"I know some of you have criticized us for having misjudged the opposition’s response to our efforts to remove taxpayer support for political parties. Although I fully support the notion that, in the long run, political parties should be responsible for raising their own funds, I accept that our timing and the manner in which we approached the issue may have been wrong-headed. We have withdrawn those contentious items from our agenda."
"Wrong-headed"?
Say what you mean man. Stephen Harper made a really a stupid mistake.
He's made stupid mistakes before too, but this one just handed the government over to the Liberals.
The petition is a waste of time! Now is not the time to be using petitions. It is only there to make the public feel like they're involved and since the leftwing outnumbers us two to one, they're likely to get far more petitions signed than we are. Frankly petitions don't matter anyway.
If you don't recall Govenor General Michaëlle Jean was recommended by Paul Martin (a Liberal!) and she's pro-separatist!
That means she will be more interested in the welfare of Quebec than of the rest of Canada. She will look at your anti-coalition petition, look at the pro-coalition petition... and then she will go with the coalition because it IS constitutional. Its even in her job description.
What we are seeing is a fail-safe mechanism of democracy, entirely democratic and constitutional, employed to protect the system from being hijacked by a bully. Harper can be proud he won his minority government, but he lacked the leadership skills to compromise and keep it afloat.
Also, this idea that what they're doing isn't democratic or constitutional is going to fail. Michaëlle Jean is too smart to fall for that obvious lie. She can do math. She will look at the 53% of Canadian voters that voted Liberal/Green/NDP, the 10% that voted Bloc and the mere 37% who voted Conservative and she will recognize that while the Conservatives did win a minority... they did not win the will of Canadians.
Now is the time to start choosing a new leader so that when the next election does happen (likely around September or October 2010) that we have a strong progressive leader who can defeat the leftwing coalition, win the hearts of middle-class Canadians and finally win a majority.
Now would be a good time to call Mike Harris out of retirement and ask him to lead the party. Or someone else equally competent who could actually win a majority instead of these half-ass minority governments.