Gun Owners' Resource

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The "Coalition" 2008/12/03

 

We need your help. Here's information you need:

 

Demonstration Planned

Petitions

 

We need everyone to act quickly on this. Please contact your MP this week, before Fri Dec 5th.

 

First, here is a message from Garry Breitkreuz, long-time popular MP and staunch supporter of our Firearms Rights.

 

Please read: Letter To Gun Owners And Sports Enthusiasts

 

Now make yourself heard. This is a Word document with contact info for all the opposition MPs. Contact them and tell them, politely but firmly, how opposed you are to the Coalition. Do it very soon!

When you send your letters, the preferred method is FAX.

HELPFUL PHONE NUMBERS

Governor General: (800) 465-6890
fax (613) 998-8760
Info

Dion: (613)996-5789
fax (613) 996-6562
Info

Layton: (613)995-7224
fax (613) 995-4565
Info

Duceppe: (613)992-6779
fax (613) 954-2121
Info

Ignatieff: (613)995-9364
fax (613) 992-5880
Info

Rae: (613)992-5234
fax (613) 996-9607
Info

Leblanc: (613)992-1020
fax (613) 992-3053
Info

 

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Demonstration

 

A mass Rally for Canada will take place at locations across Canada this Saturday, Dec 6th at noon. See www.RallyForCanada.ca. The more citizens show up, the stronger our message.

If you're so inclined, wear something that identifies you as a CSSA member (a hat or a jacket, for example), so the politicians can see how strong a force law-abiding Canadian gun owners are.

 

Please be there!

 

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Petitions

 

National Citizens Coalition Petition Stand up for Democracy

PetitionOnline Our Right to Vote on the Coalition Government

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Some Of Today's Quotes From The Papers - December 2nd, 2008

 

The CSSA shares these opinions.

JEFFREY SIMPSON, Globe and Mail, Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

    * "If this coalition takes power, therefore, Canada would be led by a temporary prime minister who almost every Liberal MP wishes were not the leader. Not having been successful in leading his own party, it would be fascinating to watch him run a coalition government."
    * "For a party that is broke, that just won the lowest share of the popular vote in history, that desperately needs to rethink its future, Liberals must be pinching themselves to imagine a return to power."
    * "It will certainly be a shock to the 74 per cent of Canadians who did not vote Liberal, and the large majority who ranked Mr. Dion by far the least popular leader, to discover that he has somehow managed to become prime minister."

DON MARTIN, National Post, December 2nd, 2008

    * The biggest Liberal loser in the party's electoral history, a self-admitted campaign failure who advocated carbon taxes as sound economy policy and lacks significant Western Canada representation, seems set to become prime minister next week. Forgive them. They know not what they've done.
    * This means an electorate that cast a third of its votes for the Conservatives will have their representation replaced by a hodge-podge of lowest-common-denominator policies produced almost overnight by parties leaning left and toward leaving.
    * While the discipline of power may keep the coalition together, more or less flying in loose formation for perhaps a year or even longer, this is not a system of sustainable government as much as it is a power grab minus a compelling reason to exist.
    * It circumvents the public's Oct. 14 election verdict for no good reason, given the government has capitulated on every grievance its opponents spotted in the fiscal update. This makes it a personal putsch, not a rational rebellion.

L. IAN MACDONALL, Nationa Post, December 2nd, 2008

    * And so Dion, who less than two months ago was rejected by three-quarters of Canadian voters, his 26% share of the popular vote the worst by a Liberal leader in history, would overturn the result of the election and overthrow the government.
    * A coup. A very Canadian coup. A perfectly constitutional coup, endorsed by the Westminster tradition. A leader rejected by the voters and repudiated by his own party is about to strike a governance bargain with the socialists with whom he said he would never seek a coalition, aided and abetted by the separatists he went to Ottawa to fight. All that for the pleasure of spending one Christmas at 24 Sussex.

