Flaherty beats the election drums

An unusual speech by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty could mean an election this fall, say the pundits.

When Canada’s politicians collectively pledged to be civil to each other during the new session of Parliament, apparently Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had his fingers crossed behind his back. Flaherty raised some eyebrows yesterday with an explosive speech at the Canadian Club in Ottawa in which he warned that anyone but the Conservatives would essentially ruin the country.

Noting that Flaherty is usually above such politicking, the National Post’s Don Martin says the speech is a sign the Conservatives are gunning for a fall election. “(W)hen the unlikeliest Conservative antagonist is ordered to get his knuckles bloody while sucker punching the opposition, this is not just a fight. It’s war,” he writes. Flaherty’s “smear written in the poison-tipped penmanship of the best PMO speechwriters” is part of a Tory effort to “to destabilize Parliament and potentially expedite an election this autumn.”

The Post’s John Ivison says in his attempts to demonize the opposition Flaherty spoke “as if he were warning the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been spotted on Parliament Hill. It was just as well there were no kids in the audience because he scared the bejabbers out of me.” He reports that “Canadian Club veterans muttered about the bad manners shown in using their (usually nonpartisan) meeting as a venue for an assault on the opposition parties.”

For a slightly less academic but fully hilarious analysis, see Scott Feschuk’s post on macleans.ca. He calls Flaherty’s speech “the political equivalent of an unhinged high school student’s poetry journal” and speculates on the finance minister’s inner monologue, which apparently included the phrase “Suck it, Greece” and meditations on getting lollipops from the prime minister.

Always one to look at the big picture, the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hebert says that in the Conservatives' quest for a majority, they're fighting “global trend that is seeing mature democracies systematically fail to arrive at clear electoral consensus.” The U.K., Australia, and Sweden all elected minority or coalition governments recently and Barack Obama seems poised to lose his majorities in both houses of Congress.