Happy Halloween From All of Us at The Left Chapter!
Trick-or-Treating at Pumpkinhead's House - Acrylic on Canvas by Natalie Lochwin
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(Prints of Natalie's art are available, email theleftchapter@outlook.com for details)
Saturday, 31 October 2015
Thursday, 29 October 2015
Not only does the former Liberal cabinet minister Tom Mulcair that the NDP imported to lead them to government and who then blew it say "he nonetheless intends to stay on as party leader and lead the NDP into the next federal election in four years" but he also says he intends to appoint a committee to tell him what "went wrong."
Seriously.
One can assume that this "committee", beholden to him, will be unlikely to point to what without any doubt was the largest thing that "went wrong" -- that being his leadership and the inept and incompetent strategy developed by him and his staff.
The farce shows every sign of continuing.
In doing this Mulcair takes a page from the successful effort of the ONDP's Andrea Horwath to keep her job after she ran a disastrous campaign in 2014. After all, why not? He imitated in a totally suicidal way the tone of her fiasco in the playing out of his. But Horwath, who in any party serious about holding its leadership to account and about actually achieving results would have been shown the door, also brought in defeated caucus members to whitewash her decisions and not only survived a leadership review but saw her approval rating increase!
A striking testament to the grotesquely delusional and insular political culture of the NDP.
There is no reason to think the same gambit will not work for Mulcair.
Perhaps worse, now that it no longer matters, up arise the folks who are predictably calling for a new direction for the social democratic left in Canada in the wake of the NDP catastrophe.
Congratulations. Your prescient hindsight is tremendously underwhelming.
For years absolute and abject hypocrisy have ruled the day among an important part of the talking heads and institutional leaders of the "mainstream" left and labour movement.
While they frequently claim and pretend to support radical ideas and policies -- especially if they are happening in other countries that they can spread useless internet memes about -- in the day-to-day reality of today in Canada they support do-nothing NDP politicians and actually attack and undermine those who call them out.
Which makes sense. The powerful and "big fish", even if powerful and "big fish" within a relatively small pond, want to remain as such. Challenging or changing anything would be a threat to themselves.
Now that the NDP campaign -- a campaign that many, myself included, predicted would collapse -- has tanked we on the left must endure either inane and offensive attempts to pretend the campaign actually went well or an onslaught of those who two weeks ago supported Mulcair wholeheartedly now going on wondering about "why is there no Corbyn?" in Canada.
Why is there no radical movement to remake the NDP or Canadian left on a federal level of any consequence?
That is actually rather simple. It is because of them and them alone that there is no Corbyn like leader or the possibility of a Corbyn like left wing movement within the NDP.
For literally decades the vast bulk of the party and labour leadership, New Democrat party organizers, members, partisans and apparatchiks and many of the accepted or "acceptable" left commentators, have actively worked to prevent the emergence of any left wing vision or any leftist and grassroots driven challenge to their power and dominance.
There is no Corbyn because they have done everything they can to prevent one.
There is no Corbyn because they line up and support the NDP, nepotistic nobodies who are given nominations or supported for party positions solely due to their last names, liberal municipal politicians and whatever "strategy" and platform is handed to them to pretend to be enthusiastic and thrilled about election-after-election-after-election-after-election.
And if anyone tries to do something about this in any meaningful way these folks attack, undermine and slap them down.
Meanwhile tokenism and sloganeering substitute for action as everyone pretends to support manifestos they have no intention of doing anything in the real world politically to make happen, rendering these flamboyant celebrity studded press conference versions of activism every bit as useless as all the other previous such grandiose much ado about nothing statements.
The reason that it is impossible to envision a Canadian Corbyn is that there is absolutely no one anywhere in any authority or with any power in the "left" in Canada that actually either wants one, or, far more importantly, will actually do anything, at all, to help to back or create one -- including taking the first and essential step of condemning Mulcair's leadership and the party's strategy in recent elections and calling for the decisive shift.
No one.
It is also very difficult to see how there is the remotest possibility of significant change within the party's profoundly undemocratic reality that they helped to foster and create by always inevitably circling the wagons around the party when push came to shove.
If any of these people really want a new left -- a real, active, demonstrably, obviously anti-capitalist left -- they need to get off their asses and actually try to do something to create this other than twitter shares and Facebook statuses about exciting initiatives in other countries or Quebec.
