"The Conservative Party can become a national alternative to the Liberals, but Harper will need the courage to tell old friends who have stood by him their time in the spotlight is over.
They will have to step back, and Anders is one of these friends." Matt Stambaugh and Kris Kotarski, The Calgary Herald, April 2, 2004. p. A17
A vote for Rob Anders is a nail in the coffin of the future of the Conservative party.
Anders' penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time has relegated him to the back of the backbenches in his own party. Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin noted in 2002 that Stephen Harper, upon winning the leadership of the Canadian Alliance party,
"has wisely put a tight muzzle on second-term Anders, 30, keeping him far removed from the limelight as backup defence critic. Anders is considered an oddity even among his own MPs, prone to taking hard-right social stands in caucus which his party strives to keep from surfacing in the Commons."
In fact, this past session in the House of Commons, Anders was only allowed to speak four nine times. Now that the Progressive Conservatives have merged with the Canadian Alliance, Anders is only going to get less time, because Mr. Harper is trying to portray his party as a moderate alternative to the Liberals, a claim tarnished every time Anders opens his mouth.
Since it's in the best interests of the Conservative party to have Anders say as little as possible, it's likewise in the best interests of the constituents of Calgary West to elect an MP who can make their voices heard.
UPDATE: If you do the math, you'll see that Anders only spoke 470 985 words in Parliament this session. When you divide his salary for that period of time by the number of words he spoke, you'll see that he was paid $45 for every word he uttered. 4500 pennies for your thoughts, Rob?
UPDATE 2:We would like to make an important correction to the site.
Earlier, we had stated that Mr. Anders had only spoken four times this past session of the house; indeed, if you search Hansard, you only get four results.
Recently, however, we were rereading Hansard when we discovered that there seems to be an error in the search engine on the Parliament site, because there were speeches Mr. Anders gave that were not retrieved by the search engine.
As such, we would like to make a correction: Mr Anders did not speak four times this past session, he spoke... nine times.
That still makes Calgary West the least-represented Calgary riding in the House of Commons, so although we regret the error, we don't feel that the revised statistic constitutes a significant change.
