You have to love a guy who speaks his mind and takes it from all sides. I agree with Maxime, and I have to respect his clear stand on a very controversial subject. Bill 101 is not about Quebec's need to preserve French, it's about Quebec being insecure, and arrogant.
The Prime Minister’s biggest quandary is that he can hardly discipline his charismatic MP from the Beauce for expressing opinions he used to (and probably still does) hold — namely the state should not coerce people into making decisions that concern their personal lives.
Before he united the right in 2003, Mr. Harper could often be heard spouting off about bilingualism (“the god that failed”) and Bill 101.
Hello, get the state out of our lives. Ivison makes it sound wrong to want less government control of our lives. He makes snarky references about PM Harper "spouting off" and the catty little ("the god that failed") remark shows a serious lack of deep thinking by a journalist, but why am I surprised?
Maxime has the right to have an opinion just like any other MP or individual. You can agree with his opinion or not, but he has as much right to "spout off" as Ivison does. Check out the comments, Ivison is not doing very well.
I think Max is a breath of fresh air. He has some good ideas, and it is nice to see an MP from Quebec care more about Canada then just his province. So much for PM Harper muzzling his MP's. I wonder why Ivison didn't mention that? Oh, right that wouldn't fit with the media's agenda. Cry about PM Harper being a bully and keeping a tight rein on his MP's, then when a Conservative MP does speak up, slamming him as a renegade and a "problem" for PM Harper. Can't have it both ways MSM, or you just look like idiots....oh wait.
So, I get a flyer from my MP called, "Keeping in Touch", nice that he wants to get in touch, but it's like he sat down for two minutes and wrote it. It talks about the upcoming budget, and the committee that he chairs, but it doesn't state anything about what he has done in our community over the holidays (and he has done lots if you go to his web page). The next two pages are the same questions you can answer online at www.fin.gc.ca and the last page asks me about the issues that are important to me.
What I can't understand is what was the purpose of the flyer? Nothing about policy, nothing about what government money has been allocated to my riding, nothing about the future direction of the government, just a bunch of white space. If I had just moved into the area, I would have no idea who this guy is or why I should vote for him. If these flyers are meant to inform, then this didn't inform me of anything. I'm sure he's not the only one sending out these flyers, and I know he is a really hard working and very well respected MP, but looking at the flyer you wouldn't know it. There's no there there!
The same can be said for the Conservative web site. Their idea of multimedia is a photo album!! Can they not afford a camera man?? We have to rely on the biased media to report on what happens at all these meetings. They are really good at asking us for money, but not so good at communicating what the party is doing. They should have speeches posted from all the Ministers and especially the PM, but when I click on the Youtube link, it doesn't work!! Communication is the life blood of the party, and knowing that the media is biased against the Conservatives, they should be taping and posting everything they can so that we can see what really happened, like at Davos.
A great example of what our MP's should be doing to communicate with us, is this post from Maxime Bernier, he gets communications! Make sure you watch the videos, he gives an excellent speech about what he sees as the direction for Conservatives. I hope that he soon gets the industry portfolio back because he did an excellent job in that position.
Keeping in touch? A flyer to constituents is only one way to engage your constituents, but at least make it count, make it engaging. My flyer went right into the garbage because I had already gone to the finance site and entered my requests for the next budget, the most important being to extend the home improvement credit. MP's need to use all the tools at their disposal, and the Blogging Tories are a force that they are ignoring, except for Maxime.
My prorogation video has over 500 views, that's more than double the number of protesters who showed up in Edmonton. I bet that I get more views on my blog any given day than my MP's web page gets in a year. In the last election lots of bloggers promoted their Conservative candidate, and I am sure that it made a difference in some of the close ridings. Yet many MP's don't even know that the Blogging Tories exist. Too bad, because we are a powerful voice for the Conservative cause. The dippers and libs have their own blogging community, but it is nothing like the Blogging Tories. The Conservative party needs to look at how Obama won, bloggers were a huge part of his win.
