Did Layton Shift NDP To The Right?

I have a lot of time for Thomas Walkom - ever since way back in the 90s, when the Days of Action movement was heading into full swing and Walkom took to quoting the German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Most of the time and on most issues I find that he has a sharp and discerning eye. But sometimes I think he loses the forest for the trees and today's column, suggesting that Layton and Rae are political twins, misses its mark.

The first thing to say is that while there are a few items in common some of these are held in much wider circles than the NDP. For instance both Rae and Layton were in favour of asymmetrical federalism to bring Quebec into confederation - but, then, so was Brian Mulroney. Or that both men eschewed ideology, defining their approach to politics in personal terms. Well, that pretty much defines every NDP leader since they stopped using the word socialism. I was, in fact, surprised by Stephen Lewis' eulogy that he described Layton's last letter to Canadians as a manifesto for social democracy. I don't think that I've ever heard a major NDP figure talk in such "ideological" terms before - and do is so effectively, I might add.

But this quote by Walkom is what really struck me.

Both men worked to shift the NDP to the right, toward what they saw as a more pragmatic path.
Rae ran into resistance, particularly when he took on Ontario’s public sector unions. His failures there played into his eventual decision to abandon the NDP.
Layton was more successful. Perhaps the party’s traditional left was too tired and dispirited to fight him. Perhaps his deliberate, albeit jovial, vagueness won over the critics. Perhaps the times were simply more propitious.

I can't help but feeling that this view of Layton's contribution to the NDP is a real mis-reading of how Jack got to be leader and its significance. I discussed a few days ago, in a postscript, how I think that Jack came to be leader of the NDP in the wake of the anti-globalization movement, which radicalized many in the NDP, and the NPI, which was the reflection of that movement inside the party.

That the party chose to go left to Jack and not to the centre with Blaikie was a sign of the power of the anti-globalization movement, the success of the NPI and the ability of Jack to personify the ideals of those movements. He wasn't a radical leftist but there can be no denying his role in pushing for the NDP to adopt a policy opposed to the war in Afghanistan and for working hard to demonstrate that the NDP was a viable option for the Quebecois - not least with the resolution to respect Quebec's right to decide its own fate. He also selected Libby Davies, a long time stalwart of the left in the NDP, as his Deputy Leader.

Bob Rae at Temagami

What's more, in the lead up to Layton's election as NDP Leader he went out of his way to promote the February 15 day of action against the war in Iraq - a series of demonstrations across the country that put the nail in the coffin of Canada's participation in that war. It is true that Rae did support some extra-parliamentary struggles - I recall him being arrested at Temagami for protesting clearcutting and the native land claims to the area. But, crucially, that was before the NDP government in Ontario and before the general political capitulation to neo-liberalism. The collapse of the NDP to the right during the Rae years in Ontario wasn't just a Bob Rae or Ontario phenomenon - it was an international phenomenon that led to Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in the USA, with his plan to "end welfare as we know it."

Following the Ontario debacle - that would lead to nearly a generation in the wilderness - the NDP was wracked by successive attempts to move it to the right towards the Third Way of Tony Blair. Alex McDonough planned a coast-to-coast tour at one point to promote the idea - iirc - before being slapped down and instead promoting the "Canadian Way" - a repackaging of the same type of ideas. In other words, the centre-moving elements within the NDP leadership were ascendant for a decade.

And while Walkom notes that neither Layton nor Rae were "wedded to traditional instruments of the left such as public ownership" he forgets that Rae was actually elected on a platform of nationalizing auto insurance. But this was the last hurrah of post-war reformist social democracy. There is literally not a social democratic party anywhere in the English-speaking world that advocates nationalizations or public ownership. Even on the left of the NDP there are only marginal voices that call for nationalizing anything. In this sense, Layton's leadership was a product of this moment in history as much as it was a product of Layton's own sensibilities. And what differentiated Layton from Rae was exactly that he stopped the rightward gallop of the NDP under McDonough et al. Of course, he was still a compromise - the NDP is a broad coalition, which means that elected leaders are pretty much guaranteed to be a compromise. But the compromise - the waffle, to steal a phrase - was to the left, rather than to the right or the centre.

Why is it important to make this point? Because otherwise we can't understand the reason why Jack's passing had such a profound impact on people. We end up with foolish bromides about how people longed for the "civility" he brought to politics. Jack was a break from the out and out opportunism of the McDonough/Rae years and his stand against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - which earned him sneers of "Taliban Jack" in Parliament - and his willingness to accept the right of Quebec to self-determination, his longstanding support for abortion rights, gay and lesbian rights, native rights and more meant that he was seen as a politician with a vision of a different world. That people identify with that explicitly progressive vision tells us that Canada is ripe for a progressive movement to return to the streets (you hear that, Mayor Ford?) It is not an accident that Stephen Lewis ended his eulogy with the quote from Arundhati Roy, written at the peak of the anti-globalization movement:"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

After Jack: Three Bad Ideas & One Good One For The NDP

The weeklong outpouring of mourning, love and solidarity after the passing of NDP Leader Jack Layton has now subsided. The sense of optimism that Jack insisted upon and the hunger for change that he not only represented but fanned to flame with the funeral that he planned for himself was an awesome thing to see. As Stephen Lewis spoke and argued forcefully for "a resolve to honour Jack by bringing the politics of respect for all, respect for the Earth, and respect for principle and generosity back to life." That could be a powerful call in the coming months as we face some important battles, not least here in Toronto where Mayor Ford is looking to slash the social fabric of our city and where a fight against him is brewing for the fall against.

That's why what happens now to the NDP matters. Jack was no radical but he was progressive, and principled and he supported movements outside of Parliament - whether it was the anti-war movement, struggles for LGBT rights, or providing Parliamentary opposition to the Tories' discriminatory back-to-work legislation against the Postal Workers. There is a danger that his legacy could be lost and now is the time to raise the call to not go backwards. To that end, I'd like to suggest that there are three immediately bad ideas and one good one for the future of the NDP and of the left in this country.

The first idea is the most terrible. To put it most starkly, it is to follow Bob Rae into the Liberals. In other words to merge the NDP and the Liberals into a "Liberal Democratic Party" as Denis Coderre has suggested. Just to make it clear, Bob Rae joined the Liberals explicitly because he had moved to the right since he took the Ontario NDP down the path of its greatest historic disaster by... moving it to the right. To join with the rump of the Liberals at the moment when the NDP has experience its greatest triumph is to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That's not to say that there aren't Liberal voters who the NDP should - and did - win over at election times. It's not to say that the NDP shouldn't try to win those unions that continue to support the Liberal Party into the real party of labour - instead of just being junior partners in a coalition with big business. But to join with the Liberals would mean that the NDP would no longer be the independent party of the labour movement. It would in reality be just another liberal party. Forget negotiations or musings about mergers and focus on building the strength of the NDP - merge with the Liberals by winning over their base.

