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The Lucknow Sentinel, 2016-02-24, Page 4Fri 4 Lucknow Sentinel • Wednesday, February 24, 2016 www.lucknowsentinel.com The Lucknow Sentinel PUBLISHED WEEKLY P.O. Box 400, 619 Campbell Street Lucknow Ontario NOG 2H0 phone: 519-528-2822 fax: 519-528-3529 www.lucknowsentinel.com POSTMEDIA AWL, JOHN BAUMAN Group Manager, Media Sales john. bauman@sun media.ca JOYJURJENS Office Administrator lucknow.sentinel@sunmedia.ca LINDSAY THEODULE Media Sales Consultant I indsay.theodule@sunmedia.ca MARIE DAVID Group Advertising Director 519 376-2250 ext. 514301 or 510 364-2001 ext. 531024 Publications Mail Agreement No. 40064683 RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO SENTINEL CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT P.O. 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Canada Member of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association and the Ontario Community Newspapers Association Michael Den Tandt: Justin Trudeau swings for the fences by continuing to outflank NDP on the left Here's akey to under- standing Justin Trudeau's govemment and the strategy it has employed since assuming power last November: The New Democratic Party is gone. Of course the NDP isn't actu- allygone. It holds 44 seats in the House of Commons, the party's second-biggest contingent ever. Leader Thomas Mulcair badg- ers the Prime Minister daily there, just as he did his prede- cessor, albeit with less time at centre stage. And yet in a strategic sense the Dippers are gone, after a fashion. Their base of support has been absorbed by the Lib- eral parry, in a big shift that began in late August, when Trudeau turned the election campaign upside down by promising "a modest short- term deficit" of no more than $10 billion in each of a Liberal government's first three years, after which it would return to balance in fiscal 2019-20. That was the pivot point, in retro- spect, that derailed the NDP campaign. In one deft move, Trudeau had outflanked them on the left. Mulcair's rejoinder — an attempt to appropriate the old blue Liberal party's fiscal -con- servative mantle by promising a balanced budget in year one of an NDP govemment - was bold, honest, and consistent with his long-standing effort to push his party to the centre, where it could vie for power, rather than merely heckle from Column Michael Den Tandt the fringe. It was a logical strat- egy. It didn't account for, as it turned out, either Trudeau's personal appeal as a youthful change agent, or the fact Ontar- ians in particular are no longer terrified of free -spending gov- ernments. Premier Kathleen Wynne's re-election with a majority in 2014 had shown that. The result, to boil it down, was that left-leaning Canadians who might traditionally have voted for the NDP voted Liberal instead on Oct. 19. The proof is in the data: A comparable number of Canadians voted for the Tories in 2015 as they had done in 2011- down about 230,000 - meaning the Con- servative base remained more or less intact. The NDP's vote share dropped by more than one million and the Liberals added more than four million, as voter turnout rebounded. Recent surveys continue to reflect this shift. In January, according to poll aggregator ThreeHundredEight.com, Lib- eral support was 45.2 per cent nationwide, higher than Ste- phen Harper's Conservatives achieved at any point of their time in office. The Tories, now led by interim leader Rona Ambrose, had 28.4 per cent, meaning their reliable third of voters continues to stick by them. And the NDP languishes at 16.3 per cent, back to its pre - Jack -Layton breakthrough base in the mid -teens. This explains Mulcair's new appetite for more overtly leftist positions on trade, defence and the like: He has little choice now, with the Liberals encroaching so aggressively on his base, but to move back to a more purely social -democratic mould to save the furniture. Here's where all that gets us: The great merger of the Grits and NDP, the subject of so much feverish speculation after the Liberal wipeout in 2011 under Michael Ignatieff, has come to pass, but at the voter level. With Trudeau as leader, straddling the centre-left, the Liberal partyhas a solid major- ity coalition, based in Canada's largest cities, that does not require the numerical support of right -leaning rural and small-town Ontario, let alone conservative Quebecers or Albertans, for its sustenance. It is quite different from the cen- tre -right coalition that won Jean Chretien three consecu- tive majorities in the 1990s. This maybe why so much Liberal messaging since the Oct. 19 vote has seemed oddly discordant with the party's his- torical positioning, going back to 1993, and with Trudeau's own branding in the first period of his upward trajectory from 2012 onward. He cast himself then as a "classical lib- eral" and "Laurier Liberal, code for small -c -conservative on economic issues, presuma- blybecause his strategic objec- tive then was to pry Chretien- vintage swing voters away from Harper. But, as Brian Mulroney once said, "you dance with the one that brung ya:' In tacking cen- tre-left - whether it's insisting on pulling combat aircraft out of the air war in Iraq, or shifting into neutral on pipelines, or borrowing billions more than he said he would to "invest in social infrastructure" — Trudeau is doing just that. And here's the risk - setting aside that racking up billions in new debt for "investment in social infrastructure" is a recipe for boondoggles and an even- tual debt crisis not unlike like the one that preceded the national wave of spending cuts in the 1990s: The Liberals are proposing, not incremental change as we saw under Harper and Chretien, but wholesale, ambitious change that requires, dare we use the term, "social licence" far in excess of 40 per cent support, or even 45 per cent, to succeed. The last prime minister who swung for the fences to this extent, without the bene- fit of truly broad-based popu- lar support, was Mulroney, with his Meech and Char- lottetown accords. Two seats in the 1993 election was his party's reward. Red Hat groups recently visited Lucknow for tea time Ruth Dobrensky Lucknow News After another week of very cold and snowyweather, many in town were talking about looking forward to spring even though the winter has been quite mild and snowless compared to the last two years. Despite the fact that we have had a lot less snow, there have been a number of days when you could hardly see across the street because of the winds blowing the snow around. A number of people have commented on the hazard- ous trips they had getting home from different events around town. The Lucknow Sepoy Ranee Red Hat group here in Lucknow recently held at Valentine's Tea in the common room of the Sepoy Apartments. The common room was tastefully decorated for the day and the tea consisted of tea, little sandwiches, lovely sweets and lots and lots of chocolates. Each ladywas given some special Valentine treats by Pat and Janet, the hostesses for the day. They were also given the choice of selecting a special red hat item given to us by a "retired" red hat lady from Brussels. Yours truly had to apologize to the ladies for not having "Royal Doulton" china (like Hyacinth Bucket - pro- nounced Bouquet), I only own Wedgewood. The Lucknow Rumoli Club also recently met for our monthly evening of food, Rumoli and fun. There must have been something in the air that evening as there seemed to be a lot of silliness hap- pening in the group. A couple of people were referring to others (or themselves) as possibly cheating, but of course, we know no one here in Lucknow who would do that. Or would we? Sympathies of the community to the families of: Harold Smith, 73, Lucknow; Brian McKay, 66, Kitchener; and Petronella Nusink, 83, RI, Holyrood.