They need to actually try to build a new movement or party or at least be willing to entertain the idea in a way that threatens the NDP establishment.
Otherwise, give it up and admit the obvious.
The limitations of the pathetic, neo-austerity, neo-liberal, opportunist and capitalist NDP are where their supposed radicalism lives and dies and the claims about wanting any kind of party that will actually challenge the dominant political narratives and consensus in this country are simply a pretense and farce, which we all know they are.
Mulcair and one-or-two of his advisers may be sacrificed, though even that, as we have seen, seems increasingly unlikely.
But either way you can rest assured nothing of any meaning will change. And far from a Canadian Corbyn, in four years, yet again, we will get another repeat of this shallow sham followed by another week or two of hand-wringing wondering why the left can never present an exciting or compelling left vision by many of the very same people intent on ensuring that it does not.
See also: Delusion continues to rule the day in Mulcair NDP
See also: Doubling down on disaster
Tuesday, 27 October 2015
While I have made wings at home, I have always done so either in the oven or using the tasty technique of preparing them in both a slow cooker and the oven that I have blogged about before.
Today I am going to take a look at making deep fired southern wings and doing it on the stove top, so no deep fryer is required! I am also going to share a trick in preparing them I picked up along the way.
To make these you need wings that have been split, so either buy them already split (far easier) or do it yourself (slightly less expensive). I did multiple batches but I will give measurements for doing a single batch of around 10-15 wings, so adjust accordingly as you go and based on the number of wings you are doing.
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| Nicely coated with batter |
1 1/2 cups self-raising cake and pastry flour (Brodie makes one, but any brand works of course)
1 tablespoon cayenne powder
1 tablespoon salt (or to taste)
2 teaspoons dry mustard powder (such as those made by Keen's or Coleman's)
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
While traditionally many recipes call for using standard flour, I found that the trick of using self-raising flour made the batter perfect both in its texture and golden appearance.
Combine all of these ingredients thoroughly in a large mixing bowl.
Pour a cup of milk into a separate bowl.
Take each wing, dip in and coat fully with the milk and then dredge in the batter mixture until coated on all sides, gently tapping off any excess.
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| Deep frying stove top style! |
If you have a deep fryer you can, of course, use it, but this part of this post is aimed at those who do not or who want to keep it in the cupboard.
When the oil is good and hot add the wings one at a time slowly both to prevent any painful splashing and to prevent the oil from cooling too much as you add them.
Add until there are enough that the saucepan is full but don't overfill. You don't want the wings clumped together or touching too much or the batter won't cook properly.
Cook the wings for 8-10 minutes turning them in the oil a couple of times during the frying.
They should at this point come out a lovely golden brown with a full batter coating.Let sit a couple moments on a platter covered with some paper towel (to absorb any excess oil) and season with some more salt and pepper if desired.
Serve with your favorite wing or BBQ sauce of choice. I mixed some Buffalo style wing sauce with some habanero hot sauce as a fiery suicide style dipping sauce but you can use whatever you want of course from plum, to honey-garlic, to Frank's, etc.
If you want to do a wing night platter serve with some carrot and celery slices, your dipping sauces and some blue cheese dressing on the side as well.
Goes perfect with ice cold beer and good company. Enjoy!
See also: Slow Cooker Chicken Wings
See also: Going for Toronto's best chicken wings with Irish Socialist leader Joe Higgins
Monday, 26 October 2015
Is it true? While that is certainly a big claim to make in a city the size of Toronto, unlike "The World's Best Coffee" claim in the movie Elf, in the case of Vena's it is not just hyperbole. If they do not serve "the best", a very subjective opinion anyway, they serve among the best West Indian style rotis and for a very good price.
Vena's is a classic "hole-in-the-wall" lunch counter style eatery. With only a couple of tables at which to dine in, when going be sure to have a take-out back up plan.
But the food is excellent and, not surprisingly given the sign, the rotis are a genuine stand-out.
What makes them special begins with the roti bread itself which is among the best I have ever had.
Then, of course, is the West Indian style saucing and perfectly cooked ingredients. Very moist goat or chicken, beef and shrimp options, and a delicious veggie roti with spinach, chick peas, potato and squash. They are all fantastic. The meat rotis can be had with just potato or with some other ingredients like okra for an extra charge.
