John Ivison does a good job in summarizing some of the more obvious aspects of the "move to the left" from the prospective Liberal leadership candidates.
Duh #1
The Rae camp suggests the attention his "unite-the-left" notion attracted was overdone and that he was merely advocating the Liberal party entice voters who recognize the NDP would rather be politically correct than in government.
Uniting the left means getting more votes for the Liberals and eliminating the NDP, not co-operation.
Duh #2
So if a union on the left is a non-starter, does it make sense for the Liberal party to drift in that direction? One Liberal strategist points out that the party lost the election mainly because it hemorrhaged votes to the Tories, rather than to the NDP. The numbers seem to bear this out -- the Conservative vote rose by 6.7 percentage points to 36.3%, almost the same amount the Liberal vote dropped. NDP support rose just 1.8 points. Of the 30 seats the Liberals lost, only five were won by the NDP.
The Liberals are fishing in the wrong pond but how can you call yourself "progressive" if you cast your net were the votes are?
Bonus Duh - you lie!
Of course, this debate pre-supposes the candidates mean what they say when they claim they will move the party's centre of gravity. As the Liberal strategist pointed out: "Winning a leadership is not the same as winning an election. The party caucus and activists tend to be further left than its voting base and in a leadership contest these are the ones who are being pitched. I'm somewhat skeptical."
Too bad you need a subscription to read the whole thing.
Comments (4)
Liberals are socialists. Socialism doesn’t work. So Liberal strategy is to target special interest groups, particularly any group that can be swayed into thinking of itself as being victimized, e.g. unions, feminists, First Nations.
The multi-culti card remains important to slice and dice ethnic groups up for Liberal brainwashing and to create more victims.
The MSM and academia are still the Liberal propaganda outlets that use the tactic of political correctness to try and shut down all dissent that says maybe the victims aren’t victims. Maybe they are simply immature adolescents that won’t assume responsibility for themselves.
The Liberals will elect a leader who can best play the victim card in a subliminal fashion so that they can carry on with their own denial that socialism doesn’t work.
Posted by nomdenet | April 22, 2006 10:00 AM
Posted on April 22, 2006 10:00
Centrist voters like myself who want middle of the road, common sense approaches to policies were swayed by Harper in the last election cause we were fed up by Paul Martin and his goons.
It will surely be a mistake for the Liberals to abandon the centre of political spectrum in order to steal a couple MP’s from Jack Layton. The Liberals need to reclaim the Centre back from the Conservatives. Problem is this will be a hard job and they want to take the easy road.
Posted by Riley Hennessey | April 22, 2006 10:01 AM
Posted on April 22, 2006 10:01
I wrote this letter to the editor…
John Ivison’s column title “Candidates lean left to expand the middle” is erroneous partisanship. The whole reason the Liberals lost the last election was because they lost the middle. You can’t expand something you don’t have. And you certainly can’t regain something you lost by moving further away from it.
Posted by ferrethouse | April 22, 2006 10:21 PM
Posted on April 22, 2006 22:21
A merging of the left of centre is inevitable. This does not necessarily mean a merger of the NDP and LPC; it could take place as a leaching of support from the NDP to the LPC, as voters come to realize just how extreme – in Canadian terms – the New Tory party under Harper is.
The New Tories are not at all a merger of the old Alliance/Reform party with the old Progressive Conservatives. It is a party which resulted from a takeover of the PCs by the Reform/Alliance party, aided by the sellout of the PC leader. As a result the policies and value systems of the New Tories are solidly rightwing Alliance/Reform ones. Most voters do not appreciate that yet, but policies do become laws and programs, and the results will be apparent to all within months.
The NDP is probably doomed to shrink substantially on the federal scene once the LPC has a new leader, and has finished a review of its own policies. I expect the LPC to move leftwards from Martin’s amorphous Tory-like policies, and to have a harder edged demarcation of its policies as compared to the New Tories.
Layton asked voters to lend him their votes. Some did, and Harper took power as a result. Now progressive voters will consider the impact of a rightwing neocon government under Harper brought into power and propped up by Layton’s colossal blunder, and lend their votes for mainstream Canadian values, by voting for a reinvigorated Liberal government.
Layton will then become another footnote on the Canadian political landscape, along with others who gambled and lost, such as Joe Clark.
Posted by CuriosityKilledTheCat | April 27, 2006 3:07 PM
Posted on April 27, 2006 15:07