Dion: "Not fit to lead this nation"

Wow... there is an absolutely stinging article in today's Ottawa Citizen! A friend forwarded it to me, and it's posted for your review here...

Why Stephane Dion is unfit to lead this country

Randall Denley
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, February 04, 2007

I've just met Liberal leader Stephane Dion for the first time and I have to say, it was a frightening experience. The thought that this fellow could become the prime minister of Canada ought to alarm us.

Everything about Dion seems soft, from his handshake to his policies. His appearance at the Citizen editorial board Friday confirmed the fears I had when the Liberals chose him as their leader. Dion is a verbose, mild-mannered academic with a shaky grasp of English who seems unfit to chair a university department, much less lead a country.

Don't take my word for it. You can catch the interview yourself at ottawacitizen.com.

The Liberal leader is probably very smart in an academic sort of way and quite a decent person, but his ideas reflect the full, knee-jerk left-wing spectrum, and he can't even articulate them well. Nuclear power? He's against it because of concerns about the waste. At the same time that he's against this clean source of electrical power, the Liberal leader is for a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases.

He's snidely un-American, in the way that the Liberal elite so often is. Canada's failure to meet its Kyoto commitments was partly due to the Americans' election of Kyoto-unfriendly George W. Bush, Dion would have us believe. He also believes it's OK to take shots at the Americans for domestic consumption, but not if you're in Washington. Dion doesn't seem to have learned much from the mistakes of his predecessor, Paul Martin, the man who thought American-bashing would get him re-elected.

Dion is, of course, opposed to an increased private sector role in health care and thinks the federal government would play a useful role by identifying best health care practices, so all the provinces can follow them. Here's a best practice: having enough doctors and nurses. That means having enough money. What's his plan?

Dion tries to tie every issue back to the environment, since it's the one area where he's supposed to be strong. Unfortunately, he's a one-issue candidate with no coherent position on that one issue.

Dion can't say often enough how unfortunate it is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has wasted a year by not immediately enacting the Liberal environmental strategy. That still compares favourably to the seven or eight years the Liberals wasted. Greenhouse gas emissions went up under the Liberals' watch, but now Dion is attacking Harper for not fixing it all at the last minute. That just doesn't make sense. Dion introduced a motion in the House of Commons this week to force the Conservative government to meet Canada's Kyoto commitments, the same ones the Liberals couldn't meet. It's certainly not feasible at this point.

Dion says he's sorry the Liberals failed to make the environment a big issue in the last election, when Harper was particularly vulnerable. One can understand the strategic regret, but what does it tell us about the Liberals? They'll damn the Conservatives now for not making the environment the issue of the millennium, but only a year ago, they were doing the same thing.

Dion does show a certain intellectual agility when he suggest that the Liberals' very lame Kyoto performance was in part the Conservatives' fault, because they were just so against it. It's challenging to see how this could have mattered in the years when the Liberals had a majority.

Hopeful Liberals have suggested that one of Dion's strengths is that he's not a slick politician. Slick he's not, but it's tough to make an asset out of that. Dion isn't one of those down to earth guys like Ralph Klein. He's more like the wooly-headed professor next door. Dion simply cannot give a clear, succinct answer to a question. It's a necessary skill for any politician at his level.

Harper just wants to build up the military and cut taxes, Dion says, and it's clear that any right-thinking, sorry, left-thinking, person would realize how ridiculous that is. While these priorities will clearly fail to galvanize Canadians, Dion is offering to make us a world leader in "water management."

I'm not a natural consumer of the Liberal brand, but as a voter, I like to feel that I have two valid choices. With Stephane Dion as Liberal leader, that's not the case. Dion would have us believe he's qualified to be prime minister. If he thinks that, he's kidding himself. Let's not let him kid us, too.

Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail,
rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com

This is what is referred to as "bad press" by experts like Warren.

We, on the other hand, would refer to something like this as "a gift". Make sure everyone you know gets a look at this one. Re-post it, forward it, keep it on file for the next election... and hammer away on these same themes with everyone you talk politics to.

Mr. Dion, though highly intelligent, is NOT the best man to lead this nation. He has a very narrow set of issues where he is strong, namely one... the environment. And based on his track record with that file, it's not much to go on. If we own him on that file, maybe with a popular new Clean Air Act deal with the NDP, it's game over for him.

Hey may go down in history as the shortest lived Liberal leader in history... let's do everything we can to help the Liberals show him the door.