If you are a fan of spice, the homemade scotch bonnet sauce is a
must. While deceptively watery in texture it packs a real punch in terms of both heat and flavour.
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| Veggie Roti |
All the dishes range from $9-12 with some daily specials as an option. Vena's only takes cash though, so keep that in mind.
Vena's is located at 1263 Bloor Street West, Toronto (just east of the Lansdowne subway station), and is open seven days a week from 10am to 7pm. 416-532-3665
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| Vena's has done important charitable work in the community |
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| The goat and potato roti |
See also: Michael's West Indian Flavor: Perfect Oxtail in New Toronto
Sunday, 25 October 2015
Perhaps one of the most mystifying things in the aftermath of the 2015 Canadian federal election is that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair still has a job.
Somehow, Mulcair and his inner-circle managed to take a party that was atop the polls when the campaign began in early August -- and sitting as Official Opposition to boot -- and by October 19 reduce the NDP to a distant third place finish while shedding 51 seats in process.
The NDP lost everywhere in this election. The party lost every single seat in Atlantic Canada; it lost in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. The NDP even lost in northern Canada.
And no one is surprised at this dismal result other than the NDP. Imagine that -- a social democratic party trying to run a right wing populist campaign that put balancing budgets ahead of its social priorities and no one bought it? Mystifying, eh? The only sad thing is a number of decent and long serving NDP MPs lost their seats because of this ill-conceived campaign.
One would have thought Mulcair would have resigned on election night?
Nope.
Or, maybe in the days following the election an announcement would have come forward that he would soon step down so an interim leader can take charge and the party can prepare for a leadership convention?
No, again.
Instead, towards the end of last week, the NDP Leader and his handlers started musing that he plans to stick around for a while and that he is in “this” for the long haul. Long haul of what, you might ask? Driving the NDP down a hole to absolute oblivion?
Apparently the party needs “Tom” to stick around because he is very good in the House of Commons and will hold the new government to account. Give me a break. As if none of the other MPs in caucus are capable of leading a third party in Question Period.
The whole raison d’etre of electing Mulcair, who is a Liberal, as party leader three years ago was that he could win. Now that he has failed miserably in this goal, why is he or any of his cronies still around?
Amazing.
Perhaps even more amazing is that if you talk to NDP partisans it is like the whole election never happened. In fact, according to them, the party actually ran a good campaign but the only problem is those silly voters just failed to see it. And they were really done in by the party’s principled stand on the niqab in Quebec. Tell me another one.
But then again, why would Tom Mulcair and his inner-circle want to leave? People in positions of power generally don’t like to accept responsibility for failure and step down unless they are forced to.
And herein lies the problem of what has become the shell of what is the federal New Democratic Party. The hierarchy of the party says, “let’s shift right, this is what we need to do to win,” and the membership says, “sure.”
The hierarchy then throws party policy out the window, dumps good candidates during the election and appoints others because, “this is what we need to do to win.” Once again, the membership says, “sure.”
And then when voters see through the whole bogus, misguided and unethical strategy the hierarchy says, “we really did run a good campaign, it’s just that the voters are very naive and they were once again fooled by the Liberals. What can we do?”
And the membership says, “You are absolutely right! When is the next party convention and who should I make this cheque out to?”
Thomas Mulcair, you can have your job as long as you want it.
Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.
See also: Delusion continues to rule the day in Mulcair NDP
See also: Doubling down on disaster
Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?
Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!
But this basic simplicity belies the tremendous complexity of flavour of their dishes, all of which are some of the best West Indian food I have had in Toronto (and I have had a lot of it!).
Jamaican style Oxtail, Curried Goat or Stewed Chicken with rice or rice and peas are always on the chalkboard menu, while Jerk Chicken and Spicy Fried Chicken are regularly available as well.
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| Michael's incredible oxtail |
All dishes can be had with an optional creamy slaw. They are also all available small, medium or large (and the large is really large) and range from $5-$12. They all come with rice or rice and peas as well.
If it is a nice day you can take your food and enjoy it at one of the neigbourhood's many parks. Colonel Sam Smith Park, one of Toronto's waterfront gems, is a short walk to the west. Michael's is also on the 501 Queen streetcar line. They are located at 3067 Lake Shore Blvd. W., which is about 4 blocks west of Islington Ave.
