According to this Globe and Mail article, Stephen Harper is changing his ways.
Facing an emboldened opposition and the possibility of defeat, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is making a significant switch in tactics, dropping his reliance on confidence votes and moving even further toward stacking the Senate with Tories.A top aide said yesterday that Mr. Harper will no longer threaten elections to force opposition compliance on secondary policy matters.
We know all this is true because a top aide who spoke on condition of anonymity said so.
If I were Stephen Harper and I wanted my government to survive long enough to be reasonably sure the Governor General wouldn't seek any alternative to dropping the writ upon its defeat, this is exactly what I would want the opposition and the voters to believe: that I've decided to try and play well with others. Then I could wait and see if a time came when conditions were right for a Conservative victory. Should that time come, I could then introduce legislation the opposition simply couldn't support, call it a confidence vote and have an election at a time of my choosing. Again.
It's quite possible that knowing the identity of that source wouldn't change my opinion about whether or not to take this with a grain of salt. But it would be awfully nice to have that additional information. There is no reason I can think of why that source deserves to have his or her identity protected on a story like this. This isn't journalism, it's gossip. Or it's the Conservatives getting their spin into the press for free with no accountability for it.
H/t to Greg.
Can I go with "Or it's the Conservatives getting their spin into the press for free with no accountability," pogge?
Gloria and Jane, playing laundry ladies. Who'd a thunk it?
We gotta explain to people the few respectable grounds there are for using unnamed sources. Being Seymour Hersh would be one. Gloria and Jane are not Seymour Hersh.
Previous behaviour dictates subsequent behaviour. This is a PM who violated his own "fixed election date" saying parliament was dysfunctional. Sure it was due to everything being made confidence matters by Harper. Moreover, all committees were purposely sabotaged by the conservative PMs according to their own "secret booklet" for disruption tactics. The whole last election was bogus cause Harper thought he had a majority in his hands.
Thus, based on all this previous behaviour listed above and more, Harper is setting a "play nice" trap, until the window of opportunity comes again.
The Liberal spin of "oh Harper is taking the Liberals serious" is just crap. They are dislusional, and broke. Two bad combinations that no matter how much they try to remake Iggy into the 2nd coming of the messiah, will not change. In fact, I remember the same remaking of Dion, as the next best thing since sliced bread. It becomes trying of all this "pumping up."