A life time in a month

Entry for January 10, 2009
I found these articles . I thought they were very intersting.. It is from this web site

http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=222647

Published: December 08, 2008 18:34h
Canada's opposition Liberal Party moved into high gear on Monday to try to quickly replace its politically wounded leader, Stephane Dion, with someone who can challenge Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper effectively.
The front-runner to lead the Liberals, Michael Ignatieff, also distanced himself sharply from teaming up with the leftist New Democrats and separatist Bloc Quebecois to defeat the minority Conservatives in January and try to install a Liberal-NDP coalition government.

Under the coalition agreement, signed a week ago, Dion would have become interim prime minister even though he led his party to a thumping loss in the Oct. 14 election.

The coalition idea has proved unpopular, especially in Western Canada, and sharply boosted Conservative support in opinion polls. As a result, Liberals of all stripes are calling for Dion to step down soon rather than waiting until a leadership convention scheduled for May.

"His time has come, and we'd like him to go with our thanks and respect," Liberal Sen. Colin Kenny told CBC television.

Member of Parliament Hedy Fry, who backs Ignatieff's main leadership rival Bob Rae, told CTV television she expected Dion to step down in the next few days.

"I don't think there is any doubt," she said.

Senior Liberals have been meeting and phoning each other on Sunday and Monday but the stark reality is that there is no provision in the party's constitution to force Dion to quit before May if he chooses to hang on.

"Ultimately, the decision to resign or not rests with him," party spokesman Daniel Lauzon said.

If he resigns before May, the party's national executive would choose an interim leader "in consultation with" the Liberal caucus in Parliament, which will meet in Ottawa on Wednesday morning.

Caucus chairman Anthony Rota said that if Dion does resign, the caucus would choose a new caucus leader and pass that recommendation to the executive, which would normally then endorse that choice as interim party leader until May.

Ignatieff, a former Harvard don who sits on the right wing of the Liberal party, has more support in caucus than Rae, a former Ontario premier who is on the party's left -- but Rota said no one can take anything for granted.

The only other leadership candidate, Dominic LeBlanc, was expected to withdraw from the race on Monday afternoon and put his support behind Ignatieff.

Last week Ignatieff said Liberals would not automatically try to replace Conservatives with the coalition after they present the annual budget on Jan. 27, and in a television interview on Sunday he stepped back even further.

"My position can be summarized as coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition," he told CTV.

"My view of this is that Canadians would not understand a party that said we're not even prepared to look at the budget ... and we already know how we're going to vote."

Polls taken last week as Harper jostled for power with the coalition showed the Conservatives with a lead of 20 percentage points over the Liberals, and with enough support -- over 40 percent -- to enable them to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons if an election were held now.

Ignatieff appears to recognize the risk that, if the government were brought down in late January or early February, the coalition might not be given a chance to govern and the parties might instead by thrust into their second election in less than a year.

POLITICS Canada`s Liberals Bounce Back With New Leader
Dion`s deep unpopularity had put Prime Minister Stephen Harper`s Conservatives ahead of the Liberals by about 20 points

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion TEXT Published: January 10, 2009 08:57h
. New leadership has helped Canada's opposition Liberals recover public support they had lost following threats to topple the minority Conservative government, two polls released on Friday showed.
Leader Michael Ignatieff has distanced himself from -- though not abandoned -- an idea put forward by predecessor Stephane Dion to team up with the leftist New Democrats and separatist Bloc Quebecois to try to replace the Conservatives with a coalition government.

The coalition idea and Dion's deep unpopularity had put Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives ahead of the Liberals by about 20 points -- a level where they would have been able to win a parliamentary majority. But under Ignatieff the race has tightened dramatically.

A Nanos Research poll published by Canadian Press had the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives by 34 percent to 33 percent. It put the New Democrats at 19 percent.

An Ipsos Reid poll provided to Canwest/Global and CFRB radio had the Conservatives still ahead, by 39 percent to 28 percent, with the New Democrats at 15 percent.

Pollster Nik Nanos said the surge in Liberal strength could be partly a honeymoon effect.

"What I've found is whenever there's a new leader, before people get to know who that leader is, they project positive things onto that leader," he told Canadian Press.

In the October general election, the Conservatives took 37.6 percent of the vote, the Liberals 26.2 percent and the NDP 18.2 percent.

Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor, has said he would not automatically bring the government down over its Jan. 27 budget, but he did warn on Friday that the coalition idea remained alive.

"All options remain on the table here, and he (Harper) shouldn't underestimate us. He shouldn't underestimate my resolve," he told CBC television.

Nanos called 1,003 Canadians from Jan. 3-7, a survey sample considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20. Ipsos Reid surveyed 1,000 people from Jan. 6-8.