See also: Swatow Restaurant -- Shrimp Dumpling Noodle Soup & more in the heart of Toronto
See also: Going for Toronto's best chicken wings with Irish Socialist leader Joe Higgins
Saturday, 24 October 2015
In the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign that wrapped up earlier this week, the Justin Trudeau led Liberals won a smashing 184-seat majority government.
Perhaps what is most amazing about the Liberal victory is that the party started in third place in terms of both number of seats and in the polls when the campaign began in early August.
Not only did the Liberals win a majority, the party won every single seat in Atlantic Canada and the most seats in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. The Liberals also grabbed both seats in the Yukon and North West Territories and the party even picked up four new seats in Alberta.
In spite of coming from behind and ending close to a decade of Conservative government rule in Ottawa, no one is much surprised at the convincing Liberal victory. Unless, of course, you are NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, his inner circle, or a diehard NDP partisan.
Going into this campaign, everyone knew Stephen Harper and the Conservatives would be in tight to win a fourth mandate. The Harper government was lucky enough to win two minority governments, let alone a majority government, and time was running out on the most right wing government in Canadian history. Stephen Harper had managed to stay in government by abusing the powers of office, seeking to divide Canadians on various wedge issues to his advantage and moving about 30 per cent of the electorate over to his neoconservative values.
Nevertheless, the other 70 per cent of the electorate had become tired of the Conservatives partisan games, racism, divisiveness, secretiveness, lies and war mongering. In short, there was a sizeable anti-Harper coalition in the electorate when the campaign began and it would be looking to place its vote with either the Liberals or NDP.
And, when the campaign began, the NDP had a slight lead in the polls over the other two parties for a couple of reasons.
Thomas Mulcair had performed well in the House of Commons hammering the Harper government on such issues as the Mike Duffy Senate scandal. In contrast, Justin Trudeau was often not in the House and when he was the Liberal Leader was ineffective.
The NDP also took a very principled stand against the Harper government’s flawed and highly undemocratic Bill C-51 anti-terrorism legislation while for some strange reason Trudeau decided to support it.
The new Liberal Leader had made other gaffes too, such as deciding one day that all Liberal appointed senators would from here on in be non-partisan and independent. No one believed this and particularly not the Liberal appointed senators. At other times, Trudeau looked shaky and nervous with the media.
Maybe he was “just not ready” after all.
At the beginning of this campaign the NDP had an opportunity to win the election and form its first federal government. But that’s all it was, an opportunity, not a sure thing.
However, it is clear that Mulcair and his inner circle viewed winning the election as a sure thing as long as the NDP didn’t commit any major gaffes on the campaign trail. So the strategy was to play it safe and conduct a front runner campaign, limit media access, say as little as possible, run on a center-right platform so as not to “scare” anyone and take it for granted their base would support the party no matter what. Over the course of the eleven-week election campaign, voters would naturally see how much more prime ministerial Tom Mulcair was than Justin Trudeau and the anti-Harper coalition would automatically unite behind the NDP on election day pushing the party through to victory.
And this is precisely how Mulcair and company proceeded to blow the best chance the Federal NDP has ever had to form government.
If the NDP were going to have a chance at winning the election, the party needed to be bold not cautious, to stake out its ground on issues of historical advantage such as innovative social programming and to convince voters they would be a good government. Running the front-runner campaign always becomes the losing campaign because it allows your opponents to paint you to their benefit and makes voters suspicious that you are trying to hide something by being evasive.
All votes must be earned and not taken for granted. Assuming that your base is not fluid and will always stick behind you is also a mistake. These are the types of bad decisions that happen when arrogance rules the day and there was no shortage of hubris in the 2015 NDP election strategy.
From day one, the NDP ran a poor campaign.
This started with Mulcair refusing to take any media questions at the NDP campaign launch. Why would the party do this? Mulcair’s handlers were clearly taking a page out of the Harper playbook of limiting media access. Yet Harper is the guy you are trying to beat and that everyone is tired of. Why emulate the Conservatives? In particular, reporters find it extremely annoying when a party is trying to act like it has already won the election when it hasn’t. It is the height of arrogance.
The NDP continued to limit media access throughout the campaign. Media scrums were often cut short and sometimes Mulcair didn’t take any questions at all. Then it came out that the NDP Leader dodged Globe and Mail reporter Jeffrey Simpson for as many as eight weeks for a profile piece he was trying to do. In the end, Simpson got so frustrated that he wrote the piece without interviewing Mulcair.
