Bringing Down the House: The Wheat Board

In order to have an election, one of a couple of things must happen.

1. We must bring the government down on a motion of confidence.
2. We must bring the government down on a vote which is a confidence motion.
3. The government engineers its own defeat in a confidence motion.
4. The Governor General fires Harper, dissolves Parliament, and calls an election.
5. Harper asks the Governor General to call an election.

Number four is not going to happen. Thank you very much, Viscount Byng. Number five will also not happen, as Harper will not overrule his “fixed election date”.

Number three is incredibly dangerous, so we have to make sure that we bring down the house before Harper shows up with something that we have no choice to vote against, but makes us look very, very bad.

In my mind, one is a boring way to launch an election campaign. I think it would be far better to take the route of number two, and do to the Conservatives what they would do to us. This way, instead of saying “the House has lost confidence in the government”, we can say “your policy is bad, is working against the Canadian people, and therefore, we have lost confidence in your government… rah-rah-rah”.

This is what I am proposing, and strictly from a western perspective. The Wheat Board is an essential part of Canada’s agricultural industry. The idea of working together and giving each other a leg up, and the concept of working together to achieve your goals is intrinsic in the prairies. How could homesteaders, the people who settled these provinces, have survived without some kind of collective cooperation. This has begun to expand to other industries. The Peace Country Tender Beef Co-op is one such example. The fact that, during the early half of the last century, the Progressives and the UFA dominated prairie politics speak to this.

If we lead the charge for the Wheat Board, the Liberals will weaken Tory support in their rural constituencies. Now, I realize the chance of Liberals gaining seats in rural ridings is unlikely, but what it does do is it forces the to shore up support in their rural constituencies, and this will likely mean spouting off some socially conservative rhetoric. This will leave them weak in the cities, where Albertans can make the most gains. We could also win ridings where Tory support is soft and David Orchard can rally the farm vote. Our big tent could significantly expand in the west.

This is a significantly less controversial thing to bring the government down on, as compared to Afghanistan. It also allows us to take a firm stand on this, without having to talk too much about it, as national grain cooperatives really do not make the best talking points. We need to start engineering a confidence motion on the Wheat Board for late February or early March, so that we may have a mid-April election. Preferably, right after people get their taxes done, and see that they were really short changed by the last government.

Read Full Post »