GREG WESTON, Ottawa Sun, December 2nd, 2008

    * The federal opposition parties have apparently decided the best way to deal with the world's worst economic crisis in decades is to create a political disaster of equal proportion.
    * All of the new NDP ministers and many of the Liberals appointed to cabinet would have zero experience running a government department, much less mastering their portfolios. That usually takes months, even for junior portfolios. The coalition would be lucky to have a budget worth anything before March.

JAMES TRAVERS, Toronto Star, December 2nd, 2008

    * What, in this era of quasi-presidential federal politics, infected Liberals with the viral notion that Dion, judged too weak for high office last month, can now provide the legitimacy, let alone the political skills, the coalition requires to be credible or survive?
    * Still, much more is at risk here than who lives at 24 Sussex Dr., pockets the perquisites and rides in chauffeured limos. Replacing the most robust party with a fragile coalition demands more than the Governor General's approval. It also requires public acceptance.

JOHN IVISON, National Post, December 2nd, 2008

    * "But the most likely scenario will see Mr. Dion become Prime Minister at the head of an alliance so unholy it would have been burned at the stake for heresy in the Middle Ages."
    * "This deal is going to provoke a visceral reaction among patriotic Canadians who feel it is an affront to sign an accord with the separatists and the socialists."

CTV NEWS, December 2nd, 2008

    * The coalition is "strange to say the least" Fife said, pointing out the Liberals have always opposed the NDP's financial policies, and Dion has always fought against separatists. But now the three parties have banded together to form a common front. It's the first time since 1926 that Canadians face the possibility of changing governments without an election.
    * The political uncertainty in Ottawa with opposition parties forming a coalition to try to topple the minority Conservative government is not helpful in the current economic crisis, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday.
    * McGuinty wouldn't say if he wanted federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion to become prime minister, and said he has warned Dion not to look for support for his coalition with the NDP from the Ontario government.

TORONTO STAR, Editorial, December 2nd, 2008

    * "Also problematic is the fact that, under the deal, Dion, the Liberals' lame-duck leader, would serve as prime minister, at least until the new party leader is chosen next spring. In the Oct. 14 election, Canadians resoundingly rejected Dion, who finished a poor third behind both Harper and Layton as "best prime minister" in all the opinion polls."

NATIONAL POST, Editorial, December 2nd, 2008

    * "Since the Bloc's stated purpose is the breakup of Canada, any deal that brings it even one inch closer to that goal is an outrageous betrayal of the country."
    * "You can't have your cake and eat it, too," Mr. Bélanger (Liberal deputy house leader in 2004) declared. "You can't defeat the government and not expect to have to go to the people."
    * Like many of our columnists, though, we wonder at the legitimacy of handing government to a coalition led by a party that just seven weeks ago received its lowest share of votes ever. Moreover, as noted in Monday's editorial column, both the Liberals and New Democrats insisted during the recent election campaign that they would never form a coalition with the other, so it cannot be argued that even though a majority of voters voted against the Conservatives they were voting for a coalition.

    * If Michael Ignatieff eventually replaces Stéphane Dion as leader of this coalition -- as many expect -- Canadians could easily awake one morning to find themselves governed by a party that lost the last election decisively, led by a man who had never been elected his party's leader, much less prime minister - backed by bureaucrats who are unaccountable to voters and manipulated by unions whose sole motive is to use economic stimulus packages to subsidize dying industries so their members do not have to make concessions on lavish pay and benefits packages.
    * The coalition partners, too, are talking about implementing a $30-billion stimulus plan "within days" of being installed. Even if this 180-degree turn were theoretically a good idea, implementing it so hastily in the middle of an already chaotic market would likely do more harm than good.
    * Still, as troubling as all those possibilities are, they don't bother us half as much as the idea of having to get into bed with the separatists to make it happen. The Bloc's stature in Quebec can only grow as a result. They will be able to campaign in future elections on all the great advantages and subsidies they have brought to the province. Meanwhile, the special attention raining down on Quebec could exacerbate tensions in the rest of the country. As Michael Bliss notes elsewhere, we are dealing with a political powder keg.
    * The coalition could be the greatest gift the separatists have ever received. That alone is reason enough to stop it before it begins.

