Out in Left-Centre Field

Who dares disturb my slumber?[/giantvoice]

Oh, it's an NDP leadership race. Just kidding -- I have been following it for a while now.

For starters, I wish it was shorter. The race is depriving the party of its best front-benchers right when the NDP needs to be working flat-out to cement their newfound gains. But instead, we get a campaign so long that the media are only paying attention to the polls showing NDP slippage in Quebec (among, yes, a few other regions).

Hilariously, the mass media still don't know how to make heads or tails of the federal scene in Canada. The mentality of "only two parties can ever win" has been so prevalent for so long that to contemplate the mere possibility that change might be real (gasp!) is something akin to an unspeakable sin. The glass ceiling has been shattered and decisively so. Get used to it.

And yet, at the same time, those polls make a valid point: the next leader of the NDP has to be up to the task of not only shoring up the gains the party has made, but also growing beyond to reach out to people who have never voted in their favour. That will undoubtedly leave some hard-liners unhappy, but then, no one can ever have it all at the expense of everyone else -- that is the essence of both compromise and democracy.

Staying put, playing it safe, just won't cut it. The status quo is not what the NDP is about -- if that's what you truly want, go vote Liberal. The former dream about the future; the latter obsess about the past.

"Aha!", but you say, "they could just merge and have a little bit of both! They're both leftist parties anyway, right? What's the big deal?"

I can say it once, I can say it a thousand times: it's just not that simple.

Fundamentally, the NDP and the Liberals just aren't that close in terms of principles, values and ideology. To most NDPers, the Liberals aren't even left of centre at all. Most Liberals don't consider their party to be left of centre (or right of it), sometimes giving their stance the oxymoronic appellation of "radical centrism" or the "radical middle". There's nothing radical about the Liberals; there hasn't been for decades. Long story short: we don't want to be them, and they don't want to be us.

For much of the 1990s -- the decade I grew up and first met politics -- the Liberals made an art out of campaigning from the left and governing from the right. They'd talk a good game about government programs and social stability, and routinely garner large numbers of disenchanted, demoralized NDP-leaning voters to swell their majorities. Then, when it came time to govern again, they'd turn around and go right back to the cutting corporate taxes and slashing provincial transfers. They were Tories in all but name -- and in fact were gladly supported by the Reform Party for adopting their fiscal policies. It was both predictable and utterly transparent.

It's a scene NDPers have watched time and time again: the Liberal Party, stampeding otherwise NDP-leaning voters into inflating Liberal victories, casting themselves as the righteous guardians of sanity against the Conservative (EVIL!) and NDP (COMMUNISTS!) bogeymen. It kept working, and the Liberals got gradually more complacent until the voting public finally got wise to their act and shifted to more credible rivals on both the right and the left.

And now, it is the Liberals who want the NDP's compassion. There's a proposal going around, endorsed in particular by the otherwise ingenious Nathan Cullen, that in the absence of an actual merger, the NDP and Liberals should agree to not compete against each other in ridings across the country so as to unite the "progressive vote" and, theoretically, unseat the greater enemy of Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

First of all, and more simply, this ignores the possibility that left/centre votes might not readily transfer to one party or the other. More hard-line partisan voters might be so butthurt that (1) they might not vote at all, (2) they might vote for some random fringe candidate, or (3) they could hop straight to the Conservatives in revenge for "their" candidate not getting in.

(I would know; in Ontario's 2007 provincial election, I voted for the local PC candidate because the NDPer sucked. I hopped right over the Liberals because, despite the media frenzy over the "religious school funding" issue, John Tory and his local candidate seemed like reasonable people.)

Secondly, what's worse, this amounts to basically handing the Liberals an easy way to sneak up and take the NDP down from behind. The NDP just won Opposition eight short months ago. Their leader promptly died, they still have yet to solidify those gains, and every new federal poll accompanies a column crowing about their supposedly inevitable fall back to "natural" third-party status. And now you're asking them to freely hand that advantage back to the Liberals, who beat them down, demoralized them, and laughed and spat in their face for the better part of a century? It goes against any rational instinct -- and parties have never won by being soft to those who would harm them.

I mean, I'd love to be friends and have everything be happy and roses, but isn't that asking a bit way, way too much too soon?

