« Margaret Wente | Main | A sad day for Québec »
February 09, 2007
Why John Waugh is right
Here we go again. Somebody scolds the NDP for not doing enough to help elect Liberals. New Democrats huff and puff that it's not their job to elect Liberals, who are bunch of reactionary stooges anyway, and anyone who says otherwise is probably a Liberal.
Well, let me establish my bona fides. I've been a New Democrat for as long as I've known what the words meant. I canvassed and dropped leaflets for Peter Kormos in 1988, for Rob Dobrucki in 1993, for Jack Layton and Olivia Chow in 1997. I was a delegate to the 1996 Ontario leadership convention. I was on the executive of the Ontario New Democratic Youth in 1996-97. You could look it up.
Why? Because I believe in things like national pharmacare, wage insurance, card checks, debt relief, rent subsidies, and progressive taxation. Because I believe that the overriding goal of any political movement must be to redress injustice, to defend the weak, to heal the pains and agonies that torment our world.
I have never voted Liberal because, while many Liberals share these goals, many others do not. Even those that do are often all too willing to let them slip, to pander to prejudices and ignorances, in the worst case to perpetuate the evils they should be fighting.
But the NDP is not without its problems either. Chief among them is a maddening inability to listen to what its public is actually saying. An inescapable fact of Canadian political life is that a substantial percentage of the population casts their ballot primarily to oppose the Conservative party.
In 1988, they wanted to stop free trade. In 1993, they wanted the Mulroneyite bastards out. Today, they don't want a government that would give more freedom to markets than to people. They believe Stephen Harper would destroy the fabric of this country if he had a majority, and they will vote however it takes to stop him.
The NDP thinks of itself as the only progressive party and Liberals and Conservatives as barely distinguishable reactionaries; choosing between them would be like, as Tommy Douglas famously put it, a mouse choosing the colour of cat. But that was in a different era, when the United States under Roosevelt was an inspiration to progressives rather than a repulsion, before neoconservatism in all its incarnations started to destroy our world.
The ideas of Reagan or Thatcher or Bush crossed the border to become Mulroney, Harris, and Harper. It is impossible to ignore these ideas. Progressives must fight them, or they will be defeated. Yet, even in the heat of the 1988 campaign, the Liberals and NDP could not swallow their pride and come to any kind of alliance, such as a non-competition pact. They spent enough of that campaign sniping at each other for the Tories to laugh all the way to the PMO.
Today New Democrats like to ask why it's their duty to elect Liberals. It is not. It is their duty, however, to prevent the election of Conservatives. More generally, it is their duty to put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of their party. If NDP truly wants to give disadvantaged Canadians what they want, rather than what the NDP thinks they should want, it must heed this message.
This is not to say the NDP should simply merge with the Liberals - the ideological differences are too great, and Canadians do not expect this. Rather, the party should be prepared to work with Liberals to figure out the best way of defeating extremist right-wing parties. One obvious solution is non-competition agreements, where in selected ridings one of the two parties agrees not to run a candidate.
The NDP would be perfectly within its rights to demand cabinet seats in return, bringing it more power than it has ever had before. Indeed, many Canadians would welcome a Liberal-NDP coalition government - many more, in fact, than would be prepared to accept a purely NDP government, even a minority one. Canada's best and most popular governments, for the past 70 years, have been Liberal minorities propped up by the NDP. Failure to form an alliance more often than not leads to electoral disaster - witness the 1990s, or 1974, or the 1987 Ontario election.
It does no good for the NDP to stubbornly stick its head in the sand and behave like a northern version of Ralph Nader. It hurts the progressive agenda, it hurts the NDP, and it hurts Canada.
Posted by Tyrone at February 9, 2007 12:17 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.tyronenicholas.com/admin/mt-tb.cgi/9
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Why John Waugh is right:
» Prednisone 10mg side effect. from Prednisone.
Prednisone and elevated wbc s. Prednisone. [Read More]
Tracked on October 8, 2007 11:38 PM
» Generic xanax. from No prescription xanax generic.
