Tue Apr 26/05
The new math

"Martin, Layton reach deal." That they did — a deal that will see the Liberals brought down by a very slim margin. The Star lays it all out for you (my emphasis):

The Liberals would need all their 131 votes, the NDP's 19, and possibly those of all three independents, allowing the Liberal Speaker to cast the deciding ballot to bring the tally to 154.

…

Of the three independents, Chuck Cadman has suggested he would vote with the Tories — his former party.

A little more than suggested, actually. So the story here is not that the Liberals will survive the inevitable non-confidence vote — because there's no reason to believe they will — but that seemingly soulless Paul Martin actually had a little bit of his soul squirreled away in a safety deposit box somewhere just to pawn for some quick cash on his way out of town. (Now everyone get their Decade out and listen to "Campaigner." Eerie, isn't it?)

And from the other side of the great divide comes Stephen Harper, armed with this noodle-scratcher:

Mr. Martin and Mr. Layton think $4.6 billion in taxpayers['] money is the price to make corruption go away. I wonder if the taxpayers of Canada are going to think the same thing.

Except that the $4.6 billion figure comes from cancelling tax cuts to large corporations. It may well be a terrible idea, but I fail to see how that's "taxpayers' money." And does Stephen Harper really think that the majority of Canadians — scratch that, the majority of the citizens of any nation in the world — would rise up in anger against taking money away from large corporations and redistributing it to social programs? Because they wouldn't. They won't. Most illogical.