Well that was quick, wasn't it?
The Canadian Champion of leafleteering - Rick Norlock, the Squire of Warworth, appears to have won this one. Despite the news of our very own MP owning the highest bill for leafleteering and casually dismissing his opponents, as people who do little except oppose communication efforts ;he has obviously won the battle of public opinion. I say this because his opponents, the putative nominated candidates for his job, will have to wait for an election All Candidates Meeting, where they can debate this huge waste of public money because the public are not interested. There is no groundswell of angry people banging on Rick's door to tell him what they think. A story without legs!
20 comments:
Not surprisingly I'm sure, I disagree with Ben's conclusion. This is the kind of story that gets implanted in the average voter's brain. It will reverberate, modestly at least, throughout the rest of Riok Norlock's public career. His supporters will dismiss it but the rest will remember. He'll always be the guy who made the top of the Toronto Sun list for spending more on such trash than anyone in the country. If you don't believe me, consider what people would be thinking about Paul Macklin even now if he'd ever been so foolishly and pointlessly profligate. My nephew, who is about as apolitical as a young person can get, was so dismayed by Norlock's behaviour that he called his office to complain. I think these incessant paper rags arriving in our mail have been driving people bonkers!
Martin is onto something. My wife, apolitical to the core, remarked on Norlock's profligacy and said she knew sevdral who would not ve voting for him.
We live in hope, eh?!
I agree, I think this is something that will not be forgotten by anybody in NQW at voting time.
Especially when we got another pointless flyer the day after it was in the local paper!
Impeccable timing, Rick.
So ... er ... um ... well ... ah ... can't we get the guy out along with the whole Harperite crew?
Elsewhere Peter Cleary was whining that these Conservatives are just too good at disparaging their opponents to make them easy to beat.
The heck with that! Let's beat them.
It's easy to do with a 3 step plan that only needs to be in place for the span of the next election campaign:
1. where the Liberals and NDP show relatively close results, have at it as usual,
2. in ridings where the NDP usually comes in 2nd to a Conservative, the Liberals step back and let them take the Conservative out,
3. where the Liberals usually come in 2nd to a Conservative, the NDP steps back to let the conservative be taken out.
That's what Harper analyzed had to stop happening to the PC/Reform, allowing Chretien to always skate up the middle. He's turned the tables. Why isn't Iggy brave enough to turn them back?
Stop whining about how there is no way to get it done and get it done. Do to Harper what he's been doing to us.
And the quid pro quo is? What political party is going to diminish its holdings just to defeat an opponent like a harper person. What does the NDP get in return for its benevolence? If the libs return to power through such an arrangement what does the NDP get except that the satisfaction the Harper has been replaced by Iggy when most progressives think that that Iggy and Harper are interchangeable.
Show us an advantage to the NDP and perhaps vote splitting avoidance actions may be advantageous
What advantage? By my count, the biggest NDP caucus we've ever seen on Parliament Hill for one.
And, being much more stongly anti-Harper than pro-NDP you'll forgive me for viewing getting him out as a real success in and of itself.
Iggy and Harper interchangeable? I think that's hyperbole but even if it is 100% true, a change would be nice and that's good enough for me.
If Iggy and Harper are truly interchangable, then replacing one with the other is hardly a change now, is it?
That's the whole point, Anonymous. The two leaders are virtually indistinguishable, and Canadians lose with either one in charge.
So the NDP has the biggest caucus in their hiatory but still no power to implement programs. Window dressing but they should feel good because they have replaced one right-wing ideologue with anothe fuzzy right of centre leader who disregards proressives in his own party never mind listening to the enemy in the NDP. Some choice
Ben and Deb, your excellent arguments lead to 4 more years of Harper as Prime Minister. They also carry the strong possibility of Harper as the leader of a majority government.
It is shameful that the centre, centre-left and left cannot do the same simple figuring that Harper himself did for the Right, pushing aside the likes of Joe Clark and Preston Manning to get elected as the government.
Everyone disparages Dion. I didn't think he was "a godsend" or anything like that but we almost had Harper out. And "in" would have been an imperfect coalition I would have gladly embraced as a perfectly acceptable alternative.
Where's the thinking / willingness that will stop us languishing on the moral high ground of never becoming the government?
Stop staking out the same old positions and the objections that have been held as unquestioned gospel for decades. Start re-inventing yourselves to match the times in which we currently live.
I stated that anyone saying Harper and Iggy are interchangeable is guilty of hyperbole.
So, for me, it would be real change.
You said the two are interchangeable, so fo you it would not be real change. I understand that.
I only ask that you avoid putting your words in my mouth. You are formidable at argument and so your words do not lose any power when they are kept in just your mouth.
Even if Iggy and Hatrper were interchangeable, as some of think they are if one adopts votesplitting then how do you placate the minority party in a non-coalition government?
So, clearly our Anon. poster is a good liberal, ready to cast aside watery principles to get a Harper-lite elected.
Isn't that the same pragmatism that got them Iggy as leader? Look how well that is working out.
I would add that it's curious Anon. does not think Harper and Iggy are interchangable, yet seems to believe liberals and NDPers are. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It seems you find the possibility of actually forming the government to be daunting. It also sounds a lot like you would prefer to relegate yourselves to being forever in opposition so you can fill the role of conscience of the nation.
