{"id":2231,"date":"2009-04-17T19:51:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T23:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2231"},"modified":"2009-04-17T19:51:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T23:51:00","slug":"game-theory-in-canadian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2231","title":{"rendered":"Game Theory in Canadian Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Flanagan has a Globe op-ed<\/a> where he muses about the Liberals needing to “re-activate” the coalition in order to bring Harper down. Yeah…because Stephen Harper has never<\/em> voted with the “separatists” and the “socialists” to bring down a Liberal government.<\/p>\n

His slightly more valid point is that Ignatieff<\/span> doesn’t enjoy the same benefit Harper does of being able to stroll over to the GG’s<\/span> to ask for an election whenever it strikes his fancy (man, we should really have some sort of fixed election date law or something to prevent that, eh?).<\/em> So Iggy will need Bloc and NDP<\/span> votes to force an election. But, really, this shouldn’t be too hard. Jack’s given the Liberals such a hard time for propping<\/span> up Harper that he’s going to look like a complete moron if he starts singing “backing down and loving it<\/em>” himself. And Mr. “I will never make a deal with the separatists” would have a bit of ‘splaining<\/span> to do, if he has to rely on Gilles Duceppe<\/span> to keep his government afloat.<\/p>\n

And, realistically, how long could the Tories survive on Bloc or NDP<\/span> support alone? One month? Three months? Short of a formal coalition deal (hmm<\/span>…), eventually an issue will come along where the opposition parties decide to take Harper out. Or, failing<\/span> that, a poll will come along that encourages them to.<\/p>\n

Now, that’s not to say the Liberals necessarily<\/span> should<\/em> pull the plug anytime soon. But I think Dr. Tom may have over-estimated Harper’s ability to survive in this parliament without Liberal support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Flanagan has a Globe op-ed where he muses about the Liberals needing to “re-activate” the coalition in order to bring Harper down. Yeah…because Stephen Harper has never voted with the “separatists” and the “socialists” to bring down a Liberal government. His slightly more valid point is that Ignatieff doesn’t enjoy the same benefit Harper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}