I know that we need to kick the win-at-all-costs, beat-'em-when-they're-down philosophy that has gradually and incessantly been rotting our politics from the inside out. (Don't even get me started on the fun in the USA.) It is critical that we must restore decency and openness and trust to politics in order to regain the confidence and engagement of the public.

Two parties merging or not competing is not going to do that. As human beings, we can do our best to forgive what others have done, but there is no way we can forget. Decades of antipathy and malfeasance cannot vanish overnight. The idea is admirable, but in practice, the time has not yet come.

And it takes time to build trust. I'm not going to pretend the NDP haven't been jerks to the Liberals on countless occasions -- so in that vein, I would readily imagine there are many Liberals who feel as I do (a strange manifestation of cooperation, but still). To start, let's make a commitment to be at least nice to each other and see how it goes from there. One day, we might all be ready.

~~~~~

And, in a highly tangential addendum, from the ranks of the "Evil Overlord List":

#6) I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

#24) I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

#48) I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus, if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.

This is already old news, but five days ago, one man in Norway committed an atrocity that words can scarcely begin to convey.

Anders Breivik, who to any eye would have seemed an ordinary (if outspoken) man six days ago, played on the fears and insecurities of the world in turning bombs and bullets against his fellow Norwegians. Indeed, his attack was not only a strike against the people, young and old, of Norway; it was an attack against all of us around the world and against our complacent conviction that such an act could never happen in our modern society.

Regardless of where on the political landscape Mr. Breivik's sympathies lay, one thing is certain: extremism, whether left or right, is our greatest enemy. When human beings are so blinded by anger and hatred that they can dehumanize others to the point of murder, then we all know we have failed in that unending struggle.

Anders Breivik attacked the present when he set off a bomb in the midst of key government ministries in downtown Oslo. He attacked the future when he perpetrated a horrific massacre at a summer youth camp. There is only one direction he wants us to go: backwards, back to a past when diversity was considered a weakness and when other cultures were dominated and enslaved for the sake of the colour of their skin.

Clearly, Mr. Breivik had some deep disagreements with the direction that his country was taking. But that does not make his actions any less odious; dialogue and debate, not hails of bullets, are how we, as civilized human beings, are called to work out our differences. War has its place, when and only when all other avenues have been tried and found ineffective.

In his twisted mind, Breivik saw something he considered wrong with the youth of Norway and the youth of the world. He saw how we embrace progress, how we embrace working together to forge a better and more inclusive future. He tried to send the message that we, the future, are the enemy.

He could not be more wrong.

It is our job to bring forward a new way, a new mindset to politics that will not inspire madmen and murderers like Anders Breivik. Certainly, we cannot eradicate violence entirely; tragic events will still take place all over the world. But we can do our best to promote respect, civility and even friendship in public life, so that those who traffic in fear and hate will have no example to look up to, and no inspiration to act upon.

July 22nd was a tragic day for Norway and for the world. Let's not get bogged down in pointless and baseless finger-pointing; instead, let's take this event for the harsh eye-opener that it is, and the indication that we still have so much more work to do in building a better world.

Remember the dead. But honour their memory by letting their hopes and dreams of peace and tolerance live on through your actions, every day, everywhere.

Adam Schneider
Oakville, ON

A few days ago, one young woman, barely out of university, dared to make a peaceful act of protest that astounded and shocked a nation.

Brigette DePape's quiet act of civil disobedience was all the louder for the way in which it was conducted: holding up a "STOP HARPER" sign on the floor of the Senate chambers in the midst of the Throne Speech. Her actions didn't have the glamour of high-flying political manoeuvering, nor did they have the in-your-face anger of protests like those at the G20 in Toronto last year. She was just a lone person, with a handmade sign; the difference lay in where she chose to stand.

I guess Brigette's actions strike home a little more than usual for me, barely a month removed from university classes in my own right. I can't help but marvel at the way that a quiet protest on the floor of the Senate could achieve such a balance of right and wrong -- as the best acts of protest ultimately do.

