According to the Globe and Mail the Federal NDP is planning on introducing a non-confidence motion. Finally. I’ve been waiting for this for weeks. Ever since the Liberals lost their back bone and stopped being an opposition and became more of a politely objecting. For all the bluster of the Liberals they haven’t done much opposing in the last few months.
And now along comes this NDP motion. First the motion uses the Conservatives’ corporate tax cuts as the reason for the motion. Unfortunately the Liberals support corporate tax cuts. Their problem with them seems to be that there weren’t enough of them.
“A key competitive advantage for Canada used to be our weak currency. Now that our dollar is at par, and we have lost this weak currency advantage, a key advantage must be a competitive corporate tax rate” (Dion, Oct. 12, 2007)
“a Liberal government is committed to reducing corporate income taxes ” (Dion, Jan. 18, 2008).
The second problem is that the Liberals don’t want an election:
“It’s a bad government and we’ll choose a time to defeat this bad government,” he told reporters. “You will see. But it will not be at this time where we have a snowstorm in Ontario and just before Easter. I don’t think Canadians want that.” (Dion, Mar. 8, 2008)
I think we can take it for granted that the Liberals will support the Conservatives in voting down this motion. The only other option they have is to abstain from voting, as they’ve been doing fairly often. But there’s a problem.
This motion isn’t aimed at taking down the government. If it were they’d word it so the Liberals could vote for it. Instead it’s designed to be as far from Dion’s position as possible. Instead the NDP gets to point to the liberals and say “look how like the conservatives they are”. The NDP isn’t trying to topple the Conservatives, they’re trying to hurt the Liberals.
My guess from this is that the NDP’s long range plan isn’t to become the government (lets be honest, they have about as much chance of that as the Green party), but rather to unseat the Liberals as the Official Opposition. The NDP isn’t aiming for first (though I’m sure they’d love it), they are aiming for second. And it’s a good bid too. As the Opposition the NDP would gain a lot of power, and a lot of press coverage, thus guaranteeing them an even better show the next election around. Very smart, very tactical, and I’m impressed. Well done NDP.
Also, if you need more proof, the picture I’m using in this post is from the NDP’s homepage.