Merger with the rump Liberals? Bad idea.

The second and third bad ideas are Thomas Mulcair and Brian Topp. There is much musing - and lots of ink in the Globe & Mail for Topp - that these guys will run for the NDP. Just to be clear, these guys are on the right of the party. Topp, a former senior advisor to Roy Romanow - former Saskatchewan Premier - is a Globe & Mail columnist and is an avid supporter of the massive program of austerity in Greece

And the root causes of all of this madness (debt) needs to be addressed in the style Prime Minister Papandreou is using to address the crisis here in Greece, against overwhelming odds – calmly, thoughtfully, and with determination.

I'm sure that the Greek working class and youth, who struck and marched in their hundreds of thousands have a different view of the devastation of their lives that Papandreou hath wrought. His two austerity packages have decimated the economy, driving it into recession and doubling unemployment. If that is social democracy, who needs a Tory party?

As for Thomas Mulcair, he is a former Liberal cabinet minister in the Quebec government of Jean Charest and was a Liberal MNA for thirteen years up till 2007. Afterwards, he flirted briefly with joining the Tories before deciding on the NDP. Good for him that he joined the NDP and helped it win the major breakthrough that it did this year but he has no particular ties to the left and has not indicated a major political break from his past as a Liberal. Certainly his views on Palestinian rights put him to the right of the NDP and when Libby Davies came out in support of a policy of boycott, divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel, Mulcair had a bird.

"We take decisions together, parties formulate policies together, and to say that you're personally in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions for the only democracy in the Middle East is, as far as I'm concerned, grossly unacceptable.''
Members replied that what is actually unacceptable was for an NDP party leader to form a coalition with Bob Rae and Stephen Harper against own senior party members such as Libby Davies. They added that an Apartheid State can never be a democracy.
Mulcair responded by telling the members and constituents of his riding who were raising these concerns to "shut up".

Thomas Mulcair or Brian Topp as NDP Leader? Bad idea.

The one good idea is for the possibility of Libby Davies as Leader of the NDP. She has been on the left and supported progressive struggles for decades. She is a profoundly principled woman, widely popular and deeply committed. She is in favour of drug decriminalization and for a national plan to combat homelessness. Her political roots lie in anti-poverty organizing with the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association in Vancouver. And she's a strong supporter of LGBT rights. She represents the progressive vision of a different, better society that formed the core of Stephen Lewis' eulogy. There is no one else on the left of the party, as far as I can tell, with the profile, popularity and experience to be a serious contender for the leadership. My personal feeling is that you should drop her a line at libby.davies@parl.gc.ca and let her know that you want her to run for NDP leader.


PS - I'm not a member of the NDP but they are the only party that I've ever voted for. Sober - the only party I've ever voted for sober.

Talk of NDP-Liberal merger grows after Layton funeral - The Globe and Mail

Ezra Levant Is The Right's Gift To The Left

Thanks, Ezra, for making right wing politics
even more unappealing!

Saw some coverage from the blogs Buckdog and Let Freedom Rain of the vile spectacle of a certain Ezra Levant on a Fox North show with Michael Coren. As you can see from the screen capture that I took from Buckdog, Levant was mocking people mourning the death of Jack Layton by wearing an orange wig and drinking a can of Orange Crush.

Levant probably believes that he's destroying the morale of the left by mocking a dead man who is held in high esteem but the reality is that, outside of far-right, deeply damaged people like Levant himself, most people across the political spectrum will just find him nauseating. In fact, guys like Levant - and Rob Ford - are actually a gift to the Left for the simple reason that they offend people who are in the middle of the road and make them more sympathetic to the Left.

I'm sure that Levant likes to think of himself as some sort of attack dog for the right. But the truth is, his incompetency and string of failed escapades reveals him for what he actually is, a fairly pathetic, unlikeable clown. When he isn't setting up magazines, like the Western Standard, that go bankrupt because nobody wants to read their tinfoil hat analysis, he's defending himself from multiple lawsuits. Levant can't open his mouth - or put pen to paper - without committing libel or defaming people - even other conservatives. This is the guy who got himself shit-canned from his position as Stockwell Day's communications director for releasing to the media a threatening letter he wrote to Conservative MP Chuck Strahl. You gotta be pretty fucking useless to get yourself fired by Day - after all, this is the guy who thought driving up to a press conference on a jet ski would make great optics.

So, keep on trucking Ezra! You're a great target and with any luck the Conservatives will be stupid enough to hire you again (unlikely). That alone would cause their national support to drop by a few percentage points. And if you ever get into some sort of position of responsibility - unlikely given your lack of business acumen (funny for a right winger) - you'll make it easy to mobilize people in opposition to you. Meantime, feel free to keep right on following the equally odious Glenn Beck - who compared the murdered teenagers in Norway to Hitler Youth and was turfed from Fox after his ratings tanked. 

A Sea Of Orange Hope

It's not fashionable to be earnest these days when irony and cynicism are the king and queen. But they've been deposed today at Roy Thompson Hall where there is a sea of people - many on orange shirts and hats, the colour of the NDP. My guess is that there are 10,000 or so here for Jack's funeral.

As I'm listening and watching, along with my partner Kathryn and daughter Beatrice, Stephen Lewis is speaking the eulogy. He has just received a sustained, speech stopping applause with whoops and whistles for describing jack's final letter as an ode to the hope promised by social democracy. The applause returns when talks about the issues of importance to Jack - equality, justice, gay and lesbian rights, climate change, gender equality and the fight against sexist violence. The list goes on and so does the applause.

Whatever is going on here it is not just sadness. There's a lot of inspiration that is charging people up to change the world. That, after all is what Jack would have wanted.

Jack Layton & Steve Jobs

I'm a tech nerd and a Mac Head, for sure. I have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone and we have an Apple TV. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I'm a little bit excited to see the new iPhone 5/4S and only pushing the limits of my common sense has prevented me from getting an iPad (for my daughter, of course). But I'm also a socialist. As a result I've been reading the coverage of both the passing of NDP Leader Jack Layton and the resignation of Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs. And I've been thinking a lot about what both of these men mean to me.

The tone and focus of the coverage of the two men has a lot on common, in some ways - with lots of discussion of their leadership abilities, their ability to inspire, their ability to have their finger on the pulse of ordinary people, their ability to save a moribund brand from disappearing, etc. The lost of both men has, in different ways led to much hand-wringing about the succession and the hole they leave in their respective organizations. But it's the ways that they are different which is more interesting.

