Because right now, we’ve got so-called Conservatives wearing Liberal clothing (and Liberals pawing through the NDP’s cast-off pile). There’s no major federal party in Canada that actually pursues fiscally responsible government policies, no matter how much they may talk about the virtues of smaller government.
Shortly after his government’s defeat, Prime Minister Stephen Harper attempted to deflect focus back to Tuesday’s budget. The economy, he said, is the number one priority of Canadians and the budget was the key to the country’s economic future. Then he said: “There was nothing in the budget that the opposition could not or should not have supported.” True enough — but what does that say to Canada’s conservatives? Based on the budget, they are now called on to support a Conservative party that has presided over an extravagant full-scale national revival of big government by fiscal expansion.
Only a few days ago, it seems, Canadian politics was abuzz with the possibility of a new ideological era that favoured smaller government and lower taxes, with less waste, more discipline and a determination to cut taxes. There were signs of revolt in British Columbia, a shake-up in Calgary and reform in Toronto, where Mayor Rob Ford captured a staggering 47% of the vote in a town where The Globe and Mail is considered a right-wing propaganda sheet. Ford Nation, they called it.
There is no Harper Nation. After five-plus years in office, the Harper Conservatives have singularly failed to change the Canadian ideological landscape. Instead, Canadian politics changed the Conservatives. In power, they transformed themselves into another basely partisan party that willingly and even eagerly pandered to whatever the political three-ring circus put on display. This week’s budget, in which $2-billion in loose cash was promptly distributed to a score of special interests and political agendas, left in place a $40-billion deficit for 2010 and solidified a $100-billion increase in the national debt over five years.
There’s no threat on the right to force the Conservatives to actually live up to their talk, so they’re free to drift as far into Liberal territory as they like — and they seem to like it a lot — because small-C conservative voters have nowhere else to go.
The most likely megaquake on the West Coast would be much further north — in fact, 50 miles off the coast between Cape Mendocino in northern California and Vancouver Island in southern British Columbia. This 680-mile strip of seabed is home to the Cascadia subduction zone, where oceanic crust known as the Juan de Fuca plate is forced under the ancient North American plate that forms the continent. For much of its length, the two sides of this huge subduction zone are locked together, accumulating stresses that are capable of triggering megaquakes in excess of magnitude 9.0 when they eventually slip. As such, Cascadia is more than a match for anything off the coast of Japan.
I guess the weekend staff were 
