New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh’s turbans might be bright and colorful but his beard is graying. It is also showing a little more trimming, in contravention of the dictates of the tenth Sikh Guru. Canadians might never choose the NDP for governance under an observant Sikh but they are more than willing to see him as the balance point between the harshness of the conservatives and their tiring with the acting of liberal leader Justin Trudeau.
Even without his glasses, Pierre Poilievre can see the tenuous nature of the liberal- NDP agreement that is supporting the current government. He enjoys sniping at their arrangement. He is in a constant state of readiness for the slug-fest to come.
But like Canada’s aboriginal peoples, the NDP also have their stories to be told. The NDP support works, they can say. “We are holding the liberal feet to the fire.” They will tell you: “We are getting things done.” And that is the song they will sing to their voters.
Poilievre, of course is there to try to convince voters that the NDP are just liberals with different hats. He is trying to redirect some of the rage, that he has been laying so heavily on the liberal doorstep, on the NDP. Whether this is going to work or not is open to question.
Thinking back over the years, we saw an NDP support agreement with the Pierre Trudeau liberals in the 1970s. The federal NDP leader, at the time was David Lewis and his party never won any dividends on that investment. In the same era, Ontario provincial NDP leader, Bob Rae, did benefit from his party’s support agreement with the Peterson liberals in the last half of the 1980s. That was in the 1990 provincial election when Peterson slipped and slid into oblivion leaving a surprised NDP in power in Ontario.
Yet, the question is, will the NDP story be heard, in the ongoing bombast of a federal election fought between a weasel like Poilievre and an elitist like our current prime minister? It could be that the new democrats will, once more, be the detritus left on the battlefield between the two larger political parties.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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