When Jobs left Apple, Tim Cook stepped into the breach immediately. Within 24-hours he had sent out a letter Apple employees to indicate that he was in charge and that everything was great, even though they were sad to have lost Jobs at the helm. The NDP will now go through a lengthy leadership process that will likely last until January, with Nycole Turmel as an interim leader - basically powerless to drive things forward. A neo-liberal would suggest that this shows how efficient is the corporate world. I guess in a certain sense that is true. And Cook has justly earned reputation as a Chief Operation Officer for establishing an enviable supply chain that has assisted making Apple the world's largest tech company. But it is a dictatorship - one that we all accept with few second thoughts - where the thousands of Apple employees have no say, the consumers who buy the products have no say, and the people who work for the companies, like Foxconn, who depend on Apple ordering the components they produce, have no say. If we drill down a little deeper we see in the paeans to Jobs the reminder that he was once ousted from his top job at Apple, only to be asked back in 1995 to save the company - which he is credited with doing. Now, spread this model across the economy as a whole - decisions made in thousands of boardrooms, sometimes by less than half a dozen men, affecting the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions. Part of what we're celebrating when we celebrate Steve Jobs is that process - in his case it "worked out" - we got some great gadgets, he helped to drive forward tech innovation, etc - but as we see with the present disastrous state of the global economy, that method doesn't always work out so well. The tops at the investment banks made decisions to slice up, package and sell bad debt as good investments. A few other guys at the rating agencies were paid by the guys at the banks to say that the bad debt was a good investment.

When we celebrate Jack Layton, we're celebrating a man who was chosen democratically as the leader of a party. That choice receives further affirmation - or doesn't - from the electorate. So, what Jack represents is the messiness of political democracy. But there's more to it than that. Jack's success - his democratic success - was in selling a vision and in building a machine to promote that vision across the country. What Jobs did at Apple was no doubt impressive but, when it comes down to it, what he did was sell us gadgets. I love my gadgets. Lots of people love their gadgets. But those gadgets don't set us free. They don't make it easier for the single-mother to find childcare or the pensioner to cover their bills. Steve Jobs had a strong understanding of what consumers want and of how to make marketing work. You look at the brand that Apple has created - hip, progressive, creative, iconoclastic even. These values or attributes are only mobilized to sell you the gadgets. They are abstractions and empty. Owning an iPad or an iPhone has nothing to do with being progressive or creative. You will challenge no moribund social values and institutions by working on a Macbook Pro.

Iconoclastic - literally smashing icons - is resisting the drive to war in Iraq when the media and most politicians are telling us that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction (a lie), that he is an imminent threat (a lie) and to not support invading Iraq is to support tyranny and dictatorship (also a lie). Layton very publicly did this. And he did it on the even more difficult question of Afghanistan, earning him the monicker "Taliban Jack" from the ever odious Tories. Being "hip" and "progressive" was to support full equality for gays and lesbians when even the NDP couldn't bring themselves to do it, as Layton did. Being creative was to take the NDP brand, project it into the province of Quebec - where the NDP has barely ever had a toehold - and less than a decade later lead a near sweep of the province's ridings.

And, ultimately, what is at stake for the NDP and Apple in losing their leader? For Apple it is clear: profit-making gadgets. As the Globe & Mail asks:

But can the company continue to churn out ground-breaking products without the rigorous, emotional demands of Mr. Jobs?

Losing Layton as leader of the NDP leaves the party with a big hole in its ability to sell it's product: hope. Jack, as he repeated in his farewell letter, thought that the party needed to give people that hope - hope that they could have a better life; hope that they could have a government that responded to the needs of ordinary, working class people and not just to corporations that were only interested in, well, profit-making gadgets. And, in the end, which is more important to your quality of life: your iPod or affordable daycare and a decent public healthcare system? The answer, I think, is apparent in the fact that while Jobs has gotten hundreds of articles, the memorials to Layton have extended beyond the media to thousands showing up to bid him farewell or write on a memorial outside of Toronto City Hall or attend the service on Saturday.

Luckily, unlike with Apple or any corporation, Layton led by inspiring others to use their own creativity  and energy to help make change. Under a dictatorship, the only real active, creative element are the people at the top who have the final say. In a movement, the ultimate say is with the people who put their efforts and hearts into the hard work of promoting an ideal or organizing a campaign or leading a strike.

I should say that I'm not a member of the NDP and have no intention of joining but I'm a socialist, like many in the NDP. I have hope that the mutual inspiration that Layton generated and received from the movement that he led - which extended beyond the boundaries of the party - will carry that movement in good stead. The dignified and courageous way that Jack left us - the letter, the funeral that he organized to inspire us to continue the hopeful struggle for a better world that inspired him - makes me confident that, if anything, his passing will serve as a reminder of what our tasks are. That reminder could well raise our movement to a new level.

Oh, and I'm sure that the iPhone 5 will be awesome even without Steve.

With Jobs out, Apple faces pressure to echo his triumphs - The Globe and Mail

I Owe Jack Layton $20,000

I've been a bit swamped with work in recent days and in my own world, so I was shocked to hear about the passing of Jack Layton. I must admit that it made me misty eyed. I won't pretend that I agreed with everything Jack stood for but he was a principled guy and played an important role on the left over many, many years. Something that most of us can only ever aspire to.

When someone passes the response of people who knew them is generally to reminisce about them and what they meant to their own lives. I didn't know Jack well and he probably wouldn't have been able to remember my name, to be honest. But I have a few strong memories of him.

The first time I had heard much about Layton was shortly after I'd gotten into politics, after his run at the mayoralty. I remember that the Toronto Star came close to endorsing him but balked at the last minute - he was a socialist after all. There was a rally at Nathan Phillips - I don't even know what it was for now - but a friend of mine was doing his socialist duty, selling the Socialist Worker newspaper, which happened to have a headline about police racism. The cops on duty, not surprisingly, weren't very happy with the headline and were giving him a hard time. Jack, a high profile councillor, went out of his way to put himself between my friend and the cops and get them to back off.

I later saw him at a post-election public meeting following the decimation of the NDP in Ontario and the election of the Mike Harris Tories with their ultra-right "Common Sense Revolution". Most people on the left were feeling pretty defeated and disoriented by the betrayals of the NDP government, which couldn't even rouse itself to pass same sex spousal legislation. I don't remember much of what Jack said but a few things struck me - his willingness to say that he didn't have the answer but that he thought the extra-parliamentary movements - social movements, trade unions - held part of the answer. The second thing was his assertion that he would never run for the NDP again. When he became leader of the NDP I wondered what changed his mind and always wanted to ask him. I regret that I'll never be able to.

Finally, and the reason for the blog post title, there was Jack's involvement in the ant-war movement. The movement was really building as Jack was campaigning for the leadership - winning in January, 2003. I remember at the time that there was some frustration that he wasn't using his own campaign enough to build the anti-war movement. I can't say now whether that was a fair assessment or just an exaggeration borne of the intensity of those days. What is certain is that he did ultimately step up to bat - using his election and newfound high profile as leader of a national political party to widely promote the February 15 protest against the looming war in Iraq. That protest ended up being massive - 80,000 in Toronto, 250,000 in Montreal. It was the defining moment that made the Liberals blink and call off their official participation.

