In case you didn’t hear the news, Prime Minister Harper has appointed his cabinet. Within that cabinet is a former advisor who was not elected but is expected to become a senator in the future. The other is David Emerson, who was elected two weeks ago today as a Liberal. He garnered 43 per cent of the vote compared to the Cons. candidate in that riding…
Doesn’t this go against everything Harper said during the campaign about accountability?
How can a cabinet minister be accountable if he wasn’t elected by the people and can’t answer questions in the House?
What about betraying all of your voters and switching sides? Harper obviously doesn’t care if Emerson is accountable to his riding.
Now we are going to hear the public saying that politicians are all the same, they backstab to get ahead, etc. How does that better the image of the politician, which is something Harper wanted so badly to do?
Why didn’t he just appoint some of the long-time Reformers? He had plenty of them and he only gave two of them cabinet posts…
Emerson better be good. He better prove to be extremely valuable to the Harper government for this move to be justified. He was the CEO of a forestry company, IIRC, and he was appointed to the international trade post. He could be valuable for the softwood lumber debate, but I don’t think he did anything in relation to it when he was a Liberal.
I think Harper really messed up his first day as PM.
Hmm i was wondering when someone was goign to post about this, i think its totally absurd, his first day was a gong show. The whole emerson thing is ridiculou, 2 weeks after being elected as a liberal and giving a speech about how brutal the conservatives are at his victory party, and then not telling this campaign manager that he was crossing the floor, i think he should resign. and so do the hundreds of protestors that have been haunting him the past week.
When belinda stronich(spl?) crossed the floor, the conservatives wanted to make a law where someone could not cross the floor and then they do it themselves? Honestly i see a bad start to our ‘new government’, and i can only imagine more controversy to come.
Pragmatically it makes sense…to have representation from Montreal and Vancouver in government but it is, in my opinion, a dumb move and makes people even more cynical when it comes to trusting politicians. I think this move will lose the Conservatives the next election but then again people have short memories.
People will ignore that the Liberals do this same kind of thing all the time but call the Conservatives hypocrites for doing it which they now are especially given their campaign.
