‘The NDP's Irrational Hatred for the Conservative Party’

Jack Layton goes on rampage, destroys budget in fit of rage.

The budget Jim Flaherty presented yesterday “provided the opposition parties with little to oppose but even less to support,” writes the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert. It should come as no surprise that all three parties rejected it, because it didn’t do anything to address Bloc Québécois demands for financial compensation to Quebec for the HST, it ignored Liberal calls to abandon corporate tax cuts, and it “barely paid lip service to the demands of the NDP.”

The National Post’s Lorne Gunter writes that Flaherty never intended for the NDP to back the budget, and suspects that the whole thing was “a trap designed to lure the New Dems into taking the blame for forcing an election.” By including NDP ideas like boosting benefits to low-income seniors and renewing the home renovation tax credit, the Conservatives can now argue they attempted to meet Jack Layton halfway, but the NDP declined the olive branch. Voters tend to punish parties that force an election.

The Montreal Gazette’s L. Ian Macdonald and the Post’s John Ivison both think there were enough concessions in the budget for Layton to support it. Ivison says Flaherty practically got on one knee and proposed to the NDP leader, only to be rebuffed by “the NDP's irrational hatred for the Conservative Party.” Layton’s thirst for Tory blood aside, we in the Newsroom think a more likely explanation for his rejection of the budget is that the limited concessions it contained probably wouldn’t have pleased the NDP’s base, and he was shaping up to vote down the government on a confidence vote later in the week anyway. To support the budget and then defeat the government a few days later would have been politically awkward.

Both the Globe and Mail editorialists and the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom think that, with its splashouts on social programs, the Conservative budget looked a lot like something the Liberals would have come up with. Walkom thinks this will make an election hard on Michael Ignatieff because he’ll have to attack an economic policy he agrees with, but the Globe thinks it could cost the Conservatives votes from their base.