In April of 2003 the group that I was centrally involved with, Artists Against War, organized an anti-war festival in Nathan Phillips Square called the One Big No anti-war arts festival. It was a big venture, including a professional stage for an evening concert. Being without funding, the cost of everything went on...my credit card. I believe that it was about $22,000. I was working as a waiter at the time and definitely didn't have the disposable income to cover that cost. Because it was at City Hall, we couldn't charge admission - which wasn't the point anyway.

As the evening arrived and crowds began to arrive in large numbers for the headline concert, we were getting a bit nervous about how much money we were collecting. In fact, we were approached by City Hall security and told that we weren't allowed to pass buckets for donations. As luck would have it, Olivia and Jack showed up at that very moment. While Olivia ran block with security, Jack got up on stage, pulled out a twenty dollar bill and encouraged everyone in the audience to do the same. Hands went up with bills in them - there were several thousand people there - and the buckets went around. Later, when Kristy, our indefatigable event manager, painstakingly rolled all the coins we had almost $20,000. If it weren't for Jack, the One Big No probably would have turned into One Big Owe for me. I have to say I wasn't only impressed with Jack's ability to rouse the crowd but also with how much of a team he and Olivia were.

Postscript:
As a secondary note, I was thinking recently about Jack's election as party leader and its significance - not just in the recent election but in terms of the political trajectory of the NDP. Prior to Jack, the party had languished under a series of "realists" who often flirted with the right wing "Third Way" of Tony Blair in the UK. Then came the anti-globalization movement  at the end of the 90s. This electrified a new generation of activists, particularly youth, who mobilized in their tens of thousands to put the brakes on global capitalism's destructive dynamic. That movement also fired up people in the NDP, many of whom were actively involved in organizing anti-globalization events and campaigns. The coming together of the movement outside of the NDP and within it found expression in the New Politics Initiative. I'll leave aside a discussion of the history of the NPI but it was avowedly anti-capitalist in its founding document. And it had wide support in the NDP, including for its proposal to dissolve the NDP in order to found a new party that united the struggle at the ballot box and the struggle in the streets (the very idea that motivates Quebec Solidaire). The motion for dissolution won 40% at the NDPs 2001 convention. The NPI sort of drifted after that, finally dissolving in 2004.

Sometime around 2004 I was at a meeting of leftists and people were bemoaning the fact that the NPI opportunity was lost. I said at the time that I thought part of the problem of the left was that we were sore winners. Even when we won partial victories - and let's be honest, all victories are partial and qualified - we couldn't admit it and were morose about the failure rather than optimistic based upon the success part. Layton's victory, I believed, was a vindication of the NPI and of the left. He wasn't a signatory but he was a supporter of the NPI and he was identified with the left. Layton's only real opponent was Bill Blaikie. Blaikie was a critic of globalization but he wasn't identified with the left wing of the party - more with the middle. Generally, it has been the squishy middle candidate that wins - Alex McDonough had won largely based upon an "anyone but Svend Robinson" sentiment in 1995. To the right of Blaikie was  Lorne Nystrom (who also ran in 1995). That the party chose to go left to Jack and not to the centre with Blaikie was a sign of the power of the anti-globalization movement, the success of the NPI and the ability of Jack to personify the ideals of those movements. He wasn't a radical leftist but there can be no denying his role in pushing for the NDP to adopt a policy opposed to the war in Afghanistan and for working hard to demonstrate that the NDP was a viable option for the Quebecois - not least with the resolution to respect Quebec's right to decide its own fate. He also selected Libby Davies, a long time stalwart of the left in the NDP, as his Deputy Leader. These were significant shifts after the McDonough years and to have massively increased the NDP's share of the popular vote has shown that the NDP does best when it hews to the left. To have transformed the party in that way and led the historic breakthrough into Quebec is a powerful legacy. Jack will be missed. And I wish I'd gotten to thank him for the $20K.

Nycole Turmel & The Media’s B.S. Loyalty Test

This is a story that isn’t a story.

NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel has a long history as a union activist and progressive. She was president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada for a number of years and can point to a significant victory for her members when PSAC won a $3 billion pay equity settlement against the federal government. That is why she has the right to run for and lead the NDP.

She also happens to be from Quebec and was, for five years, a “card-carrying member” of the Bloc Quebecois, before joining and running as a candidate for the NDP. She also donated a grand total of $235 to the sovereignist party over a period of five years. That works out to a grand total of... $47 per year. I pay almost twice that a month for a membership to a yoga gym. The fact that the Globe & Mail uses that old McCarthyist phrase “card-carrying” to describe someone who was the member of a legal electoral party, with members of Parliament and which was, until this year, the largest federal party in Quebec and was once the Official Opposition, speaks volumes.

The English Canadian media – and politicians – need to wake up to the fact that there is a sovereignist movement in Quebec that has mass – near majority - support. Amongst the left in Quebec, a sizable constituency, that support is even larger. That support deserves to be understood with thoughtful analysis and an examination of Canadian history - not the kind of demonization typical of Anglo commentary. The popularity of demands for Quebec sovereignty has nothing to do with “betrayal” of the mythical warm and fuzzy Canadian state. It has everything to do with the historic experience of national oppression by the Quebecois(es). Quebec was incorporated into Canada by force of arms; it has never been treated as the nation it was prior to conquest and which the majority francophone population still considers it. The linguistic rights of the francophone majority were also suppressed for generations, with all business, legal and governmental matters being conducted in English – a language that the majority of the population didn’t speak.

To raise any of this lived history and its continuing repercussions ought to be banal . In Quebec it is. But in English Canada it’s like taking the Lord’s name in vain in a Catholic Church. The Anglo elite simply cannot face reality for fear of losing their privileges – and not only to Quebec but also to the aboriginal populations in Canada.

Of course, the denial of reality, the presumption of the right to hold asymmetrical privileges, and the general bigotry towards the aspirations of the oppressed - particularly when those aspirations find a political expression in the form of a movement or a party - none of this is new. Our politicians and media plead fealty to the principles of equality but when the women's movement demands pay equity they are being unreasonable or man-haters. When aboriginal people's demand reparations, or treatment as a nation with the right to self-determination, or even access to the wealth generated by natural resources on land that was formerly (or even presently) theirs, they are labeled as militants and radicals (as thought that's a bad thing). Such lies and obfuscations are just part of the day to day operations of capitalism and of the Canadian state. They keep things running smoothly.

But you would hope that the media would have an ability to at least rise above the most obvious and pathetic hypocrisies of recent history. Apparently, as the Murdoch scandal demonstrates, you can't set the bar low enough for the sycophants, laggards and charlatans of sober thought to lift their foot over it.

