Today’s comments were supposed to be a scholarly discussion about understanding political speeches. Maybe we can leave that for another time. Instead, we can have fun critiquing the new democratic party’s present-day prat falls.
Good grief folks! This election isn’t even ‘At Post’ yet and the NDP is falling apart. We have been expecting it but we assumed the funeral would be part of the results of the election.
I was thinking about this early last week when it was the liberal’s Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland who were being lionized at the Unifor convention in Quebec City. This is Canada’s largest union and there was not a single prominent NDPer in sight.
The poor dippers have been out of gas for quite some time. They made a disgrace of themselves as a party when they stabbed poor Tom Mulcair in the back in Edmonton in March of 2017. It was hardly just Mulcair’s fault that the party fell on hard times as Trudeau’s liberals talked of ‘Sunny Days.’
The schism between the old guard socialists and the newer NDP environmentalists was too broad. And with the Lewis name on the Leap Manifesto, it garnered more supporters than it really deserved.
The final straw was the surprise of Jagmeet Singh being able to swamp the membership of the NDP with Sikh immigrants in B.C. and Ontario. He won the leadership but seemed to have no plan on what to do with the party once it was his. His was just too long a learning period to please the old timers.
As it stands, the NDP has stumbled badly in fundraising and in organization for the election. With limited funds and starting to lose candidates before the election is even called, the NDP still has almost half of its candidates to find.
Jagmeet’s only plan at the moment is to try to save as many seats as possible. The way it looks though, the NDP could get wiped out in Quebec and lose at least half of their other seats across Canada. Jagmeet Singh’s leadership will be a short-term experience.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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