Some of our kindly readers have send notes asking what happened to Babel-on-the-Bay’s forecast in May of the immanent demise of the Ontario New Democrats. Yes, there were some brazen forecasts of such departure and logically we could show you where we were right and where we might have been blind-sided.
But the truth of the matter is that the New Democrats in Ontario have nowhere to go. The provincial election tore the heart out of the NDP in Toronto. The Windsor area Liberals might have been more pissed than we realized but you can hardly run around the province taking peoples’ temperatures–especially in Windsor where they seem to prefer rectal thermometers.
But on balance, in the provincial election, the New Democrats went nowhere with a miserably low turnout at the polls. And it puts a question mark to the supposed ability of New Democrats to pull out their vote. Even in the recent federal by-election in Trinity Spadina, the NDP loser was a person reputed to be one of the top guns in the party in the ground game. That spells real trouble for New Democrat darling Olivia Chow’s chances in this fall’s mayoralty race.
But the person to keep an eye on in the next while is Ontario New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath. She forced the party’s gamble in bringing about the provincial election. She ran the worst do-nothing campaign we have seen from the New Democrats. She ignored the panic of her party’s old guard. The campaign was Andrea’s to screw up and she sure did. Her head is on the block. She has time to decide to go with dignity and arrange for an orderly transition. She had better do it before the knives come out at the approaching convention.
But the guy looking at Ontario with pain on his face is federal New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair. He is the one with the most to lose. He knows he will gain nothing and can lose much in Quebec next year. He was counting on Ontario to give the federal party a new base. He knows now, it will not happen.
It is time for Mulcair to sit down with Justin Trudeau. It is the ordained time for change. It is time for realizations. Mulcair and his party can fade into the woodwork of Parliament next year or they can buy into a brighter, progressive future. What they need to point out to Liberal Leader Trudeau is that in sharing the social democrat patina in Canadian politics benefits both parties. We need one strong social democrat party in Canada and we can achieve that in a merging of the Liberal Party and the New Democrats.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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