Let me issue a small reminder, one that would keep the Tories - if not the media - quiet if they had any honour. Before there was the Bloc there was the Tory party of Brian Mulroney. Understanding that without a victory in Quebec the Tories could never win a majority government nationally. And understanding that the only way to seriously cut into the Liberal's mafia-like base in Quebec was to substantively deal with the fact that Quebec was excluded from the repatriated constitution by virtue of a Liberal (and NDP via Roy Romanow) betrayal. Brian Mulroney promised a "new deal" for Quebec and recruited a number of 'soft-sovereignists" into the party, granting some of them cabinet level positions, most prominently Lucien Bouchard.

The fruit of that "new deal" were the Meech Lake Accord in 1987 and then the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. Both of these were defeated, largely by a wave of anti-Quebec bigotry. The result was that the Tory party was badly split. In the west, Preston Manning - heir to the Social Credit/Tory dynasty in that province - launched the fake populist Reform Party out of the bigotry. In Quebec Lucien Bouchard led a number of Quebec Tories along with two Liberal MPs out of their caucuses after the failure of Meech Lake - and the move to water down its provisions in the lead-up to Charlottetown. So, the Bloc must first and foremost be seen for what it is: a creation of the Tory party; a result of Mulroney's failure to hold onto the soft-sovereignists whom he courted. The recruitment of Nycole Turmel - and other sovereignists - is really only the NDP following in the wake of a past Tory strategy but doing so on a left wing basis, founded upon the social democratic values of the NDP, rather than on the pro-business, right wing policies of Mulroney's Tories. Attempts to portray the recruitment of sovereignists to a federalist party as beyond the pale and unprecedented are utterly false and hypocritical.

It is however a bit disturbing that the NDP doesn't raises these points and that it shies away from speaking the truth - presumably in the interest of not alienating English Canadian voters. Turmel rather than using the opportunity to speak the truth about the experiences of Quebec, its history, etc. instead tries to downplay five years of party membership. This is bad enough but makes her look ridiculous when her letter of resignation and her financial donations were published.

“Enclosed is my Bloc Québécois membership card, which I wish to cancel. I wish to state that my request has nothing to do with the party’s policies, I am doing this for personal reasons,” Ms. Turmel wrote.
She then wished “good luck” to Ms. Lavallée, who went on to be defeated by an NDP candidate in the May 2 general election.

This kind of dishonesty will blow up in the NDPs face. Not only will it damage their support in Quebec, where support for sovereignty is not considered a mark of weakness or betrayal. In the rest of Canada working people will smell that she is spinning a lie. Of course, it's possible that coming out and openly stating the reasons for the wide support for sovereignty in Quebec might damage the NDPs popularity in the short term, it will strengthen it in the long term. We've already seen that telling the truth isn't necessarily damaging: after some hesitation, NDP Leader Jack Layton came out in support of the NDPs official position on a sovereignty referendum - that they would support a simple majority. The NDP has not collapsed in the polls and it has held firm in Quebec. There's a lesson here. It's only by being honest and principled that the NDP will be able to build a sustainable presence in Parliament in the wake of its incredible breakthrough this spring.

Are There Pics Of Bin Laden? Who Cares

I'm more and more of the mind that the primary job of the news media is to find stupid, insignificant shit and make it into a big deal. Because it's totally irrelevant and worthy of being ignored, it puts them in good stead to be the first to "break" an important story. They can thus market themselves as "cutting edge" or some other bullshit as a way to sell advertising space and subscriptions.

Take this story in all the major Canadian dailies that NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair mused that, since Obama hasn't produced any photos of bin Laden's body, they probably don't exist. Now, tell me, in the scheme of conspiracy theories - that 9/11 was an inside job, that the US military has UFOs at area 51, that Obama wasn't born in the US and is a secret African socialist Islamic agent bent on destroying the Christian and free enterprise character of the United States of America - does this rate even a mention? Seriously, this is the kind of thing you say when you're out with your buddies having a beer or sitting with your family at a holiday dinner:

Uncle Barry: "If he had the photos, they'd be all over CNN. Come on, they blasted pics of Saddam Hussein's bullet-ridden bodies all over the place."

Aunt Sue: "He doesn't want to get people even more riled up by suggesting disrespect for the dead. You don't want to give terrorists another excuse to blow things up."

Uncle Barry: "Hmmm. Maybe. Pass the gravy?"

And that would be the end of that.

The real issue, I'm convinced is the deeper point that he makes: did the US break international law by going into a private home in a non-belligerent country with the intention to shoot-to-kill bin Laden regardless of whether he was armed or not. Did they kill an unarmed man? Frankly, the NDP's official response that "we are happy the U.S. tracked down Osama bin Laden” is worse than pathetic. How about - hey, the USA and its allies, including Stephen Warpig Harper have used bin Laden for the last ten years as an excuse to justify killing hundreds of thousands of people in several countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Chinese border. How about, Harper - and before him the Liberals - have used the war on terror to justify taking away our civil rights and spending tens of billions of dollars on a war in Afghanistan that has done nothing but kill innocents and prop up warlords and heroin kingpin and now they're about to spend tens of billions of dollars on stupid, over-priced fighter jets. After all that blood and treasure wasted to stop the evil Osama bin Laden why isn't it unreasonable to ask when the wars and defense spending justified by the hunt against bin Laden and the - mostly disrupted and demoralized - al Qaeda will be ended. Why isn't it reasonable to expect the country supposedly fighting to defend international law and respect for human rights, the USA, actually follow international law and not abrogate the most basic law that permits one the right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial? Or is that right only reserved for westerners who agree with the likes of Bush, Obama and Harper? It is deeply disappointing that the NDP lacks the spine to take on something so basic, obvious and cost-free - Canadians are morons, we can figure out hypocrisy and double-standards.

Conspiracy theory: NDP deputy leader Mulcair doubts U.S. has bin Laden photos - thestar.com

