Saturday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend:

- Your latest Con copyright talking point: if someone from an opposing viewpoint hasn't presented draft legislation, they deserve to be ignored. Which makes for an interesting political strategy: presumably the goal is to provoke somebody to draft something that the Cons can attack, but isn't there some serious risk involved in dwelling on procedure while allowing the opposite side to argue on principle?

- From the standpoint of dealing with short-term deficits without damaging (and indeed perhaps even improving) the theoretical long-term incentive to boost economic development, Andrew Jackson's suggestion of a one-time capital levy makes a world of sense. Needless to say, I never expect to hear of it again.

- Michael Harris weighs in on the Libs' latest Afghanistan capitulation:

The chill Stephen Harper has put on parliament is still looking for a spine to run up in the Liberal Party. The only Liberals standing up for anything are men and women whose loyalty requires official silence outside of caucus. Dion’s questioning of the training mission is a thundering rebuke of the elitist appeasement that plagues the party at the top.

- Finally, the Free Press's coverage in Winnipeg North paints a rather stark distinction as to how two of the campaigns are doing in actually getting people interested in participating:

Chief, a political rookie, is facing Liberal Kevin Lamoureux, a strong constituency man and formidable campaigner who has represented 75 per cent of the sprawling federal riding at one time or the other in his 18 years as an MLA. The NDP hopeful boasts a team of more than 300 volunteers.

The other main contender is Julie Javier, acting executive director of the Philippine Canadian Centre, who has run a low-profile campaign in which she has avoided two all-candidates meetings and ducked media interviews (she only consented to a brief telephone interview for this piece and refused to pose for a photograph, emailing one of herself instead) to concentrate on door-knocking. She said this week she has 10 volunteers working on her campaign.

And the distinction looks to be more a matter of bad news for the Cons than anything: doesn't it seem downright stunning that a governing party would be unable to summon up more than 10 volunteers from one of Canada's ten biggest cities for a by-election campaign?