Breaking.. NDP leader Tom Mulcair gets the boot!

[easter bunny]

I voted strategically last time knowing that Mulcair wouldn't be able to resist loading up the Senate with dippers if he won. That would solve the problem once and for all.  

[Anonymous]

I voted strategically last time knowing that Mulcair wouldn't be able to resist loading up the Senate with dippers if he won. That would solve the problem once and for all.  

I have resigned myself to the inevitable fact that the senate is not going anywhere. It will be around 50 years from now.

[easter bunny]

The thing I like best about the Senate is that when you appoint good people they can't be corrupted. Make it elected and it becomes no better than the House, and we all know how well that can turn out.  ac_unsure

[Anonymous]

The thing I like best about the Senate is that when you appoint good people they can't be corrupted. Make it elected and it becomes no better than the House, and we all know how well that can turn out.  ac_unsure

I ask myself is an upper chamber really necessary even if it was elected. I do not see it as performing any necessary function, but I know it will be around long after I am gone.

[Anonymous]

HOLY FUCK!! Who would replace him though? When will it happen? I did not expect him to lead the party into the 2019 election, but I expected him to hold on until 2018.

 

NDP support across Canada across Canada is collapsing. I've heard in some polls it's as low as 10 % nationally.

We will probably be throwing them out on the 19th.

[Anonymous]

HOLY FUCK!! Who would replace him though? When will it happen? I did not expect him to lead the party into the 2019 election, but I expected him to hold on until 2018.

 

NDP support across Canada across Canada is collapsing. I've heard in some polls it's as low as 10 % nationally.

We will probably be throwing them out on the 19th.

Alberta will be the only NDP government in Canada. Who would have ever thought they would see that.

[tangy]

Thanks for the up to date news tidbit bunny. It's been rumoured Cam Broten might try a run federally, but he lost his own seat in the NDP's crushing defeat here in Saskatchewan. My money would be on Paul Dewar being the next leader.



Anyone else want to make a prediction.

Stephen Lewis maybe.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the up to date news tidbit bunny. It's been rumoured Cam Broten might try a run federally, but he lost his own seat in the NDP's crushing defeat here in Saskatchewan. My money would be on Paul Dewar being the next leader.



Anyone else want to make a prediction.

Stephen Lewis maybe.

Hey tangy, nice to meet you.  ac_drinks



Stephen Lewis is more elderly statesman of the party. He's 78 years old. I don't see it.

[Anonymous]

^He is to the dippers what Preston Manning is to the conservative movement.

[Anonymous]

A good article by Mixhael Den Tandt. If the NDP adopts the Lewis/Klein radical LEAP horseshit, the party is finished as a credible force in Canadian politics. The Alberta and Saskatchewan NDP will split from the national party and the federal party will be more of a rump in parliament than they have ever been.

Stick a fork in the federal NDP. They're done.



These New Democrats, no longer Thomas Mulcair's NDP as of 3: 15 p. m. EDT Sunday, have responded to last October's electoral disappointment in a classically Liberal-party way; first, by casting aside years of careful strategy in a desperate lunge for something they hope will be shiny and better; second, by dragging the losing leader out behind the barn and ignominiously putting him out of their misery, without so much as a thank you.



The process was inept, curt and callous. It left Mulcair, who drew kudos from all his colleagues when he was winning, without a shred of dignity.



The former opposition leader's agonizing, day-long execution, including the keynote address during which he at times seemed overwhelmed and upset, literally smiling through the tears, demonstrates nothing if not that the Dippers really have made it to the big leagues. They can now knife a leader in the back like the best of them, without a backward glance. This is not to say Mulcair himself doesn't share in the blame for the debacle. He set himself up for defeat — first, by allowing the convention to take place in Edmonton, while having nothing approaching a strategy for dealing with the oil pipeline issue that had bedevilled him since he became NDP leader in March of 2012. He then delivered a speech stunningly devoid of meaningful content — a pastiche of bromides reminiscent of the stump speech that had failed to ignite voter enthusiasm last October.



The speech was preceded by a video that, in tone and style, resembled the TV ads that formed a part of last year's losing campaign.



It featured no excoriation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or his Liberal government — though party elder Stephen Lewis had demonstrated Saturday just how effectively this could be done, in a barnburner that made NDP delegates laugh and cheer. Lewis, at 78, was the star of this convention. Should he choose to present himself for leader, one suspects he would win in a landslide.



But that doesn't appear to be part of the plan. Avi Lewis, Stephen Lewis's documentary filmmaker son, seems a likelier candidate for the job. In an interview Saturday with the CBC, the younger Lewis pointedly did not rule out a future in politics, though he also did not rule it in. This little pas- dedeux was eerily reminiscent of Justin Trudeau's early non- committal interviews, when he was being asked the same question.



And Avi Lewis has another reason for running, than simple dynastic inevitability. He was, whether by design or accidentally, instrumental in Mulcair's collapse. Lewis is the frontman for the radically left- wing Leap Manifesto, which the convention voted to debate at the riding level and consider in future policymaking, repudiating Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley's plea to the delegates Saturday.



The Leap Manifesto says, boiled down, that t here should be no more oil pipelines built in Canada. Its thrust is that the 173- odd billion barrels of oil locked in the oilsands should remain there, and that ending pipeline development will bring this about. Mulcair, offered a chance to repudiate this egregious nonsense, pointedly did not do so. In an interview last week, and again Saturday, he instead said he would press whatever policies the party membership asked of him.



This had the effect of alienating the sizable Alberta delegation at the conference, while undermining Notley, the party's only current star in power. Mulcair's openness to a sharp leftward lurch also had the effect of deep- sixing his reputation for principle; no New Democrat believes he's a leftist firebrand, not after the campaign he ran last summer and fall, which cautiously advocated balanced budgets.



It was, to summarize in language suitable for a family newspaper, an epic screw-up on the part of Mulcair and his team.

As for the party, it has now cast its lot with the Lewises and their Manifesto. This amounts to a plan for Canada to cast aside the free market in favour of a deeply protectionist, managed economy, in which the happy citizenry drive state- funded electric go- cycles fuelled by state- funded wind turbines and live in straw bale houses that don't require heat in winter. It is an addled, cockamamie vision l i ke something out of Orwell, or the fevered imagination of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

This socialist mass movement will be led by ... who knows? None of the worthies who've hedged on Mulcair in recent days, including Manitoba MP Niki Ashton and former Toronto MP Peggy Nash, is in a position to do so, based on the tepid support they drew at the 2012 NDP leadership convention. B. C. MP Nathan Cullen, who was a sentimental favourite in 2012, has made it clear he's not interested, though perhaps he' ll be press- ganged into service.



Why would Cullen or any other serious, credible candidate run for leader, though? For this is the problem the NDP now faces: Its sturdy Jack Layton- esque centrism is in tatters. The roster of possible replacements contains not a soul who seems likely to out-Trudeau Trudeau, including Avi Lewis.



Therefore, the NDP will lose in 2019. This party was once generous to leaders who lose. Not any more. That much, at least, we know