It has since come out that the NDP tried to contact Simpson at the last minute to set up an interview and he refused saying it was too close to deadline and the story was done. Ethically, Simpson should have conducted the interview and added Mulcair’s comments into the story. However, there is no doubt he was thoroughly annoyed at these arrogant twits around Mulcair dodging him for two months and had had enough. The point is, why was the NDP, of all times, going out of its way to alienate reporters in the middle of an election campaign? Remember, respect and trust has to be earned.
The second major mistake the NDP campaign made was choosing to work against the party leader’s attributes and not with them. Thomas Mulcair is an attack dog politician. This is who he is and the type of politician he has been all his life. It is what has brought him success. However, because the NDP wizards that spend 90 per cent of their time on the Hill heard that a few reporters in the press gallery found Mulcair a bit too acerbic when he dealt with the media, all of a sudden “Angry Tom” had to go.
Hence the bearded teddy bear appeared on the campaign trail flashing wooden and fake smiles at the cameras every opportunity he got. The phoniness of it all was painful to watch and you actually felt sorry for Mulcair that his handlers were forcing him to keep up this idiocy. The media saw through it and voters did too. The only people who didn’t see through it were his handlers because they kept getting him to do it.
The third and most fatal mistake the Mulcair team made in the campaign was the “we will balance every single budget, come hell or high water, boom time or recession” pledge. Obviously the Liberal strategists had been doing some research on the issue of balanced budgets and were more aware of the current reality -- as opposed to the dunderheads around the NDP leader.
First, Canada has a very healthy debt to GDP ratio so selling bonds at reasonable interest rates is not a problem. This, of course, was not the case in the early 1990’s. Second, world interest rates are at record lows so running reasonable deficits is not costly or harmful to the long-term health of the economy. Third, Canada has very good economic growth forecasts. Fourth, someone may have wanted to remind the NDP that the previous Conservative government had just run seven consecutive deficits and no one batted an eye.
The Liberal campaign strategists knew all of this very well and also knew the economy needed some stimulus and infrastructure investment. Hence, they pledged to run a few deficits if elected to fund an infrastructure program before balancing the budget by the end of the first term.
At this point, in late August, the NDP campaign strategists should have taken a deep breath and seriously thought about how they would respond to the Liberal's deficit pledge. The most prudent response would have been to emphasize that the two most important things the party wanted to do was bring in an affordable childcare program and a universal pharmacare program. If this meant running a few deficits, so be it. At the same time, even if the NDP ran a few deficits, the party could have said it was confident it could balance the budget by the end of the term while keeping these as the key priorities.
However, as we all know, this is not what happened. In the NDP’s obsession to outflank the Liberals on the right, the party’s response to the Liberal deficit pledge was, again, that it would balance each and every budget if elected to office. And there is no doubt Mulcair’s team made this pledge before they had costed the platform.
So from here on in, Mulcair struggled to answer how he would balance budgets without significantly raising taxes or scrapping the party’s social program pledges. And, not surprisingly, he never really had an answer.
And soon key social programs like affordable childcare and universal pharmacare began to fall by the way side. If it was the difference between balancing the budget or not, these social programs would not happen until the end of the first term. Or maybe the end of the second term. Or maybe not at all.
Mulcair and the NDP strategists began doing lots of whining about how Tommy Douglas balanced all budgets when he was Saskatchewan premier and they were just following his lead. The only thing they forgot to mention is that Tommy Douglas never ran a campaign with the key focus being balancing budgets.
If he had, the CCF would have never been elected in Saskatchewan. Douglas won elections by promising to bring in public auto insurance, rural electrification, a trade union act, a human rights act, preventing farm foreclosures and many other social programs – all of which the CCF delivered on in short order. Sure, Medicare was not implemented until 1962 but this was after a lot of other things had already been accomplished.
The key point is Mulcair’s team forgot the wise and important adage that political parties need to fight campaigns on their own ground in order to be successful. The NDP’s ground is innovative social programming. This is the area where the party has thrived and gained the respect of Canadians. Fiscal prudence is the ground of the Conservatives and Liberals but never the NDP.