The Real Victory Is The NDP's

I know lots of people are depressed this morning thinking about four years of majority rule under the heel of the Nasty Party. It's true that they are a ghoulish and evil lot and they will try to shaft workers, the poor, women, Quebecoises, Aboriginal peoples, the disabled, peace-lovers, the environment and all things good and right in the world that I may have missed. They are, in short, scum.
Just so that you know where I stand.
But while the wingnuts who make up the Tory base may be gloating a bit this morning, my guess is that Harper - a sharper sort of scumbag - is rather more circumspect. Sure, he got his majority but only by poaching a section of right wing Liberals who were peeing their pants at the thought of an NDP federal government and only by promising them stable, moderate rule. Now, of course, Harper is an inveterate liar and charlatan and not prone to keeping his word or respecting democracy or its institutions. But he also doesn't want the Tories to be the next Liberal wipe-out in waiting. If he pushes too hard he has to know that he may win some short term gains but the result will be that the already fragile Liberal Party will complete its collapse as the remaining bulk of its members head to the NDP and a smaller number head to the Tories. If he unites the left under the umbrella of the NDP he will have polarized the country, shifted close to a majority of the electorate to the left and made it much less likely that the Tories will be able to ever win a majority again. All it would take is a breakthrough in the Prairies to put the nail in the coffin of future Tory majorities. So, he will have to govern carefully - I don't expect to see any great lurch to the right in the coming months, just more of his attempt to slowly transform Canada into a right wing dystopia of Seuss-like proportions.
Now, a lot depends on the ability of the NDP to really capitalize on their massive electoral breakthrough. And, in an ironic way, a Harper majority will potentially make that easier and allow the NDP time to consolidate its gains in Quebec, build a party machine to deepen its Quebec roots and pave the way for further gains. If that building process is accompanied by strong opposition in parliament and - even more importantly in my mind - with campaigning on the ground to involve the hundreds of thousands of people who have turned to the NDP, it could really transform Canadian politics. I'd be interested to know, for instance, what sort of relationship exists between the activists and leadership of Quebec Solidaire and the federal NDP. QS is a left-sovereigntist party in Quebec with one seat in Quebec's National Assembly and a presence to some degree across the province, plus several years' experience in holding together riding associations, etc. They are certainly to the left of the NDP and have an official position of being a party of both the ballot box and of the streets. One hopes that sensibility is widely held in the Quebec wing of the NDP because if two-thirds of the NDP caucus seek to build the party through a strategy of mobilizing and that infects the party in English Canada, things could get very exciting. In fact, in the short term my guess is that the NDP is about to become the country's fastest growing political party and it will be infused with idealistic youth and formerly cynical trade unionists. If the flux and the growth combine in the right recipe - something nobody can know at this point but about which we ought to be optimistic - we could be looking at a mass, renewed left wing movement and party.
There are dangers, of course - the union leadership are slow-moving, conservative bureaucrats with little interest in mass mobilizing or anything that disturbs "business as usual." The NDP leadership - many of them union bureaucrats themselves - is likewise conservative in this sense. Layton is a wildcard. He's no radical but he supports extra-parliamentary movements - he has spoken at innumerable anti-war events and Olivia Chow has gone the distance with the War Resisters Support Campaign both inside and outside of parliament. He might encourage this process, which would help it immensely, or he might try to follow a more Harper-esque model of containing the party's rookies by tightly controlling the flow of information and the model of party building. Hopefully the political situation in Quebec is dynamic and massive enough that it will push things forward regardless of what the party leadership thinks.
Harper will have nowhere near that dynamism from his victory and he no longer has the cover of a minority government to blame for his failings. The continuing experience of austerity and recession for the majority of Canadians will undermine Harper's credibility. Having a big, left wing alternative will facilitate that decline. That's why I'm not depressed.

Canada Just Took A Big Step Left

The real news tonight is not that the Tories won a majority. They HAD a majority previously, it was just that some of their members were in another faction known as the Liberal Party, which voted with the Tories on 9 out of 10 confidence votes. For some time there has been no real Official Opposition in Parliament, not on substantive issues anyway. Ignatieff's politics are fundamentally no different to Harper's, except that Ignatieff lacks both a populist and a killer instinct to be successful as a politician.
No, the real news is that the left wing of Liberal support - and of Bloc support in Quebec - jumped ship, tired of the rightward drift of the Natural Governing Party and went over to the NDP. Some of the Liberal vote went to the Tories, too, of course. Scared out of their minds that the NDP might actually end up leading a coalition government, the right wing Liberal voters out there rushed headlong into the cold embrace of Stephen Harper. They haven't gone far really, but they have gone home. However, that only meant a less than 3% increase in the vote for the Tories - assuming they finish at the 40% number where they are now. The NDP's popular vote more than doubled. All those people - millions of them - have no moved left and that is a much bigger challenge to Harper than any pseudo minority where the Tories face the Liberals.
The other big news, of course, is the absolute domination of Quebec by the colour orange. This is a massively significant event of historic proportions and will mean big changes to the character of the NDP. Over half of the NDPs caucus will now come from Quebec, many, if not most of those new MPs will be (at least) soft sovereigntists. The NDP will either learn to deal with the national question or it will be a short-lived love affair. I'm hoping that they learn to deal with the national question and so transform the left and the trade union movement in Canada in the process, bringing the vitality and militancy of the Quebec union and social movements to English Canada, as well its traditions. For too long the pan-Canadian working class and left has had little or no dialogue - this is the biggest opportunity for English-French working class solidarity in generations, perhaps in the history of Canada.
Whenever Parliament is called back we will see a House in which on one side will be the uptight, small-minded bigots and carpet-baggers who make up the Tory government. Across from them will be an uprising of unruly youth, Quebecois, women, minorities and workers. If Layton welcomes that uprising with open arms and allows it to breathe, permits it to infuse the party down to its very roots, the Tories are going to be in a for a much rougher majority than the past five years of minority government.

How Do You Get To Be A Radio DJ?

We rented a car this weekend to go to a family event outside the city. This morning I was returning the car and got to experience a "morning show" on The Edge with Dean Blondel and some other dude. It occurred to me, as they were making fun of Jack Layton and the massage parlour thing that they were fucking assholes. In less than two minutes they made fun of Asian accents, dehumanized women, and were just, in general, the kind of pricks you would never have as friends. And I wondered to myself if it was a job requirement to be a radio disc jockey that you be a right-wing, woman-hating jerk and if it was a course that was taught in the Ryerson Radio and Television program: "Dickwad 101", "Advanced Techniques: Insulting the Intelligence of Your Listeners", "The Historic Development of Being Stupid & Offensive Simultaneously".

Layton For PM. Then Keep His Feet To The Fire.

Shoot me. I wrote a brilliant piece of prose and f***ing Blogger had an error and deleted the whole damn thing.

Here's the short hand:
Layton could win - some polls put the NDP within three percentage points: YAY!
Remember Bob Rae (without fondness). The failure of the 1990-95 NDP government in Ontario was not just cause Rae is a skunk - it was their capitulation under pressure from the media, the corporate sector, the state bureaucracy. The only thing that could have saved them and us from the hell that was Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution would have been protests against the NDP betrayals. This happened towards the end of the NDPs tenure in office when they cocked up what should have been a shoe-in: same sex spousal benefits. The gay and lesbian community didn't have the institutional ties and baggage that the union leadership had and when it was clear that the NDP was going to betray them, thousands mobilized. That mobilization was the light in an otherwise pretty dark moment and when the Tories were elected it was no surprise that the first to demonstrate were gays and lesbians. If it weren't for that, there probably wouldn't have been a Days of Action movement, with its rolling one-day, citywide general strikes only a few months later. Ultimately that movement was sold down the tubes by the same union leadership that stomped on any attempts to fight the NDP when it was betraying workers, the poor, gays and lesbians, students, etc But all that demonstrates is the need to have clear-headed thinkers and organizers inside the union movement as well as in the gay and lesbian movement, who will resist ANY sell-out, no matter which party it comes from.
So, if the NDP wins the federal government we will have witnessed an exciting and historic event that will transform Canadian politics in ways we can't even understand - multiple party leaders will resign, the NDP will have been brought to office with a wave of sovereigntist MPs and votes (which will transform the NDP itself), and workers will suddenly realize that they can shake things up in a big way when they want to - and maybe not just at the ballot box. All this is incredible and important stuff. But we also don't want to end up with the Obama phenomenon where we elect an inspiring leader and then leave it to him, ending up in a situation where not only is our side thoroughly demoralized but the right wing comes back with a vengeance and viciousness that is the result of workers and progressives having dared to challenge their right to rule.
Let's make this election the beginning of the revolution, not the end.

