Tue, October 21, 2008
Dion still living in dreamland
By NEIL WAUGH, EDMONTON SUN
I guess it was the pooping puffin after all.
Maybe it was the talking oil blob or any of the other goofy stuff the fat frat boys with the sticky-up haircuts in Stephen Harper's war room threw at Stephane Dion during the federal election campaign.
In the buildup and execution of the election, all the parties - with the exception of Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois, which rocked - came up a day late and a dollar short.
Yesterday the election-that-wasn't claimed its first victim when the Liberal leader finally emerged from his "consultations" after a week of working the phones and fell on his sword. It was either that or suffer a death by a thousand cuts by surly party members.
He didn't lose the election because he was an aloof academic with a one-plank Green-Shift platform that called not only for a massive tax hike, but the rape and pillage of the part of the country still holding its own in the economic storm.
Nope, there were other sinister forces out there. As he explained to his adoring Parliament Hill press gallery subjects yesterday: "All of you know it was not a tax hike," Dion sighed at his long goodbye press conference.
"I was told I gave a good performance," he continued. "But it was not enough."
Apparently there are two Stephane Dions. One was portrayed by the pesky Tories as the nutty professor who wanted to impose his "tax on everything" then trickle it back in a confusing stew of tax credits and other tweaks.
"Canadians didn't know this Stephane Dion," he said.
The public did, however, get to know the other one.
"The one that they have seen in their living rooms for almost two years before the campaign started," he said. "They believed that character was real," Dion continued. Same goes for the Green Shift, or Green Shaft, if you happen to feed your family and pay your taxes working in Alberta's hydrocarbon economy.
"Canadians went to the ballot box thinking it was merely a carbon tax and they would have to pay for it," he said.
Except in Alberta where we would have to pay for it twice.
"They never knew what (it) meant for their family," said Dion. "We failed to explain that."
Now that wrecking Alberta's economy is on the Liberals' back burner, Dion is vowing to make it his life's work to "ensure that my successor be protected against this kind of propaganda we were unable to react to."
The diminished Liberals are deep in debt and Dion, now a lame duck as Grit boss, is reportedly still in the red from his leadership campaign. Dion didn't say how he plans to build up the bucks to match the Conservatives' media buying power.
Meanwhile, the professor lives in a surreal world of denial.
"I still think if we had been equipped to explain why I am fighting for my country, what kind of a leader I would have been and what kind of a policy we were proposing, I would have won the election," Dion beamed.
More ironic is that Dion also appears to think he somehow saved Canada from the separatists, even though the Bloc Quebecois won 50 seats in Quebec and Captaine Canadien's Liberals took just 13.
Now he says he wants to "protect" the next Liberal leader. "The image the Conservatives gave to me is cemented in the minds of too many Canadians," he said.
Alberta's Enterprise Minister Iris Evans - whose job it is to protect those industries the Ottawa Liberals were plotting against - popped Stephane's balloon yesterday.
"It was a wealth shift," Evans spat. "It never was a Green Shift. It was the long green of your money that shifted,'' she said.
"I don't think I've ever seen such an insensitive policy," the Refinery Row rep continued.
"He certainly couldn't sell it in Alberta," Evans continued. "I thought there were so many ways it was flawed and obviously Canadians felt the same way."
Cue the puffin.
