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Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday March 13, 2008

Tories set to survive two more confidence votes

Two more confidence votes are scheduled Thursday, during which the Liberals will emerge to see the shadow of their electoral prospects and scurry back underground, presaging at least six more weeks of frosty partisanship.

“About an election, look, not this week,” Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Wednesday following a caucus meeting.

A vote on extending Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan to 2011 is assured passage after a compromise was hammered out between Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government and Dion’s Liberals.

And a budgetary ways-and-means motion, which guts a new Liberal private member’s bill that would make Registered Education Savings Plans tax deductible, will be allowed to pass the House late Thursday – provided Speaker Peter Milliken doesn’t rule the government tactic out of order.

The votes will effectively end a six-week period of brinkmanship in the Commons that saw the minority Tories survive their third federal budget, a government-manufactured crisis on crime legislation, the Afghan debate and an NDP confidence motion on climate-change policy.

But as parliamentarians embark on a two-week Easter break beginning Friday, the season of resurrection ensures that nothing, politically, has been settled. (Source: Sun Media)