CPC-NDP gap narrows to three points in dwindling hours of campaign | iPolitics

The Evils Of Massage Therapy or How To Keep A Non-Story Alive

Layton confident voters will dismiss massage parlour 'smear campaign' - The Globe and Mail

What the hell? This massage story is the most stupid, pathetic smear that I've ever seen in my life. Guy goes to a massage clinic to get a massage and is told by the police that there may be dirty things happening there (were any charges ever laid against ANYONE?). Nobody ever suggested that Layton did anything wrong, no charges were laid, there was no follow-up interview. And I say this as someone who - along with my wife - goes to a storefront massage "parlour" around the corner from my house.

It's a complete non-story. The only story here is who (cough, cough) illegally and unethically leaked this story. The media, had they any scruples or sense would be raising the hue and cry about the scandal of such a last minute attempt to undermine a candidate. But no, it's all about Jack making a denial after Olivia made a denial. It's all very leading, as in the famous question: "so, when did you stop beating your wife?" Of course, one hopes that the absolute filthiness of the tactic will blow up in the faces of those who "leaked" this absurdity. And I'll make no bones that I think it was the Tories, who got their fingers burned trying to do the same kind of thing to Ignatieff a few days earlier with a fabricated leak. That the SUN media chose to "expose" one smear, where the price was low since Ignatieff was already sunk, and to publish the one related to Layton, whose momentum seemed unstoppable coming into the weekend, is also hardly coincidental.

This whole pathetic non-story stinks to high heaven. Too bad the mainstream media doesn't have a functional nose to be found.

Chinese Premier Kicks Harper In The Nuts

IT STARTED OFF SO PLEASANTLY. Well, there were all those nasty headlines calling Harper a dink. But other than those, it was nice: they even had him inspect an honour guard of Chinese soldiers. From what I'm told Chinese Premier Wen let pass the opportunity to tell Harper that it was just a sample of a military big and mean enough to crush Canada like the bug we are. That was kind, no?
It was all a ruse to get Harper to let down his guard for the press conference. Then, when Stephen bent over to pick up his glass of champagne, Premier Wen took advantage of the easy target and "woof", Harper took a full wallop in the 'nads.
"Next time, Mr. Prime Minister," Wen said with a smile. "Don't be such a fuckhead. We are now a world power and you can't treat us like we're still building your railroads for five cents a day."
Stephen managed to grunt a reply: "I couldn't agree more, Mr. Premier. I hope you'll visit us."
Back home opposition politicians laughed their asses off. Bob Rae took time out from scheming how he could play Brutus to Ignatieff's rather sclerotic Caesar to take a poke at Mr. Harper: "This just shows why Canada would be better off led by my enormous brain. I have sent a letter to the Conservative Party that they need to end the humiliation of Stephen Harper as leader and put me in his place. In fact, I'll happily lead all three parties simultaneously. Yes, I'm that smart."
NDP Leader Jack Layton also said something but the media pretty much ignored him. Too bad, he actually made a pretty good point. "I told you Harper was an asshole. They even know it in China." Then he pointed out the small matter of Harper being a hypocrite for saying anything on human rights when the Tories were dancing on the broken, tortured bodies of Afghans.
Back in China, Harper later thanked the Premier for helping to distract attention from the Conservatives weak attempt to cover up for the fact that their stimulus package is for shit.

Nanos Poll: Only Thing Moving Are Liberals...Down

THIS POLL ON THE GLOBE AND MAIL webpage by Nik Nanos demonstrates two things: that the Tories and pretty much every party from the Bloc to the NDP is stuck in aspic in terms of support. Harper can't make the breakthrough he needs to win a majority - not unless the Bloc collapses in Quebec, an unlikely prospect. Or he has a major breakthrough in Ontario, also unlikely.
As part of the same phenomenon the chart shows that no party has caught the imagination of Canadian voters. This ought to be surprising. The recession is a doozy and people are hurting across the country. The Tories are mean, dishonest and incompetent. And yet, the NDP hasn't managed to inspire people beyond their core supporters.
The second thing confirms what I've said previously - that Ignatieff is in free fall and can't inspire anyone anywhere in any way. He has utterly destroyed the good will that was thrown his way after he was selected as Liberal Party leader. And in less than a year. Nice work, Iggy. With the recession continuing to bite deep it's possible that at some point things will break one way or the other. I hope it's to the left, though there is always a danger that without a serious fightback against the effects of the recession that people could turn to the right, towards scapegoating and surrender to the corporate agenda. But I'm certain - as long as Ignatieff is at the helm - there won't be a break towards the Liberals.

Liberals and NDP Work Hard To Lose

IT'S A BIT DEPRESSING READING THE POLLING NUMBERS from EKOS today. But what's most depressing about the Tories building their lead is just how unnecessary it all is. With the Tories now in striking distance of a majority government expect Harper to act as though he had a majority already. Anything that makes a slimeball like Harper and his neo-con toads happy is enough to make you pour yourself a stiff drink.
But we shouldn't get too miserable. After all, the Tories have been here before, on multiple occasions. Back in September, 2008, as the election approached in October, the Tories were at 39 percent, only to fall back to 34 percent by the beginning of October. When the election finally happened the Tories won 37 percent of the popular vote, which was up by 1 percent over the previous election but they actually received 165,000 less votes. It just so happened that the Liberals received 835,000 less than the previous election. Because, well, they sucked under Dion (unlike the roaring charisma of Ignatieff the neo-con professor). The bigger news was probably that the most people ever didn't even bother to vote.  Nearly a majority came to the realization that not only did Dion, with his incoherent and deeply uninspired Green Shit platform, suck - so did everyone else.
All this brings me back to where we started. The truly depressing thing about the Tories temporary climb in the polls is that this is the result of a lack of leadership on the part of any opposition party (I can't speak to the Bloc in Quebec because I'm not familiar enough with what's going on there but the Bloc has kept its support pretty stable, it seems).
The Liberals spent the better part of the last several years propping up the Tories by voting for whatever horribleness they were passing in the House. Their recent reversal looked exactly like what it was - a pathetic and opportunist attempt to take advantage of a heartbeat of growth in their support. No surprise that their unprincipled threat to bring down the government lost them support instead of inspiring it. It doesn't help that Ignatieff not only looks indistinguishable from pretty much any well educated Tory across the House. He is indistinguishable. It just so happens that he has the misfortune of sitting beside a turncoat weasel like Bob Rae.
As for the NDP, ah, well, I weep for the NDP. I received a fundraising email from them in the days following their grotesque about-face on supporting the Tories. Suddenly they were no longer the only party that stands up to the Tories. Now the Liberals were "playing politics" and they were the only party trying to make Parliament work. "So, let me get this straight: you want me to send you money so that you can vote for Stephen Harper's EI bill, which will actually screw workers?"(See page 8) I hate to say I told you so but I did, back when Jack was having tea with Stephen. You could smell it - and it wasn't bread or roses.
All this sounds a bit of a downer but have hope - it's Friday! And the Tories will sink again, as they always do. And next time you say something bad about Quebec sovereigntists, remember that if it weren't for the Bloc, the Tories would already have a majority.