Provincial NDP governments have been very good at managing finances but nobody cares and the party will never get credit for it. Just like the Conservatives will never get credit for innovations in Medicare. This is not their ground; it is the NDP’s ground.
Once the NDP was fighting the campaign on fiscal prudence and balancing budgets, they were losing and the party never recovered. It was the turning point of the campaign and why the party slid so badly in the polls in Ontario after the pledge.
After this, the media and most of the public stopped taking Mulcair’s NDP seriously. They were no longer credible. And the anti-Harper coalition began to coalesce around Trudeau and the Liberals who were running a very solid retail campaign. From here on in it was a two party fight between the Liberals and the Conservatives and the NDP was assured third place. In other words, Mulcair was dead in the water by the end of August and the polls showed this as the Liberals continued to gain momentum.
Liberal momentum continued to grow in all provinces before really taking effect in the last two weeks of the campaign as the anti-Harper coalition stampeded over to the party. Knowing they were in trouble and that efforts to make the ballot question about the Harper government’s good management of the economy (false, of course) had failed, in a last and desperate move to hold on to power the Conservatives tried to shift the election to divisive issues such the niqab, reluctance to take in Syrian refugees and the "barbaric practices" tip line.
None of this had any effect on the NDP campaign. The NDP was already out of it and all but irrelevant. What it did do is shore up some of Harper’s base but at the same time it ensured even more voters were going to come out and vote Liberal to oust the government.
There are a good number of NDP apologists who fail to realize all the mistakes the party made in the campaign prior to when niqab became an issue and who say Mulcair’s principled stand on the issue was why the party lost so many seats in Quebec.
This is utter nonsense. Those voters for whom the niqab was a serious issue voted for both the Bloc Quebecois and Conservatives and both parties saw some very minor gains. However, the real story in Quebec, as in the rest of the country, was the tremendous growth of the Liberals. As in all other parts of the country, by late September, the anti-Harper coalition in Quebec had lined up solidly behind the Liberals and abandoned the NDP.
They did this in spite of past misgivings about the Trudeau name and the Liberal sponsorship scandal. The key issue in Quebec, as most other parts of the country, was ousting Harper and voters in this province were no different than those in other provinces in realizing the NDP was “just not ready.” And for NDP apologists to say the sole reason the NDP lost seats in Quebec was because of Mulcair’s stance on the niqab is a joke. In particular because Trudeau came out harder against the Harper government on the niqab than did Mulcair.
We are now closing in on a week since the Liberal election victory and not surprisingly the other parties are already moving on. Stephen Harper has stepped down as Conservative leader and the party is making plans to choose an interim leader and then organize a leadership convention. A number of Conservative MPs, past and present, are speaking frankly that the party had become too negative under Harper and it needs to change if the Conservatives are to expand their base. Gilles Duceppe has also stepped down as Bloc Quebecois Leader as this party looks to rebuild, if that is even possible. It is business as usual in the Green Party and don’t expect much to change there as Elizabeth May is more than happy to have the party be largely irrelevant as long as she continues to get some media attention.
However, talking about the main parties, it is only in the NDP where there is no indication of a change in course. As was the case during the campaign, those in the inner circle continue to blame everyone else for the party’s failures.
When the NDP campaign began to crumble, they first blamed the mainstream media for giving overly favourable coverage to Trudeau. When each and every polling company showed big time momentum for the Liberals compared to an epic slide for the NDP, they screamed all the pollsters were wrong and the NDP was much stronger than indicated.
And, when the NDP got solidly thumped on election day, the partisans now blame the voters for being naive and being duped by the Liberals as some sort of alternative to the Conservatives when the NDP is the only “real” alternative. This again is, of course, nonsense as the NDP very happily ran a campaign to the right of the Liberals and the Justin Trudeau Liberals are very different from the Stephen Harper Conservatives.
For those in the NDP, the bottom line is never to look in the mirror even in times of total failure.
And perhaps what is most alarming is that Thomas Mulcair is now musing about staying on as party leader for an indefinite period of time. Why? Because his superior oratory skills in Parliament are supposedly needed to hold the new Liberal government to account. The same skills that gained the NDP absolutely zero on the campaign trail. Does anyone really believe that none of the remaining MPs could step in and perform the role of a third party leader on an interim basis?
