They have tried it provincially in Ontario and then they did it again federally. It does not work. Our New Democratic Party cannot change its spots just at election time. If they are going to become a more middle-ground social democratic party, they need to establish some bona fides long before an election.
The recent federal election was a sham as NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair tried to out-control an old-pro such as Stephen Harper. It was a constant performance with a stiffly smiling party leader fronting for a wall of a stiffly smiling labour grouping. It looked staged because it was staged and it did not work for any party. Viewers were always checking the people behind the leader to see how pained they were with the scripted words for the media. Camera people frequently tried for the back shot that showed fewer in the audience than in the staged people background.
But it was Mulcair’s “me too” that torpedoed the New Democrats. He was trapped between the bigotry of the niqad affair and his concern for his falling support in Quebec. His stance on balancing budgets left the door open for the Liberals to appear more concerned with the needs of Canadians.
Looking ahead, Mulcair has to be more concerned with shoring up his party than any challenge to his leadership. His direction has to be to make the social democracy stance real. To do that, he has to restructure the New Democratic Party. He has to resolve the problem of the unions.
Unions are a noose around the neck of the NDP. The unions no longer have the control of their own membership that initially made them useful to the party. You can be assured that more unionists voted Liberal in the last election than voted for any other party.
Canadians are far more likely to buy into social democracy than any union movement that is tied back to the ‘Dirty Thirties.’ Social democracy calls for a different attitude. It leaves behind the “I’m alright Jack” of the unions and deals in social responsibility.
The picture of a single drowned child was all Canadians needed to shift their attention to the needs of people fleeing the turmoil in the Middle East. The Harper Conservatives tried to redirect the concern to that of security but Canadians did not buy it. The already losing New Democrats were lost in the shuffle when the Liberals came across as decisive.
Some people accuse social democracy of being nothing more than ‘warm and fuzzy’ but the truth is that warm and fuzzy works.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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