Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, September 17, 2012

The Liberals need a merger candidate

It isn’t obvious who it would be, but the Liberal party deserves to have a candidate in the coming leadership race who stands forthrightly in favour of promoting a merger or close cooperation with the NDP.

When you think about it, it is awfully strange that a champion for merger hasn’t emerged already. Consider for a moment who was saying that the Liberal party had to reflect on this option after last year’s election. Were they marginal figures?

Well, no. For a starter, there was Jean Chrétien, the most successful modern Liberal prime minister. There was his experienced strategic sidekick, Eddie Goldenberg. Oh yes, and then there was the most prominent Liberal MP left standing after the 2011 election. Someone named Bob Rae.

Nonetheless, the Liberal party has not had an open or frank discussion of the possibility of working with, instead of against, the NDP.

When Bob Rae mused about the possibility of a party merger in the days after the 2011 election, the party apparatus quickly shut him down. The party executive gave Rae a choice: if you want to run for the interim leadership of the party, then drop the subject. And so he did.

When the longtime Quebec Liberal organizer and MP, Denis Coderre, mused about a possible concordat with the NDP just a few months later, Bob Rae, by then interim leader, was poacher turned gamekeeper.

“A debate will happen,” Rae told reporters, “but if somebody says to me, ‘Is it a debate about something real?’ my answer is, no. I’m not running a political seminar here. I’m running a political party that’s looking at real issues in front of it.”

But real or unreal, when the Liberals met in convention at the beginning of the 2012, there was no debate: there was almost no mention of the subject.

Perhaps, you may think, the reason for the Liberals’ enforced silence is that Liberal voters wouldn’t stand for it. That the Liberal public will insist on having a “Liberal offering” at the next election as some party insiders put it.

Well, no, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

According to an Ipsos Reid poll just a few months ago, Liberal supporters favour a merger with the NDP by a margin of almost two-to-one.

Not surprisingly, what many Liberal supporters want, if not expect, is to have an option at the ballot box in 2015 that would replace the existing Conservative government with one that more closely reflects their views.

Contrast what has happened in the Liberal party since 2011 to what went on in the NDP. In the immediate aftermath of the last election, with Jack Layton still at the helm and the Liberal party seemingly on the ropes, a triumphal party convention in Vancouver considered a resolution that would forbid any effort at collaboration with the Liberal party. It was soundly defeated.

In the NDP leadership contest that followed Layton’s tragic death, just one candidate stepped forward to advocate a common front with the Liberals. Nathan Cullen argued for a system of joint nominations in which the Liberals and NDPers could back a single candidate to defeat the Conservatives in some ridings.

At first, he was greeted with a predictably tribal reaction from his NDP rivals. His idea was dismissed as verging on disloyalty to the party. Some journalists saw Cullen’s advocacy of cooperation as the kiss of death to his candidacy – and perhaps he did too for a time.

But as the campaign matured, his idea attracted increasing interest. Cullen emerged from the pack of also-rans to come a surprising third up against the initial front-runners, Brian Topp and the eventual winner, Thomas Mulcair.

In the latter part of the leadership race, Cullen was attracting the most new members to the party – some channeled through outside progressive groups such as Leadnow.ca – and he was raising the most money. Other candidates began emphasizing their own “cooperative” approach. And while Mulcair rejected the Cullen proposal, he presented himself to the convention with a backdrop that declared: Progressives United.

Among those NDPers, including Mulcair, who opposed party cooperation during the leadership race, one of the strongest arguments was simply that the Liberal party wasn’t interested.

At the end of the NDP leadership race, however, there was no doubt that many New Democrat activists – and possibly an even larger percentage of NDP supporters if the polls are to be believed – were very much interested in the progressive parties to work together.

That’s because although the Liberals and NDP have real differences, on federalism and to a degree on the question of individualism versus collectivism, they also have a broadly shared view of many social and economic issues.

A majority of Canadians voted in the last election for parties that unlike the Harper Conservatives, were against deep corporate tax cuts, were concerned about rising inequality in Canada, believed that we could and should do something about climate change, and acknowledged that market forces sometimes have to be controlled, contained or regulated.

Their problem was that there was no way that this majority, divided as it was among three political parties – the Liberals, NDP and the Greens – could beat the 39.6% of Canadians who supported the Conservatives.

Now, wouldn’t a candidate who wanted to do something about that find some appeal among Liberals and their supporters? I think so.

And if enough Liberals made the case for a common progressive option in 2015, wouldn’t the NDP have to respond? I think maybe it would.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Paul Adams

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