MICHAEL COREN, National Post, December 2nd, 2008

    * I was 12-years-old. Our soccer team had just scored for a fourth time and the opposition was about to lose. Suddenly Rory O'Brien shouted out, "It's my ball and my mum says I have to be home before it gets dark. Bye." And that was that. It was indeed his ball and because he left with it we couldn't finish the game and there was no result. Rory was lying. His mum was largely indifferent to what time he came home but the notorious little hooligan was tired of defeat. Truth be told we were boasting throughout the match, so whilst Rory was wrong, he had been provoked.
    * But we were children playing a game. Canada's federal politicians are adults influencing the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. So even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been clumsily harsh and premature in his politics, the opposition parties are behaving not only worse than Rory but less responsibly even than Rory's big brother, Mick, who spent a year in prison for handling stolen goods.
    * Let us state the obvious first: The hysterical chagrin of the NDP and, particularly, the Liberals has nothing at all to do with the government's economic policy announcements. Half of the Liberal caucus could not even define a modern stimulus package, let alone write one. Harper's economic approach is entirely reasonable and within the purview of an intelligent response to an international financial crisis. It may well need to be adjusted, but there is little that can be done until the new administration in Washington is in place and we know what Barack Obama intends to do.
    * Although they have been told by the Canadian people that they are not wanted in government, the Liberals are prepared to break every precedent in Canadian, British and British-influenced governance and assemble a formal coalition of parties that were all rejected by the electorate.
    * More than this, the NDP has been told at virtually every stage of its history by the Canadian people that it is not fit to govern. Under the terms of this coalition accord, it would receive 25% of Cabinet seats. And the whole thing is supported by a separatist party that has no loyalty to the country and is willing to park its regional support with whatever group will bend the most to its selfish demands. This is a coalition not of the willing, but of the beaten, the bullies and the barefaced.

ANDREW COHEN, Ottawa Citizen, December 2nd, 2008

    * A half century ago, the Liberals thought they could return to power without forcing an election. It was a monumental miscalculation. Lester Pearson was chosen party leader on January 16, 1958. He was a renowned foreign minister who had won the Nobel Prize for Peace the previous autumn for defusing the Suez Crisis in 1956.

    * The Liberals were cocky. On January 20, Pearson moved a motion of non-confidence in the Conservatives, who had been elected seven months earlier with seven more seats than the Liberals. Pearson listened to party veterans who argued that the government of John Diefenbaker could be overthrown in a bloodless coup. On his first day as leader in the House of Commons, he moved the motion blaming the Conservatives for mishandling the economy.
    * The idea was to appeal to the governor-general not to dissolve Parliament, but to invite the Liberals to form a government. Then and now, it was an act of staggering stupidity. It was also terribly presumptuous. It assumed the Liberals had a right to power, which they had held for 22 years under Louis St. Laurent and Mackenzie King. It also assumed that after 200 or so days in purgatory they still saw themselves as Canada's "natural governing party."
    * Hadn't their defeat the previous spring been an accident? Hadn't they chosen a new leader, that dazzling Nobel Laureate, St. Mike of Suez? Wouldn't Canadians now come to their senses? Diefenbaker was not persuaded. He spent two hours eviscerating Pearson in the House. Then he asked the governor-general to call an election.
    * On March 31, 1958, the Conservatives won 208 seats, the largest number in the country's history. The Liberals won 48 seats, the smallest number in the party's history.

For more information:

Tony Bernardo
Canadian Institute for Legislative Action (CILA)
(905) 571-2150

Larry Whitmore
Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA)
(905) 265-0692