2005, the opposition forced an election that extended over Christmas and New Years. Stephen Harper still won, but that does not mean that people appreciated the holiday politicking. Right now, we are in the middle of four by-elections that Mr. Harper called for St. Patrick’s Day.

A couple of points. First, not all Liberal MPs in Manitoba lost their seats — Reg Alcock kept his, mostly because he was active in flood relief during the first part of the campaign. It’s an example of turning a bad circumstance into a positive — a skill that today’s Liberals don’t seem to have. Second, Paul Martin’s actual election day took place on January 23rd, far away from any statutory holiday. It doesn’t take all that long to recover from a statutory holiday.

I also have to wonder about this line of argument:

I’m sure the NDP will run commercials showing empty Liberal seats and suggesting that the Liberals weren’t a good opposition. So what? The Liberal Party is not campaigning for opposition; we are campaigning for government. Let the NDP argue that they are the best opposition and we’ll see how many votes that gets them when people are picking a new Prime Minister.

See, the problem with this line of thinking is simple: the Official Opposition is looked at by voters as the alternative to the government in power. If the Liberal Party is campaigning to be the next government, I have to say that they’re not doing a very good job of it. I don’t see them pushing alternatives to current Tory policies; they’re just bad-mouthing them. You need more than that to convince voters that you can run a government. And mass abstentions from confidence votes doesn’t help their case.

In my view, principle requires that we do what we need to do to defeat the Stephen Harper Government in the country, not in the House of Commons. If you believe that the Liberals have missed their best opportunity to win an election, then I think it is fair for you to question the strategy. However, don’t suggest that the Liberals have no principle just because they decided that they don’t want a March election.

And now we come to the biggest problem about Cherniak’s argument. Simply put: what principle is he talking about?

If the principle is “the logical route back to power,” then I have to say I don’t think very highly of it. If the principle is “the overall good of the nation,” then I’m not sure that can be justified either.

The thing is, a Commons vote is the public record of party intentions. It’s where push comes to shove, where a politician’s stance really matters. Abstinence, unless it’s due to ill health or scheduling conflict, really isn’t an excuse. A vote, aye or nay, means you, as MP, are willing to take a stand on a position and are willing to justify that stand to your constituents. Not your leader, or your party representatives. You.

I mean, if you don’t take a stance because your leader didn’t want you to — well, what does that say about your loyalty to your leadership as opposed to your loyalty to your constituents? Who or what are you speaking for?

I’ll be interested in seeing what “principle” Cherniak has for justifying this abstention strategy. Because I’m not entirely convinced that the Liberals actually have one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 16:08 and is filed under Blogging, Fisking Exercises, Libranos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.