“Here is some advice for Mr. Harper and his conservatives: come up with some new ideas instead of running around saying “Don’t worry, we will do that too,â€? every time the Liberal party makes an announcement. We know where you stand on same sex marriage and we are getting tired of it. It is not the only issue Canadians care about.

How about letting us know what else you stand for, and then we can have an election?”

While I agree with your point Lyndon, the fact is it is the Liberal message that Harper has to emulate to get the necessary votes in central Canada.

There was a party that stood apart from the Liberals on principle: it was called the Reform party.

It was rejected in ‘93,’97 and again in ‘00 as the Canadian Alliance.

While I would love to see a principled conservative party go up against the Liberals with a distinct platform and message, I doubt very much that they’d garner any support outside of the West or rural Ontario.

Nor will they ever on that kind of a platform. Canada is a number of solitudes, some of them ideological, some regional and linguistic, all of which will never be accommodated under one central government.

You’d think we would have figured that out by now.

So far, all we have is Harper’s past rhetoric, and the platform/rhetoric of the Reform/Alliance parties - hardly something that represents much outside of Alberta voters.

(Oh wait - Harper did say today that he’d cozy up with George Bush if he becomes the next PM. Of course, that’s like trying to get cozy with a paranoid cobra with a persecution complex)

So if “government spending is just going to make things worse” then does it matter which party does it if they are both promising the same thing? I would find it seriously ironic if the Conservatives were elected and then were obliged to keep Liberal promises because they didn’t have any of their own.

Here is some advice for Mr. Harper and his conservatives: come up with some new ideas instead of running around saying “Don’t worry, we will do that too,” every time the Liberal party makes an announcement. We know where you stand on same sex marriage and we are getting tired of it. It is not the only issue Canadians care about.

How about letting us know what else you stand for, and then we can have an election?