He's had a de facto majority government since for too long the Liberals were playing chicken and losing each time.
I didn't see Dion giving any commitments to passing all legislation Harper put forward.
It's also hard to blame the Liberals for their In-And-Out campaign finance scandal,
Pales into insignificance compared to the "elaborate kickback scheme" unearthed by Gomery.
making the PMO more closed than the Kremlin,
Your source on this is...? What standard was used to calculate how closed the respective offices are? I assume this is somehow different from the "veil of secrecy" and "lack of transparency" Justice Gomery cited in his report into the previous Liberal Government?
And how would you spend that money? It's easy to label spending as pork when the money's not going into a project that you approve of, but the fact of the matter is: Harper has lowered taxes. It is the Liberals who believe in tax-and-spend, which provides greater scope for "pork projects" and corruption, as was unearthed by Gomery.
148 cronies stuffed into public offices just before this summer, and so forth.
As opposed to, say, Art Eggleton, Larry Campbell, Jim Cowan, Romeo Dallaire, Dennis Dawson, Francis Fox, Yoine Goldstein, Sandra Lovelace Nicholas, Grant Mitchell, Robert Peterson, Claudette Tardif and Rod Zimmer, all of whom are Liberals parachuted by Paul Martin into Senate seats, within the last twelve months of his office.
Of particular interest are Rod Zimmer, noted fundraiser for the Liberal Party of Canada (it seems that the Liberals have no problem selling Senate seats, although so far not yet on ebay). Dennis Dawson, who ran for the Liberals in the 2004 election in Beauport being humiliatingly defeated by the Bloc by an almost 2:1 ratio, before being handed a comfortable seat in the Senate (good thing the Liberals are so big on democracy, otherwise they might not be so willing to listen to the voice of the people who clearly don't want him there). Good ol' Larry Campbell decided he wasn't a politician and therefore wouldn't re-contest the Vancouver Mayoralty, of course this didn't stop him from accepting a Senate appointment from Martin (probably because the appointed Senate means he doesn't have to be a politician, not having to worry about trifling little issues such as elections). Then you've got Art Eggleton, who backed Martin's leadership bid but was passed over for the Ministry, thus he had a hissy fit and announced he wouldn't run for re-election. Realising his mistake, Martin promptly appoints him to the Senate once the election is out of the way.
I guess the only time you disapprove of cronyism is when it relates to appointments to the public service, rather than appointments for life in teensy-weensy Senate seats. I am quite confident to suggest that in the long run, Martin's appointment of 12 "cronies stuffed into" the Senate until retirement will cost taxpayers a lot more than Harper's appointment of 148 to public offices a month or so ago.
Your mock outrage is fun to watch and all, but it doesn't really work when the Liberals govern with "a culture of entitlement among political officials" and "the refusal of [liberal] Ministers, senior officials in the [liberal] PMO and public servants to acknowledge their responsibility for the problems of mismanagement" - comments made not by me, but by Justice Gomery.
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