The 39th Parliament and side note

Well, I'll start with the side note and progress onto the Parliament. NDP MP's are upset with one of their own. Former MP, Bev Desjarlais, has taken a position with Veteran's Affairs Minister, Greg Thompson. I guess they have trouble understanding how one might set aside partisan issues to work for the betterment of the people. NDP Caucus Chairwoman, Judy Wasylycia-Leis (Winnipeg North), had this to say: "It's hard to understand how Bev could have gone from being an active New Democrat to actually supporting and upholding the Stephen Harper agenda. [It] is just mind-boggling and very disappointing." Not everybody has the same opinion however. MP Peter Stoffer, NDP foreign affairs critic, was quite congratulatory and happy for her. For more details, check out this Globe and Mail article.

On another note, the 39th Parliament of Canada opens on April 3rd. PM Stephen Harper has indicated there a 5 major priorities that they hope to work on during this session of the House. These are as follows: The introduction of a Federal Accountability Act, a reduction in the GST (a .5% cut seems likely), a crackdown on crime, child care and a Patient Wait Times Guarantee agreement with the provinces. In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to go over each point and break them down into what we might actually see and what it could mean for Canada.

The War on Terror (Canadian Style)

Been following news on the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. Sadly, we have already lost a few soldiers to attacks as well as accidents. However, I know our guys and girls over there are ok with that. One of my friends is over there right now, and he told me earlier that he's accepted the fact he could die. He said that was something they all accepted when they signed up.

Nice to see our PM make a visit to the troops as well. I had mentioned the possibility earlier, nice to see they actually went through with it. I've been waiting a long time for our government to support our troops. And not just with words, like the Liberals did, but with actual actions and money. I firmly believe that the Conservatives will do this. Many of my friends are either in the military or have served recently and the biggest complaint they all had was that they knew the people of Canada supported them but the government didn't seem to give a damn about them.

My final point tonight is that Jack Layton is an idiot. I was listening to Charles Adler on the radio and he had Jack on as a guest. He started talking about how the Canadian public had no idea that the troops in Afghanistan would actually be fighting and dying. That we thought it was a peace-keeping mission. Has he had his head in the sand for the last six months? The military and the government have made it very clear that this mission was going to be different from any recent missions they've conducted. Layton also mentioned Bush's name a couple of times. Now maybe its just me being cynical but it seemed he was trying to somehow play this up as the whole Harper is Bush's best friend thing again. But it wasn't the Conservatives that approved this, it was the Liberals. Just seems to me like the NDP is drifting ever farther away from the mainstream of Canadian opinion, and Layton's whistling away to himself as the party becomes less and less relevant to more people. I'm all for a strong left-wing in Canada but recently the NDP has become a little too strange for me (I maybe a little biased however, I do live in BC and had to deal with the NDP here in the 90's, and all the BS that happened).