Last election the NDP took 7.5% of the popular vote in Quebec. Now polls consistently show the NDP at around 12% in Quebec. In other words, the NDP is up 4 to 5% in province with about a quarter of Canada’s voters. However, recent polls put the NDP below what they were in 2006 nationally and hardly any poll since 2006 has showed the NDP rising above what the obtained in 2006. Ergo the NDP is bleeding voters elsewhere. This is certainly the case in greater Toronto. The NDP is loosing support both to the Liberals and the Greens there.
Toronto Center and Willowdale were not flukes; they are the future. The NDP is going to take it on the chin in the 905 and 416. If there was an election this spring chances are Layton might keep his seat, albeit barely, but Chow, Marston, Charlton and Nash will loose their seats.
Now, the political spectrum has never been a particularly fool proof way of understanding politics in Canada and this is especially so with regard to the western provinces. The NDP and Liberals are not fighting for the same voters there; the NDP and Conservatives are. That is what makes the following NDP “game plan” all the more baffling. “Damaging Harper and the Conservatives on ethical issues like the Cadman mess mainly helps the Grits, and that’s not in our gameplan.” Before the arrival of the Reform Party, the NDP was where protest voters parked their votes. Damaging the conservative parties on ethical issues has historically been a very good game plan for the NDP and did someone forget remind Layton that the seat Dona Cadman is running for is held up the NDP’s Penny Priddy. The Liberals stand no chance of winning Surrey North.
The NDP seems to have seen the writing on the wall and have realized that while they are bleeding support to the Greens in urban centers and also loosing support to Liberals inside in greater Toronto they are holding their own in rural and small town Canada. To this end, rather than minimizing Conservative scandal or using it as a means of broaching other subjects (e.g., NAFTA in case of the Obama leak), they have started to play them up. They have also not followed the Liberals in backing carbon tax that is bound to be unpopular with rural and small town voters.
So long as NDP continue on this track, there is reason to believe to uneasy truce between the Liberals and NDP could develop that could prepare the groundwork for a Liberal NDP minority government by doing two things. The first is by forging ties between the two parties and the second by developing a strategy to pull the Conservatives into different directions.
The key is get NDP supporters at this junction in time to recognize that there are other measures of success other than just the number of seats one wins and to realize that even though the NDP won 29 seats in the 2006, the 39th parliament has not been a successful one for the party. This involves looking back and realizing that at its best, the NDP has provided an invaluable service to all Canadians; it widened the Canadian political debate and did so by historically being the most ideological of the major political parities. Parties concerned with the “art of the possible” are not infusing the political debate with new ideas with little chance of furthering their party at the polls. They are reactive. However, the catch 22 of such pragmatism is that such parties concede some of the field to those who are not so cautious. To use an evolutionary metaphor, the politically brave and ideologically pure help determine the policy areas to be discussed; the powerful and pragmatic determine what policies get accepted. Historically, the NDP were able to get “results” for Canadians in two ways. One, they played king maker in several Liberal minority governments. Two, they were able to achieve successes at a distance by continually infusing the political arena with new policy ideas. Either way the Liberal party benefited. By infusing the political arena with ideas from a leftist perspective, the NDP shifted the political debate in Canada leftward, leaving Liberals and not the Progressive Conservatives as the “natural governing party of Canada”.
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3 comments:
Your post is more of the same hoary old strategic voting arguments that people are finally seeing through. God knows that many of the folks from ethno-cultural communities concerned with the Cons immigration 'reforms' are seeing just how quickly they get thrown under the LPC campaign bus as it quickly backs away from forcing an election.
Canadians are tired of parties that set aside their (supposed) principles for political expediency. I am sure that the NDP caucus is looking forward to presenting their ideas to the Canadian public. NDP policies that will help green our economy and finally address the 25 year ongoing income gap (unlike the LPC). NDP policies that will actually bring about national child care not just perennial promises of the same (which the LPC did). The NDP will return our country to its proud tradition of peacekeeping instead of keeping us at war with a vote to send our soldiers to Afghanistan and two votes to extend their mission (like the LPC did).
Over the course of my adult life I have watched the Liberal Party repeatedly try and use fear and pandering in equal measure to win over progressive voters. What the NDP has proven over this session of parliament is that they are the party that truly stands up to Harper and his crew and that they are the party that will truly make progressive change. I encourage those reading this blog to find out the facts about what the NDP are doing and what they are saying by visiting www.ndp.ca
Do you find that party clap trap usually works with most bloggers? I don’t.
>>>> God knows that many of the folks from ethno-cultural communities concerned with the Cons immigration 'reforms' are seeing just how quickly they get thrown under the LPC campaign bus as it quickly backs away from forcing an election.
As Guidy Mamann of the immigration law firm Mamann & Associates notes, the Conservative immigration “reforms” are redundant.
“Our current legislation states that the federal cabinet ‘may make any regulation ... relating to classes of permanent residents or foreign nationals’ including ‘selection criteria, the weight, if any to be given to all or some of those criteria, the procedures to be followed in evaluating all or some of those criteria… the number of applications to be processed or approved in a year’ etc. In fact, in the case of Vaziri v. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Federal Court held in September 2006 that our current legislation ‘authorize[s] the Minister to set target levels and to prioritize certain classes of PR applicants’ without even a regulation being passed. Accordingly, Finley has more than enough power under our current legislation to make virtually any changes that she wants subject to
the Charter.”
Which begs the question why all the hoopla? One theory is that the Conservatives deliberately tired to force the Liberals into an election by stirring up various immigrant groups. The theory I favor though is that the Conservatives tired to look like they were solving a problem that they made worse by initially cutting staff at embassies and consulates. Of course the two theories are not mutually exclusive.
>>>> NDP policies that will actually bring about national child care not just perennial promises of the same (which the LPC did).
However much I disliked the Liberals tepid approach to childcare, to suggest that the Liberals had not gone beyond “perennial promises” is patently untrue.
>>>>> The NDP will return our country to its proud tradition of peacekeeping instead of keeping us at war with a vote to send our soldiers to Afghanistan and two votes to extend their mission (like the LPC did).
Peacekeeping is relic of the past and pains me to see that that the Liberals are not the only party to wax nostalgic about it. It is really too bad for the NDP that their party’s base did not allow the party to develop a full fledged realist critique of the Afghan mission. There is a very good reason why Conservatives should not have extended the mission and the Liberals should not have punted it away. The mission is doomed to failure. It is a huge waste of money and resources and it does nothing but make a terrorist attack more likely.
>>>> What the NDP has proven over this session of parliament is that they are the party that truly stands up to Harper and his crew and that they are the party that will truly make progressive change.
What utter horse punky. Besides insulating the Conservatives from scandal, the NDP have spent more time bad mouthing the Liberals and trumpeting the fact that they voted against this or that motion, even though their vote means nothing so long as the Liberals are not going to vote down the government, than they have actually trying to sell the country on national minimum wage and their pharmacare plan. Instead of going to the NDP’s website the readers of this blog should research just how far behind the NDP are from the social democratic parties in Europe. Where are the calls for public dental care and more vacation time?
>>>>Your post is more of the same hoary old strategic voting arguments that people are finally seeing through.
Yeah thats it.
"the political spectrum has never been a particularly fool proof way of understanding politics in Canada and this is especially so with regard to the western provinces. The NDP and Liberals are not fighting for the same voters there; THE NDP AND CONSERVATIVES ARE.
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