Looming Federal Election: RedBedHead's Prescient Predictions

Well, it's all over but the crying for this Parliament with Ignatieff promising to pull the plug for real this time. (No, really, they're gonna do it this time. Go ahead, dare them.)

I want to be the first one out of the gate to make predictions on how things will go in the next two months. The trouble is, I'm of several minds, so let me break it down by my mood:

1) Cynical Mood: The NDP will get a shabby, embarrassing offer of some concessions from the Tories, the political equivalent of a gnat's penis. They will look at the poll numbers, see themselves at 4-5 points less than they got in the last election, shit their pants, and vote for the Tories, claiming that they won a commitment for "important reforms that will help working families and keep this Parliament working." Everyone who is a soft NDPer will be so disgusted that they'll vote for the Liberals and the NDP will sink further.

2) Optimistic Mood: The NDP's maneuver of claiming to want the Parliament to work, while all the while expecting that the Tories will do as they always do, attempt to govern like they have a majority because they're bullying pricks, will work magnificently. The Tories will lose a confidence vote, an election will happen in which the Tories are trounced, the Liberals get a minority and the NDP increases its position significantly - say to 45 seats. (I have cynical and optimistic scenarios in this instance as well. The cynical being that the NDP goes into a coalition government with the Liberals and thus surrenders the last vestige of their purpose as an independent party).

3) Realistic Mood: The Tories will ignore the NDP as irrelevant (or as that perennial piece of shit, Jason Kenney put it so eloquently: "It's a party of hard-core left-wing ideologues." - wow, I hope he never meets me, I'll end up in the pokey!). We'll go to election and return a parliament with exactly the same breakdown as there is at present, perhaps with the addition of one seat for that other Liberal party; what are they called again? Oh, yes, the Greens.

The problem, you see, is that the Liberals and the Tories are effectively the same. Ignatieff is perhaps even more hawkish on foreign policy and civil rights than the Tories. The only difference is that the Tories are a teensy bit more beholden to the wing-nuts from the western wing of the party who want to put an electric fence around Toronto, with all its homos, Muslims and socialists, and pass a law against promoting the anti-Christian view that the earth is round (though, in fairness, the Liberals also attract their share of whack jobs).

In the past the tie-breaker between these two right-wing, pro-business parties has been Quebec. But then Trudeau (along with the Sask. NDP and the Ontario Tories) gave two-fingers to Quebec when they repatriated the Canadian Constitution without their support. And then Mulroney's inability to win any consensus around, first, the Meech Lake Accord, and then the Charlottetown Accord to bring Quebec into the Constitution, taught the political class in Quebec that they needed their own party. Thus was born the BQ, which has 48 seats. This wouldn't be enough to put the Liberals in a position to govern but would strengthen their hand significantly. If they could win back key bastions of support out west or in Ontario, along with Quebec, they could return to being the "natural governing party" of Canada. Fat chance.

The NDP will bobble between 15 and 20 percent, with the media totally ignoring their little "expose the Tories as uncooperative" maneuver. Jack Layton will continue to smile like a soldier through it all and point to the recent victory in Nova Scotia as a consolation prize.

The Liberals won't win back the west for a generation (though at the rate that Alberta's fiscal position is collapsing, we may see the end of that one party state in the not too distant future).

The Tories will never make a serious breakthrough into the industrial heartland of Ontario. And they're way too crazy for Quebec. Mulroney was virtually a hero of enlightened thinking compared to Harper's gang. With the collapse of the ADQ in Quebec, the resident Tory party, Harper's in a worse position now in Quebec than a few years ago.

Thus, my realistic prognosis: we'll blow $300 million bucks on a mini-stimulus package, called an election, and the Tories will win again with another minority government. Nothing will change. Nobody is in a position to make any kind of breakthrough this election. The most exciting thing will be the potential election of a Green MP. But, let's be honest, these aren't European Greens. These guys are boring as shit and pull most of their support from the Liberals because that's what they are. Remember their last leader? He used to be a Tory.

My post-election crystal ball: Ignatieff will join Dion at the bar for drinks, lots of them. In fact, they'll probably end up in a brawl, followed by a lot of "I love you, man's" before Iggy staggers off back to the US (where he can torture some Muslims to work out his frustrations, I mean to protect democracy) and Dion will stagger off to an academic job in Quebec (where he can bore people in his official language with policy discussions that nobody can understand). The Liberals will try a feint to the left by promoting Bob Rae to leader. Rae will split off a chunk of the NDP, with the help of perennial Third-Way social-liberal Roy Romanow, thus weakening them further. Layton will resign and return to TO, where he will campaign for bike lanes and shave off that fucking mustache. The remaining rump of the NDP will have a "Refounding the Left" conference attended by lots of people, most of whom don't like each other (well, I know I won't like most of them) but they'll hug a lot before coming up with a new party name that still can't get them higher in the polls than 20 percent.

And then, I'll go for a drink...

Layton's Meeting With Harper: Prepare For Something Stupid

I have to admit that I like Jack Layton personally. And Olivia Chow, fellow NDP MP and his life partner has done some wonderful and important work on behalf of the anti-war movement in general and the War Resisters Support Campaign in particular.
But the NDP's parliamentary jockeying and nonsense about "making Parliament work" makes me nervous. Particularly when I read this:
"Rick Boychuk, Mr. Layton's communication's director, said his boss was to meet with Stephen Harper to talk about the NDP's “legislative agenda” with the goal of making Parliament work."
I'm holding my breath in preparation that he'll agree some hare-brained deal with the Tory scum that lets them stay in power through the fall, while extracting some pitiful crumbs in return.