Right, in that she has a point: Stephen Harper's Conservative government has consistently hit unprecedented heights of obsessive control over everything from the business of Parliament to mere photo-ops and anything in between. Dissent has become a crime in Parliament -- not just to the Speaker's right, either -- and Mr. Harper has willfully led the charge to greater anger and divisiveness for his own gain.

Every so often, someone has to come along and remind us that debate and dissent are essential and healthy parts of democracy. If this is what it takes, then so be it; Ms. DePape is to be commended for that.

Wrong, also, in that she paid fundamental disrespect to the institutions through which our democracy functions. Her protest flagrantly disregarded the decorum of Parliament; how many of us have been taught that it is rude and improper to interrupt someone (in this case, the Governor-General of Canada himself) while they are speaking? Both parliamentary procedure and common manners took a beating at the hands of a girl and her octagonal sign.

Furthermore, Ms. DePape and her fellow parliamentary pages are meant to serve as neutral, non-partisan intermediaries; how much of that trust will be shaken by her actions? Her superiors were right to fire her from her position; Ms. DePape's example has eroded trust in the neutrality of the page service, no doubt primarily with regards to the government that her words targeted. Worse, any other employers seeking to fill positions that require scrupulous neutrality may never turn to her in the future.

But then, in some ways, what else could she have done? Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett's suggestions included taking the protest outside, to the lawn of Parliament -- who would have noticed? The focus was on the Senate for the Throne Speech; no one on the streets of Ottawa would have taken more than a momentary glance. The best protests are those that grip our attention and make us force ourselves to watch.

Ms. DePape must have known that such a high-profile act would cost her a coveted, well-connected job; it must have been worth it to her. Whether you or I think she had genuine political concern or just a desire for attention, it is undeniable that she showed extraordinary bravery in voicing her opinion. Her actions have, at least in part, touched off a debate that we needed to have about the need for courage and engagement where we, as a nation, only see complacency.

At the same time, as stupid as we were as a nation to hand Mr. Harper an unfettered, four-year-long majority mandate, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about acting on it. The Conservatives won the election; there is no changing that fact, and there is no point complaining about it. Far from needing an "Arab Spring", as Ms. DePape says -- an entirely absurd comparison, given that people in the Middle East are fighting dictators and paying with their lives -- we need to work together to ensure that abuses of democracy are never allowed to happen, and if they do occur, to hand appropriate punishment to those responsible.

Democracy isn't just something we take out for a little fresh air once every two, three, four years. It requires us to get off our asses and make our voices heard on the issues that matter to us. It requires us to keep the people who we elected responsible to the people they represent. It requires us to be vigilant, principled, and above all, courageous.

In the aftermath of the stunning upheavals in the 2011 federal election, with the Conservatives finally winning their coveted majority and the NDP doing a bang-up job of demolishing the Bloc Quebecois (and hey, Liz May finally won the Greens a seat in there too!), the federal Liberal Party has lost its most recent failure-of-a-leader and is joining the Maple Leafs and Jays in full "rebuilding mode".

So now, the media and the "blogosphere" (I hate that term but I can't think of anything better) are alive with speculation and advice on who the Liberals should hire and what strategies they should pursue in building themselves back up to their ancestral greatness. In the interest of not being here all day, I will focus on what I think of their leadership prospects, since that is what many Liberal partisans appear to think will bring them the quickest, most immediate benefit.

Personally, I believe that the party has much more in the way of structural and systemic problems, and that their recent defeat resulted not only from an incoherent and overconfident leader but also a tendency to rely on their past actions from 20, 30, 40 years ago and to expect that voters would simply reward them with a new mandate based on tradition, not any good reason in the present. The Liberals "mailed it in" this election, and they paid for it. They have been losing credibility for a long time as they twisted in the wind, trying to be all things to all people. They need to pick something concrete to stand for, and fast. But enough with little tangents ...

In the hunt for a new Liberal leader, many names have surfaced, from young New Brunswick MP and son-of-a-Governor-General Dominic LeBlanc, to the pragmatic Nova Scotian Scott Brison, to Quebec backroom power-broker and ex-lieutenant Denis Coderre, to rocket man Marc Garneau, to second-generation Liberal heir-apparent Justin Trudeau, to defeated Outremont candidate Martin Cauchon, to the Ontario premier's brother David McGuinty, to the locally popular but uninterested Dr. Carolyn Bennett, to the stalwart Western holdout Ralph Goodale. But the most buzz, by far, has centered on Bob Rae, MP for Toronto Centre and runner-up in the recent Liberal leadership ballots that gave us Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. His ambitions are public, and his credentials are impressive.

