Sorry “Bull”, my comments were to Vincent who seems to be a bit of a thinker. You on the other hand seem the classic Harper-Hater so any discussions with you are pointless .. no offense.

OK, I’m just going to drop a quick line here and let this thread finally jump the shark.

You’ve descended into stale talking points from the war room now. Harper’s proroguation is NOT routine due to the fact that most of the work done by Parliament was not complete, and even his trusted long time advisor Tom Flanagan clearly stated it was to avoid the Afghan Committee, among other things. This is what was so offensive to many ordinary canadians, and that is why the argument for why it has garnered both support and media focus does not unravel at all.

Secondly, your comments regarding “Down with Harper” or “Harper is Hitler” signs is a red herring. Everyone knows that in Winnipeg conservative youth prepared signs and attempted to appear as though they were part of the CAPP protests, sadly and rightly it backfired on them. To this, Frank – you are full of baloney. Canadians have a problem with harper, one thing being proroguation of parliament before the legislative agenda is complete – that was the lightning rod for the litany of complaints that many canadians have about this government. Frank, do not forget that 2/3 of canadians DID NOT vote for Harper, and ideologically are not even remotely close to holding similar values.

Having said that, I encourage you and your conservative friends to continue to ignore these movements and believe they aren’t real. In the words of Dr. Phil, “how’s that workin’ for ya?”….

Your argument that the events were anti-prorogation, and not anti-Harper, on the surface seems sound, and if this were the case I don’t think we would be having this discussion.

But, are you not overlooking a critical piece of history that betrays your reasoning? Your argument unravels when you consider that this PM was not the first prorogue the government (under almost identical circumstances), yet he was the first one to enjoy relentless media coverage, commentary, and demonstations because of it. How do you reconcile that with your argument? I can’t see how it can be done.

I would have much more respect for protesters, organizers, and the media if their professionally printed, identical, grass-roots signs read “Down with Harper”, or “Harper is Hitler”, or “Gotcha on this one Evil PM” then the baloney “Democracy is Lost” type-of-signs. That to me, seemed ridiculous, insulting, and childish. There’s an old saying that comes to mind when I think of this episode in Canadian politics: “Don’t pee on my foot and tell me it’s raining”. I think this applies here, if you have a problem with Harper, say-so, trying to channel this through some fabricated scandal makes everyone involved look very small and petty. I hope you can follow my argument, and see why I and other see this as strictly classic Harper-hating, that why I still file this under: Faux-protests and Faux-marches.

I think this sort of approach is what CAPP needs to do. CAPP already has, I believe, a general consensus among its 225,000 members that the proroguing procedure should be reformed so that it requires the consent of parliament. I’d wager that most of the membership are also for reigning in the power of the PMO and restoring the power of parliament.

This, it seems, is the sort of reform program that CAPP should be campaigning on. But it should do so within each political party within riding associations and working on up to party conventions.

If CAPP can pressure both the NDP and Liberals to endorse these policies, great. If not, then I think we should go from there. But more likely, the NDP will endorse them and there will be substantial resistance in the Liberal Party. CAPP could then use the opportunity – through a press conference, for example – to threaten a public rebuke the Liberal Party leadership. I know my Liberal friends would hate this idea, but they’re the ones who have to concede that their party is really the party that can make these necessary democratic reforms to prorogation, the PMO and parliament. But I would imagine the pressure from CAPP, the Liberal party base, but also the threat of the NDP gaining from any Liberal leadesrhip foot-dragging on CAPP’s proposed reforms, would ultimately force the Liberal leadership to endorse the reforms if only for purely opportunistic reasons.

The point here is to come up with a plan to win and as far as I can tell, that’s the only way to do it at this point. The direction CAPP is now going is a total dead-end.

CAPPers have to organize such campaigns within their respective parties, recruit those non-affiliated CAPPers into riding associations, and fight the good fight from the bottom up, taking on party leaderships if they have to and, if required, making those unsavoury threats of allying with another pro-CAPP party to win the battle within their own party. Putting the principle of democracy before party loyalty – that would be non-partisan!

The question for Liberals, in my opinion, is how far they would push this within a party that we all know contains a number of old school, anti-democratic elites? Do they have the cojones to take them on and become a thorn in the side of their own leadership? And the question for NDPers is, knowing their leaders would likely endorse such reforms, how much they are willing to take on Layton and Co. in actually pushing them to campaign actively, openly and consistently on a policy which the membership actually supports as opposed to something cooked up by the unelected advisors that really call the shots in developing the campaign policies.

In short, much of the media was anti-prorogation, but not anti-Harper. The media gave widespread and generally unhostile coverage to the CAPP rallies but never explicitly endorsed the rallies.

