I know I did have a few beers last night, but when I woke up this morning to read Jane Taber's column about Michael Ignatieff apparently offering people cabinet posts I thought I should have been a character in the movie The Hangover. You know the one where the main players get so loaded that when they wake up the next morning they can't remember what they did and how they changed their worlds.
So a leader whose party has no platform; who at this point according to polls has lost what ever momentum he had in polls; who now in a recent Macleans interview is found to have trashed his party's Pearsonian peacekeeping traditions; is making a cabinet? And oh yes, he is the Leader of the Opposition, a mere technicality of course. This latest adventure is either exceptionally audacious or the height of that Iggy arrogance that drives so many batty except it seems the great man himself and a few of his sycophants.
According to Taber's report: "The Liberal leader recently visited former B.C. attorney-general Wally Oppal, who was narrowly defeated in the May provincial election, and offered him the justice portfolio if he were to run federally, according to a source close to Mr. Oppal." If Jane's story is right it appears that Iggy and his Liberals still haven't learned that Canadians hate that entitlement attitude of theirs. Remember that classic line from former Liberal minister David Dingwall: "I am entitled to my entitlements." It was that frame of mind that led to the sponsorship scandal, sank the Martin juggernaut and put the Liberals on the bench.
Canadians do have this terrible expectation that people who seek public office work for their vote and offer some plans on what they might do. Presumably Iggy forgot about that while he was away. The Liberals don't have an inherit right to govern despite their Leader's current delusion.
In case it also slipped your mind Michael, in parliamentary democracies like Canada, there is a process called an election whereby those common folk known as the Canadian public decide who becomes the government.