Amazing Happenings in Ottawa!

Have you been following the goings on in Ottawa the past week?  Amazing, gripping stuff.  
A sitting Prime Minister and government could be brought down by an opposition coalition.  Why? Well, this is politics, of course, so the short answer appears to be that there is a mood within the opposition parties that the timing is right for this.  But the principal instigator appears to have been the economic statement presented by the government last week.   Among the items slipped into that statement by Harper and his government was a promise to eliminate a law passed by the Liberals that grants political parties nearly $2 per vote received.  This predictably pissed off all of the opposition parties.
And did you catch the other little nugget:  a ban on public sector strikes for 3 years.  This came out of nowhere — certainly, I don’t recall the Tories running on this promise in the recent election.  I have no idea where this idea came from, but this sort of random, blame-the-workers attack on labour rights does smell a lot like something Guy Giorno would do.  He is a former Mike Harris advisor during the so-called “Common Sense Revolution” days in Ontario.  We noted last week that a lot of the Harris era Ontario Conservative Party labour law reforms have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Perhaps Giorno has taken his labour-rights bashing show on the road to Ottawa.
The Tories have had to withdraw those measures now, with tails firming planted between their legs, as they try to hold on to power.  As Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail notes today, someone is likely to pay for the Tory’s very bad judgement last week.  That someone could be Giorno, but we’ll have to see who falls on their sword.