Dryden: "We can do better!"/Chretien: "Liberals fiscally responsible and socially committed"

By Les Wittington, Toronto Star, April 27, 2011
(At a rally featuring Jean Chretien) Liberal candidate Ken Dryden delivered an impassioned call to bring an end to Conservative rule, saying “it’s time to be offended by this Harper government. This prime minister’s bad for Canada. We are better than this.”
At the same rally, Jean Chretien reminded his audience that Liberals represent fiscal responsibility and social commitment...and that places his party smack in the middle between both the NDP and the Harper gang.
And, for the next three or four days, Canadians will have to think "deep thoughts" about their future, about their family's future and about the kind of communication and relationship  we want with our government.
And, as Michael Ignatieff reminded Jack Layton, "Polls don't make you Prime Minister!"
However, those same polls, showing that young voters and women voters are turning to the NDP in Quebec ( a significant and historic movement away from the sovereignist movement) and possibly also in Ontario, the traditional base of the Liberal party, could spell a very different kind of government from the one Canadians are accustomed to in Ottawa.
Political theory (from a political neophyte):
It says here that given the dramatic and insensitive turn to the right in Canadian politics over the last five years, linked with the kind of arrogance and contempt for the parliamentary process demonstrated by the Harper gang, following the stench of the sponsorship scandal, the country is tired of "same old" "same old" and may be deciding to "give those NDP'ers a chance" to play a significant role in government policy.
And even if the country does not see its way to elect a Liberal government, Dryden is right: It is time to be offended by this government....and we can do better!"
With the monstrous escape from the prison in Kandahar, from a project into which Canadians have invested millions of dollars and over 150 in human sacrifices, and with yesterday's assassination of nine U.S. soldiers by a single Afghan, armed with American weapons, bringing some U.S. soldiers to ask publicly, "What are we doing here?"....a new Canadian government without Harper as Prime Minister, could re-evaluate our continuing role there, including the option of withdrawal.
And a new Canadian government could also:

• begin to take global warming and climate change seriously
• begin to remove subsidies from the tar sands
• begin to take the plight of our aboriginal peoples seriously
• begin to refocus our government on the human needs, not merely the corporate agenda
• cancel the proposed F-35 Fighter Jets that we just do not need
• cancel the construction of billions of dollars in new prisons
• begin to negotiate long-term serious funding for our health care system
• restore Canada's place at the table of nations in the Security Council of the U.N.
• restore some dignity to the plight of poor seniors
• enhance the provision of prescription drugs under the Health Act
• restore funding to those agencies stripped because of ideological differences with the Harper gang
• begin to restore our crumbling infrastructure in roads, bridges and expanded high tech services

And most importantly, restore a sense of pride and hope in our own future simply through a commitment to open, honest and comprehensive "truth telling" with the Canadian people.