The impression on the ground in the last election was that the new democrats were drinking their own Kool-Aid. Where did the B.S. about the boost in votes come from? No party stood to gain in that election. Least of all, the NDP.
I will try to keep this further update simple for the slow thinkers in that party.
The best illustration of the problem I can think of was a news clip on the television news the other day about a young Sikh in Nova Scotia who was beaten to death in what appeared to be a racially motivated attack. It was a shocking and awful incident made even more horrifying by the TV people being unable to pronounce ‘Sikh.’ They made the word sound like ‘sick’ instead of ‘seek.’ We used to have properly trained news personnel at one time.
But that ignorance explains the problem. What I carefully explained before is that Jagmeet Singh, with his colourful turbans and customs, is an observant Sikh. With a half million Sikhs in Canada, Sikhism is little understood by the majority of Canadians. Jagmeet is easy to like. He is personable. He is smart. Those are givens. He even amuses children on Tik Tok. He is just quite unlikely to ever be prime minister of Canada and the NDP need to face that reality.
But the other reason the NDP have nowhere to go is the constant blurring of their direction. Why do they think that a party that is going nowhere has anything to offer Canadians?
As a young Canadian, I admired the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). When David Lewis and Tommy Douglas bought into the linking of the party to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and becoming the new democratic party, it was a new game. They bought into the muscle but not the brains. The CLC was on the decline. It is why the NDP has continued to lose the support of the more progressive unions.
The NDP have to face the reality that the party has the same problems as the conservatives and the liberals. All three parties have the next two to three years to get their acts together, choose more effective leaders and do some serious thinking about the future of our wonderful country.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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