I personally prefer to have my conscience exercising some effect directly on what is put into action by my body. To forever keep the two disconnected seems a bizarre wish.
If a political party is afraid to hold power, why does it exist?
As an aside to Deb, I believe this is the first time in my life that anyone has ever labelled me a Liberal --whether "good" or otherwise. Family and friends who know me would be rolling on the floor with laughter after hearing that comment. For the record, I am not a member of that party, never have been, never would be.
Politics is the art of compromise. I rue the day Harper had a blinding flash that caused him to see what that could mean for the Right in Canada. I look forward to the day the Left and the centre-left and whatever elements of the centre we can net have a corresponding blinding flash.
If you look at the successes --and the failures-- of the provincial and territorial governments that the NDP has formed, the lesson was success comes through broad coalitions, through doing as much as possible to eliminate the competition, and, yes! through taking a realist's view of what is and what is not a principle.
This is how Darrell Dexter formed a government in Nova Scotia. It is how we've done it in Manitoba.
It is how we've done it in the past in B.C., in Saskatchewan, in the Yukon. It is how we currently came to form the official opposition in B.C. under Carole James.
In the past, someone doctrinaire told me Mike Harcourt was interchangeable with leaders of the time in other parties.
That past remark echoes in your present posts here.
There is a difference between sticking by one's principles, which is a fine thing to do, and, being so rigid that one sees everything as if it is carved in stone even when it is not actually at the level of "a principle" but looks that way just because we are being doctrinaire.
It is not a metter of forming a stronger opposition. Votesplitting is futile unless a meaningful coalition is entered into after the votesplitting. No-one has even contemplated that, all they want to do is to get elected and get rid of harper. But who gets to share the power and how is a fundamental question to be answered before votesplitting is undertaken?
It would be helpful if Anon. would reveal his/her identity; it would give much more credibility to the comments. It's easy to make any kind of claim when you're invisible.
You may be NDP but you're no socialist, that's for sure, or you would never contemplate any merger of the "left and centre left".
But current NDP thinking isn't quite socialist either, so it could happen, and it would mean the effective end of what is left of the socialist vision for Canada.
I think Lawrence Martin is reading this thread. Just kidding.
Interesting to read his column in today's Globe and Mail, though:
Lawrence Martin "It's only been a decade, but the conservative way is redefining us"
For a long time now, certain diehards in the NDP have held the view that the natural order of politics in Canada is to have only 2 parties. The Liberals would be eliminated. The NDP and the Conservatives would remain.
Every voter from the precise centre in the political Centre out to the Left would come under the "big tent" of the NDP. Every voter from dead centre in the political Centre to the extreme Right would vote Conservative.
It is an interesting dream because all voter statistics show that if this were true, the Right would rarely, if ever, form a government since most voters' preference would place them under that NDP big tent in the vision.
Trouble is: this vision was always at odds with reality. As time goes by, it becomes more and more obvious that this is a pipedream. Rather than the number of parties being reduced from 3 to 2, the number has grown from 3 to at least 5, maybe more. (Which ones are "in" the count and which ones are not?)
I talk to people in the local NDP riding association who still claim things will eventually shake out to that "natural order," with only 2 parties: they anxiously await the predicted collapse -- and disappearance -- of the Liberal Party. It will never happen.
Canada is evolving towards a European type system. If you study the countries there, you see the same trend. England stopped being the kind of 2 party system in the dreams of those I talk about above. It is not Labour / Conservative any more; the Liberal Democrats are in there. In France, it is no longer conservatives and socialists. Same for Germany. Etc.
The way to govern that has evolved in these countries is either to deal with the reality of constant minority government by forming coalitions or to have some form of proportional representation.
It is not only the social democrats who have to adjust to this new reality but liberal parties, green parties, etc.
In the U.S. where the system more or less mandates a perpetual 2 party system, you can analyzed the current reality along the same lines nontheless -- Obama got elected by using coalition type tactics from the new global political realities, and, the Right down there fully intends to unseat the Democrat majority by utilizing the same tactics to their advantage. The far Right of the Republican Party there is sounding very much like Harper with its acknowledgement of the need to bring lots of different types of voters under a new kind of "big tent."
One can only wish that Iggy or Layton or May were an Obama.
And if anyone still thinks we might get some form of proportional representation in this province or this country, recent failed attempts at --a fractured form of-- that mean it will not come back round again for a long time.
Coalition of some sort it must be, then.
So, the exchange of ideas is in danger of being reduced to the implied oneupmanship and put-downs of: you might be NDP but you are not truly socialist. This is a lower level of maturity than I personally would like, having left that style of argument behind when I departed from high school. More than that, though, isn't this precisely the problem? If we are so quick to divide amongst ourselves, then the Right has no need to put any effort into dividing us. Remember the old saying: "If we don't hang together, we will surely hang separately."
Yup, four more years of Rick and Steve allrighty. If there ever emerges a party to unite the left,find a name other than NDP or Liberal.
I'd go for " Canadian Democratic Party ". Walkom's column in today's Star suggests the Harperites have kicked up some dust in transforming Canadian politics. Harper's Teflon team keeps on going, and going....
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