Generic xanax. [Read More]
Tracked on November 6, 2007 11:03 PM
» Croom's breakthrough season meaningful for from bear bryant coach life paul
That's a life lesson." And a lesson that was drilled into Croom's head incessantly while playing for the legendary [Read More]
Tracked on January 19, 2008 09:40 PM
» Cal Academy on the move from blue foam insulation
Recycled shredded blue jeans will insulate the walls and solar panels will adorn the roof. Toilets will use recycled water. [Read More]
Tracked on January 22, 2008 07:27 AM
» Napa Valley winery property listed from wine country tour from san francisco
Schwab, vice president of investments and senior director of Marcus & Millichap's national office and industrial properties group in San [Read More]
Tracked on February 15, 2008 06:38 AM
» Love letters - Fort Worth from control folsom rodent
"Bedding has been done forever, but now we are seeing items for the dining room," says Kat Nelson of Red [Read More]
Tracked on February 16, 2008 06:11 PM
» Long-suffering Jobe counts blessings - from denver life coach
Jobe's longtime swing coach, Denver-based Mike McGetrick, flew to Jobe's home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area just before Christmas and [Read More]
Tracked on February 18, 2008 11:12 PM
» IOGEAR 4-Port Automatic HDMI Switch from cable hdmi play station
You own a PlayStation 3. You own a Mac Mini. You own an HD-DVD player. You own an HD [Read More]
Tracked on February 19, 2008 04:41 PM
Comments
And my reply in the update:
http://secondthots.blogspot.com/2007/02/lecturing-jack.html
Posted by: Dennis (Second Thoughts) at February 9, 2007 03:18 PM
And my reply in the update. ;)
Posted by: Dennis (Second Thoughts) at February 9, 2007 03:18 PM
And my reply in the update:
http://secondthots.blogspot.com/2007/02/lecturing-jack.html
Posted by: Dennis (Second Thoughts) at February 9, 2007 03:20 PM
1) It's good for both parties for both the Liberals and the NDP to continue to exist as full-fledged parties. As things stand, the Liberals will have someone on their left flank and won't only be pulled to the right, as the Democrats in the U.S. have been, and the NDP will continue to provide a genuine option to lefties and won't feel pulled to the centre themselves with someone else occupying that spot. Keeping the two parties both separate, and healthy, is the only way to have a full, vibrant political spectrum in this country.
2) If the two parties ever felt like they wanted to put aside their disagreements and form government together rather than trying to snuff each other out, that would absolutely rock my socks. However, the NDP has only expressed interest in working with the Liberals in a minority government situation, and when I asked now-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion about a possible interest in a coalition in my interview with him, he could only keep repeating over and over again that he thought the Liberals would be able to get a single-party majority on his watch. It's disappointing, but those are the facts.
3) I personally would be just fine with your "non-competition agreement" idea, as long as the terms of the agreement were fair and equal and it were really in "selected ridings" instead of dividing up the whole country along party lines. However, I don't think either party would agree to this because in Canada, all the parties have so often rattled the sword of "we're running candidates in all ridings, therefore we are legitimate!" for so long. It's entirely silly (in the U.S., for example, parties regularly don't run candidates in districts they can never win), but again, those are the facts. Right now at least, this is not an option without diminishing the parties' credibility.
4) If the Liberals ever got to a point of agreeing with you--and I hope they do--the very best show of faith they could give the NDP would be full support of proportional representation. This is something you don't mention once in your post, and that's a huge, huge oversight.
Posted by: Idealistic Pragmatist at February 10, 2007 07:38 AM
Also, you should rethink the title of this post. John Waugh specifically argues for a merger of the Liberals and the NDP. You speak out against this idea in your post, and yet title it "why John Waugh is right"? That's neither accurate nor strategically wise.
Posted by: Idealistic Pragmatist at February 10, 2007 10:51 AM
Hello to a fellow traveller. I wrote this, today, on my blog and sent a letter to the Globe basically repeating the ideas. Wente is using her power in a shameful way, and she's dishonest. Good for you in your effort to talk back to her...
http://johnnymaudlin.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Johnny Maudlin at April 1, 2007 10:08 PM