But ultimately, Rae will not, or at least should not, become the leader of the Liberals. Ever.

Why? Like I said above, his experience and his past credentials are impressive. He is, no doubt, an intelligent man. He consistently wins his riding in downtown Toronto by solid margins. Why shouldn't he win?

Quite apart from the fact his riding has been a safe Liberal stronghold since time immemorial (thanks, Rosedale), electing Bob Rae as leader would be the final nail in the slowly-closing coffin in which the Liberal party is currently interring itself. It would be electoral suicide. As much as he is an intelligent man, Rae had his chance -- a big one, with a majority -- as premier of Ontario, and he blew it. Badly. I won't even make the standard excuse that he governed in the worst recession until the recent (ongoing since 2008) one; any number of people could have gotten through the same lousy situation in better shape. Instead, Rae blew it so badly that he left the Ontario NDP in a coma to the present day and, most likely, for decades to come. His name is dirt in Ontario, once the sweep-prone stronghold of Liberal majorities. With the Liberal brand in tatters both in the west and in Quebec, they need to rebuild their chances in Ontario to have any hope of a comeback.

If rebuilding in Ontario is what the Liberals seek, then electing Rae will do the complete opposite; it will deliver what remains of Ontario right into the Conservatives' hands. As one acquaintance of mine said recently, the Conservatives need only repeat the phrase "Rae Days" enough times to knock the Liberals back down to the basement in the polls. Worse, this tactic would not only slaughter the Liberals but the NDP as well, since the ONDP were the party in power when Rae turned his tenure as premier into an unmitigated train-wreck. Voters have long memories, and only people at my age or younger (i.e. 20s at best) will not recall Rae's government and the myriad bungles thereof.

And if there's anything that the Conservatives' recent campaign taught us, it's that they are very good at repeating the same word (e.g. "coalition") over and over and over and over and over until either (a) we are all utterly sick of it, or (b) we begin to buy it as the truth. Never mind that Ignatieff had no coherent response to the issue while his rivals did, nor that the biggest concern was the worry about appeasing Quebec. The Conservatives have no problem with hammering on a single issue in response to every criticism until we, as voters, tire of it and either walk away in disgust or support them. You saw the glee with which they successfully savaged Ignatieff; is there any doubt they would do the same to Rae? And given Ontario voters' memories of Rae's government, is there any reason to doubt that the Conservatives would succeed again?

The worst part is, much of the Liberals' alternatives to Rae are either not ready (Trudeau, LeBlanc, etc.), uninspiring (Brison, McGuinty, Bennett, etc.), of dubious character (Coderre, Cauchon, etc.), aging (Goodale, etc.), or recently out of a job (Hall Findlay, Dryden, Volpe, etc.). Sadly, Rae might be the best that they can do -- which really speaks to the quality of people whom their party is attracting in their dark hours. If anything, in the past, the Liberal Party has been able to advertise itself as the quickest, easiest route to power for the ambitious. Now, it can't even rely on that bandwagon status anymore, eclipsed by both a united Conservative right and the NDP that they used to belittle and ridicule without end.

The Liberals' troubles are well-deserved, and indeed, it would serve them best to rebuild the hard way, from the ground up, starting with a compelling raison d'etre. But if past experience is any indication, the Liberals will most likely go for what seems the quickest, easiest way back to prominence from which they can posture to have a claim on power. It would be their undoing. For their own good, and for the good of the entire left and centre of Canadian politics, the Liberals need to find lasting solutions to their problems before they can ever contemplate acting for short-term gain.

It's election time, everybody!

And we're already seeing the onslaught of posturing, extravagant promises, attack ads and defamation that are driving so many Canadians away from the ballot box. I look back and I wonder, when did it get this way? When did things get so angry and vitriolic and divisive? When did we decide to import the aggressive, blood-sport style of politics from our neighbours to the south and others around the world?

Maybe the earliest time I recall ever being aware of politics was in the late 1990s. I was still in elementary school, Jean Chretien was already a constant at the federal level, while Mike Harris had been in power in Ontario for a couple of years. One of the few things that really struck home for me was being out of school for weeks (that was great in those young days!) and seeing my teachers picketing up and down the sidewalk in front of my school, chanting and yelling and waving signs like "Stop Bill 103" and so forth.