And let’s not conflate the editorial line with the politics of a few columnists in the mainstream media who have long opposed Harper and openly supported (and even attended) the rallies. But that’s what columnists do – take positions. The editorial lines of the mainstream newspapers did not come close to the open anti-Harper, pro-rally politics of some of these columnists.

And simply because a section of the media was vocally anti-prorogation – which does not automatically equal anti-Harper – it does not mean, as you say, that the CAPP rallies on January 23 were “faux-protests” and “faux-marches”. They were organized at the grassroots by spontaneous coalitions of many different political stripes at very short notice which explains, as exciting as the rallies were, the actually quite small numbers (which indicates how little influence the media actually has). January 23 didn’t come close to how many marched in Quebec City in April 2001 against the FTAA (80,000), the largely ignored rally a few years ago organized by CAW in Windsor (40,000), or the 500,000 Canadians who marched against the looming war in Iraq in February 2003 – and in all cases the mainstream media was editorially aloof or openly hostile.

So don’t get your balls in a knot over words like “crap.” Describing what happened on January 23 as “faux” is, in my opinion, crap.

Frank, what are you smoking? Seriously….

“My point was that the media were biased in favor of this event taking root”

This is hardly the case. In the early days as the facebook group was nearing 100,000 members the media and the pundits that appeared regularly discounted it as “slacktivism” and “a bunch of disaffected university students”. It was only when the group had exceeded 200,000 and the rallies were imminent that the media picked up the stories in earnest, and even then for the most part underestimated the crowd sizes until official numbers came in.

Secondly, nowhere in ANY post I have EVER made have i intimated that the media has shown any bias against Harper. In fact, there could be a compelling argument towards the contrary and one only has to look at recent chubby senate appointments to make that call.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion my friend – but attempting to revise what I say is stretching the foil hat just a bit too far. I’m sure that others here respect other opinions, provided they are based in fact and have some connection to rational thought.

You may have also failed to notice in my original post that I am not affiliated with any political party, and that I had participated with the rally on my own.

Tell me “frank”, did you attend the anti coalition rally last year? If so, were you on the buses provided courtesy of the Conservative MP’s? Do you feel that there was a ‘media bias’ towards those rallies that garnered a few thousand people nationally? I’d love to hear your opinion – I need a good laugh today.

I’m not sure we disagree. My point was that the media were biased in favor of this event taking root. I didn’t make this up, please re-read the quote I took from the original comment. If you need to take a strip off of anyone, it should be “Bull”, he is the one the clearly stated the media is biased against Harper. If you organized one of the meetings, I’m impressed, good job, and I apologize for insinuating that you received any encouragement from the media coverage.

That said, it’s always enlightening to visit Scott’s blog were its readers view any opinion outside of their own small comfort zone as “fail”, “crap”, and “talking-head” lies. Makes for great discussion.

Frank’s comments are just outright nonsense. The media did implicitly promote the rallies through its constant coverage of CAPP’s growth and the general editorial stance against prorogation. They did not, however, urge people to make it out to the rallies.

If you were at all involved – and clearly you were not – the rallies were organized by the CAPP chapters which brought together all sorts of people, but not the media or media organizations. They were not part of CAPP, they did not participate in the organizing meetings, put up posters, leaflet, go on the demonstration, write letters to MPs, etc.

Frank’s comments describe a very wrong view of how grassroots politics operates. He collapses in to the sort of nonsense conspiracy theory-esque crap about people being duped by the media. This was not the case at all. Had you been involved, you might know that. But clearly you are not.

FAIL.

Yeah frank thats it. We all are just big meanies and we hate harper – us bobbleheads are mere pawns to the awesome power of the left. Good god man, get a grip!!

Did you ever stop to think that perhaps the media and the general public have caught on to the outright lies from harper and his ministers, and therefore view their talking points with skepticism? Nah, couldn’t be that now could it?

This has nothing to do with partiality, it has to do with the old russian saying “trust, but verify”… everyone has finally decided to verify. Apparently this is lost on conservative apologists. Why not tell the truth and actually govern for a change? That might stop the protesting, yah think?

“I’m not holding my breath. Neither is the media.”

With that statement alone, you manage to elegantly descredit the faux-protests as well as the rest of your comment. A real media outlet does not have opinions, it does not prejudge, its purpose is to report the news, not to create or promote it: is that not your understanding of news? The faux-marches were planned and promoted by the media for their own political purposes, and the “talking-head” lefties (to coin your worn-out phrase) were easily duped into being puppets by their intense, irrational, Harper-hating … at least that’s how I see it. On the bright side, it was a nice day for a faux-march/stroll.