The NDP just ran one of the most disastrous campaigns in Canadian history. Dropping from first to third in polling and shedding 51 seats in the process. And, to those leading the party, it is as if none of it ever happened.
If Mulcair and his cronies won’t step down, the caucus should show them the door. But there are no indications at present that this will happen either. This likely says a lot about the weakness of current NDP elected representatives.
In either the Conservatives or Liberals, such incompetence, ineptitude and failure would not be tolerated. But not in the NDP, where delusion always seems to rule the day.
Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.
See also: Doubling down on disaster
See also: Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to
Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?
Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!
Friday, 23 October 2015
In the wake of the catastrophic election result for the NDP -- an election that saw the party squander its position as official opposition and "government-in-waiting" and what seemed its first real shot at power -- comes news that the leader who "led" the party there, Tom Mulcair, intends to stay at the helm.
And seemingly, apparently, not in some understandable caretaker role while the party finds a new face to try to mount a comeback, but for the foreseeable future:
“He’s in it for the long haul,” his spokesman, George Smith, told the Star after Mulcair spent the past two days speaking to both elected and defeated NDP MPs as he works to rebuild his team.
“Expect to see him in the House of Commons,” Smith said of Mulcair, who was re-elected to his Montreal riding of Outremont Monday night with about 44 per cent of the vote. “Expect him to hold the new government’s feet to the fire.”
While an utterly suicidal move for the NDP, (a point to which we will return), and one that would not happen in any other party, in the NDP for a variety of reasons this kind of politically blind insanity is nothing new.
Hence we saw Andrea Horwath, the ONDP leader whose bankrupt and opportunist strategy in the 2014 election helped to drive away essential Toronto progressive voters and to hand a totally unanticipated majority to the Liberals, not only remain as leader but actually get a higher approval vote from party delegates at the party's next convention!
While to those outside the political culture of the NDP this is no doubt mystifying, it is part-and-parcel of a party narrative that externalizes blame and responsibility for its own actions.
When a campaign begins to or does unravel or tank it is always the fault of the media, "elites", strategic voting, leftists, progressive voters who "don't understand that the Liberals are not progressive and are the same as the Conservatives", etc, etc, etc.
It is never the strategy of the NDP itself, of its core "strategists", of its narratives or of its leaders.
This convenient unwillingness to engage in any meaningful self-criticism flows at least in part from an essential fiction that is shared by the remaining party members and its leadership cliques alike -- that being that the NDP is still the grand party of principle that it was in the past and that. despite all of the evidence, it is still a party that is fundamentally different than all the others.
This collectively maintained group-think delusion is why every election we see the paint-by-numbers denunciations by New Democrats of anyone who dares to deny this mythology and the standard calls for "unity" and "solidarity with the party and leadership" with the claims that criticism should wait until some magical day that never comes.
That this allows obvious ineptitude by the leadership and signs of impending doom, which were visible to everyone but New Democrats themselves in the days leading up to October 19, to go unchallenged and proceed unabated to disaster does not seem to dawn on anyone in any serious way.
It does the party far more harm than good.
This "circle-the wagons" mentality is critical to understanding not only why the party so often seems to repeat the same mistakes, but also why without a major cleaning of the house at the top, absolutely nothing will change.
Especially when seen in conjunction with the NDP's ever more centralized and undemocratic nature and structure which makes the possibility of serious reform from within increasingly remote and quite possibly even impossible.
A very large number of activists, and certainly most of those who believe the party should have a culture of criticism and accountability regarding the leadership, have already left.
Tom Mulcair remaining as leader will ensure that this cycle simply repeats. It will prevent any serious criticism and rethinking of the direction the party has taken to the right and centre over the last few years for the obvious reason that this would have to of necessity involve a serious critiquing of Mulcair's thinking and strategy and that of the staffers around him! Real change for the NDP requires a fundamental questioning of the way the party has been run and has presented itself in its quest to supplant the Liberals as Canada's natural opposition to the Conservatives and even whether this quest, framed as such, is really what should be the party's objective at all.
The NDP did not lose despite the leadership and strategy of Mulcair and the NDP's senior strategists and core leadership, it lost because of them.
The total fiction that the fault lies without will linger on as the narrative until the party and its members accept this reality and cut loose the Third Way, neo-populist and strikingly unprincipled leadership cadres that hang as an albatross around the neck of what once was Canada's social democratic party.
See also: Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to
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