I remember that it was vaguely defined as a "bad" thing, and I remember being disgusted when Ontario voters were so stupid as to hand Harris another majority government in 1999. That's probably when I started paying attention for good. So, in a way, did negativity draw me into politics? Was that what the people who called the shots were thinking, that it would bring greater entertainment for the masses and spur interest in politics? Well, it worked, but in the wrong way. It drew in and motivated the hard-liners and the ideologues, right and left, and has turned off moderates from across the span of political sympathies.

And the trend hasn't stopped. Stephen Harper -- who has since gathered many of the mainstays of Harris' government, like Flaherty, Clement, Baird and Giorno -- has been running some of the nastiest, most intentionally divisive parliamentary politics that I have ever seen. And the other parties, Liberal, NDP, and Bloc alike (hell, even the independents) have been ever so happy to oblige. The accusations and slander fly thick in the air and confident proclamations of party superiority are everywhere you turn. Rarely do you see MPs even permitted to vote their conscience or those of their constituents; power is ever more centralized in the leader and their circle of trusted insiders.

How is this even supposed to be appealing to the ordinary people, like me, who vote? How is that supposed to be appealing to future generations who will have to take on the burden of governance? Is that setting a good example to follow? Or is democracy itself simply being run into the ground for short-term convenience?

There are signs of hope. The proposed coalition back in 2008 showed that parties can set aside their revulsion for one another and work for a common good. Even the proposal signed by Harper, Layton and Duceppe back in 2004 was a sign that parties can come together from differing ideologies. But of course, compromise is seen as an admission of weakness, so now everyone is either swearing it off or demonizing the idea far and wide. Party supporters cannot, cannot be seen as ever admitting that their chosen parties (which are really just coalitions of individuals) are anything less than perfect or will do anything less than win outright; to say otherwise is considered to be an act of treason.

So here goes. As you've probably seen from my past words and actions, I am an NDP supporter. That's where I've been in the past; I may yet switch elsewhere but I do not see it happening. I do not see the NDP as perfect; they have a number of policies, like Senate abolition, that I don't agree with. I don't see their leader, Jack Layton, as perfect; good and competent as he is, he has made a number of mistakes in the past, like declaring his opposition to a budget without ever seeing it, or failing to sufficiently reprimand deputy leader Libby Davies after her comments that the state of Israel was illegitimate. The NDP also attracts many hard-line socialists and communists with whom I am uncomfortable; I do not believe that any single system of belief is ever the answer to our problems.

Hell, I haven't always supported the NDP; I remember the 2007 Ontario election, one of the first after I finally reached voting age at 18. The NDP candidate (Tony Crawford) in my riding (Oakville) did not impress me in the slightest; any question he was asked in a candidates' debate, he always turned to the issue of identity theft. Clearly, he was an expert on that subject, which would be of concern in a relatively affluent, middle-to-upper-class community like Oakville. But people who seek the honour of being an elected representative need to broaden their understanding and not harp on a single issue every time they are asked about diverse subjects. So, ironically enough, with my earlier Harris-era experiences fresh in my mind, I voted for the PC candidate. Strange, right? Well, the local PC candidate, Rick Byers, seemed a competent and well-rounded fellow in the few times I heard from him, while his party's leader, John Tory, was reasonable and moderate despite his ill-advised position on school funding. And why did I skip over the Liberals, you ask? I couldn't conscionably support them when they spent the entire campaign ranting about the religious school funding issue and deflecting attention from their own lacklustre record on everything else. (It helps when the media get wrapped up in their own hysteria and cheer you on like trained seals.) If you can't stand on your own record, you don't deserve to be in power; it must be earned, and it is not yours by some sort of birthright.

So no, I'm not going to tell you my chosen party is perfect. The best part of an election is that it is all up to you, the voter. I cannot tell you how to vote. The media cannot tell you how to vote. The choice is yours. Know the candidates, know the platforms, make an informed decision. Who are you most comfortable with? And are you aware and accepting of the fact that no one and no party is perfect?

A different opinion doesn't make someone your enemy. That's something too many people lose sight of far too quickly. Respect, trust and willing cooperation are absolutely necessary if we are to fix the problems that ail our beloved democracy. It's not a perfect system, but it could be a hell of a lot better if we had the will and the bravery to make it as good as we can.