Weird but true. Today the government finally bowed to the inevitable and tabled the legislation rather than see it defeated. Actually, that's not as good as it sounds. But I'll start at the beginning of this silliness.

The background to this is that the Tory minority government is really inept, and the Liberals are a third party rump whose members are afraid that the next election will take them down personally.

The goofball former Liberal Leader couldn't even get a seat in the last election. The Interim Leader who replaced him is an asshole, and one with a personal emnity for the NDP. With that, and the material interest in avoiding an election, the government had a cozy relation with the Liberals.

They cooked up this legislation banning health care strikes as a means to pretend they were doing something about wait times, and to tar the NDP as being in bed with the unions.

By the time government announced their plans, the Liberals had elected a new Leader who wasn't interested in the larger political game, and agreed the [still just talked about] legislation was no good and they would not support it. Period.

The crew in this government is so inept they just plowed ahead regardless. The more they talked about it, the more the little chance it had of finding favour with the public, slipped away.

Bashing health care workers isn't popular. The 'strategy' is transparent to the media. And the somewhat geater potential for tapping into the generic anti-union and NDP-in-bed-with-unions nastiness evaporated when the Liberals joined in.

The coalition of unions still had to take this very seriously. And they have done a good job of it. And the NDP has kept the message on the real issues: doing something about wait times.

So, today the government withdraws the bill with the stated intention of bringging it back in the Spring.

Hard to tell what will really happen. I know for a fact- from lobbying the government on other issues- that these bozos are lost and make it up as they go.

Perhaps they intend to negotiate with the Liberals and come back with something else. I don't see how, either you ban strikes or you don't. The Liberals have been unequivocal in the strike ban being fundamentally wrong.

Maybe the government thinks that with some more time to massage public fears they can bring it back and score points even if it is shot down? So far, their publicity stunts around 'building support' have been pathetic.

Or maybe they'll just drop it. That's what one would expect. But these guys are
really lost, so they may still convince themselves the strategy just needs work.

I'm not minimizing the potential for harm here. We get all sorts of goofy re-alignment of the stars in provincial politics. The idea hasn't been slammed down yet.

But that is the dynamic behind the legislation.

[ 07 December 2007: Message edited by: KenS ]