Logged and Blogged Part the First

Hello and welcome back to the NM&P blog! Feeling under the weather today so I'll use it as an excuse to catch up on this week's links that didn't get posted including the stories I had set out to talk about today. Most of those will be in Part the second so come back to check them out. Right now I want to begin posting about a surprising first week of Parliament and an invigorated oppositon.

This has been a good start to the kickoff of Parliament. The opposition parties have not been cowed by the increasingly threatening language coming from the right -- which of itself is a small victory. Mr. Harper's calls of "I'm going to make you pay for this come next election," have the sound of a school-boy's idle plaint and seem a bit flatulent. Especially when you add to that Harper and the gang's new crusade against Canada's elites.

 Who are these elites, you ask? Well, anybody living within the boundaries of Canada's major urban centers who is desirous of having people register their lethal weapons. Elitists! That especially includes anyone living in the GTA (greater Toronto area, for the uninitiated), Montreal, Ottawa and B.C.'s lower mainland. Elitists!Also included are those who are employed or studying in Canada's universities. Elitists! And let's not forget those employed in bureaucracies, cultural institutions and even boardrooms. All of them the elitists!

This would no doubt come as surprise to most of the people lumped into this group who spend most of their days striving and paying bills, raising children, going to pee-wee hockey games etc.. They likely see themselves as pretty regular folk with concerns they imagine are similar to other Canadians in urban and suburban centers. They would be wrong. They are in fact elitists who are standing  in the way of Mr. Harper's majority government and in the way of having his non-elitist agenda crammed down all our throats. The nerve!

So now the opposition, with the support of their elitist constituencies, are uniting in a bid to bring back the mandatory long-form census into the Statistics Act. This is being done with a private members bill being sponsored by Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, who says, “It's almost a sacred trust that we have with civil society that we will get them the information they need with which to plan, and whether that's the Bank of Canada, or the public health officials, or the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, people are counting on this information and it must be comparable data with previous censuses.”

Eliminating the long-form census set off a wide backlash from a variety of opponents back in the summer, including religious groups, major charities, the Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities, statisticians and academics, who we can add to the list of Canada's elitists. And you can toss in the Premiers of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and P.E.I. who have all balked, saying the loss of data would skew policy-making.

There are just some things from the Bush playbook that don't translate to Canadian politics -- no matter how hard you try. So now that the opposition recognizes that opposing Stephen Harper's ideologically driven agenda is likely to be good for their poll numbers I see heady days on the horizon for Canada's elites and even some non-elites too. As Mr. Layton noted the other day, "...rural voters are every bit as concerned as their urban counterparts about job security, the availability of health care and the quality of their children’s education,." Indeed. Those issues don't appear to be anywhere on Stephen Harper's radar, and that could cost him some non-elitist votes.