Friday, May 25, 2007

Charest's Liberals know that Jean's done

This political risk will not pay off for Charest's Liberals, even by tabling a $1 billion income tax cut budget, containing $950 million worth of tax cuts for middle class workers, as even Jean's personal attack, verging on vendetta, on democratic socialist medicare as he readies himself to challenge to the Canada Health Act and its openly federalist principles just to prove the Québécois that he is beyond the status quo he protects and preserves as Philippe Couillard right beside him nods in agreement.

Fall is coming, with the possibilities great that his government will be saved by his rivals, Charest Grits commissioned recommendations on how to change the financing of the its public health system, these changes include an idea that it should be absolutely scraped and privitized for its own betterment, a backroom appointment of former Charest backer and Liberal minister Claude Castonguay will likely bring this assessment up as its most favoured option, while advocating for full fledged two tier system that allows for user fees for medical services and expect Ottawa to like it or else.

Supre Mario Dumont knows the Action Démocratique du Québec has to stand against tax cuts, open to changes in medicare or the Liberals win, so he asks for more autonomy for Québec by rejecting the federal transfer payments, paying down its deficit and sticking to its priorities of health care, education and debt reduction, with seems to mean the ADQ is slowly becoming seen as the true third way between the PLQ's failed federalism and the PQ's stalled separatism.

That kind of political realignment, a sort of second revolution of silence, has been going on in the province next door, Ontario, since about 2003, which asks the citizen to escape the right versus left dichotomy, this basic rethinking and redoing of the same old system allows one to break out of boxes created many generations and revolutions ago, slowly creating a new antagonistic of ample propostions that pits the almost united grassroots against the already unified elites on diametrically opposed sides of the political arena.

Now we know the Parti Québécois are in no shape for another election, between interim leader François Gendron and leader to be Pauline Marois, as the March election gave only 36 seats in the 125-seat national assembly to its Péquistes, compared to an opposition 41 for the Adéquistes and 48 for the Liberals, thus memories of André Boisclair must be expunged from the minds of its supporters and replaced by the René Lévesque-friendly vision of Pauline Marois as soon as possible.