Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 27 of 31

The Left Wing Case Against Obama and Obama’s Next Term

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On November 3, 2012

32 Comments

Matt Stoller’s made the left wing case against Obama, and then responded to his critics, who, he’s right, don’t address his points.  The two articles are excellent, and you should read them.

I haven’t really bothered writing that much about the election because it simply isn’t very important, despite the hysteria.  Romney would probably be worse on the margins, but the difference is at the margins, except, possibly, for the Supreme Court.  The most intellectually honest argument for Obama can be summarized as “he’s an evil man who has gutted the constitution and done everything possible to enshrine oligarchy, but he’ll probably appoint a Justice who will keep Roe. v. Wade and a few shattered spars of the Bill of Rights around.”

The key thing to realize is that Obama is the President who normalized Bush’s Republic.  He normalized routine civil liberties violations, normalized anti-immigrant raids, normalized the eternal war on terror, pushed executive power even further than Bush with a unilateral war against the wishes of Congress in Libya and by arrogating for himself the right to kill any American.  He made sure the rich not only stayed rich, in the face of a financial collapse which he could have used to break their power, but has increased inequality significantly.  The wealth and wages of ordinary Americans have dropped, the portion of the country’s income going to the wealthy has increased, and the US is well on its way to becoming a corrupt petro-state.  Nothing is more hilarious than Mayor Bloomberg endorsing Obama because of climate change, when Obama has quite deliberately overseen a huge increase in hydrocarbon production and openly embraces so-called “clean” coal.   Obama may agree that Global Warming exists, and Romney may pretend that it doesn’t, but the policies of the two are functionally identical and the money Obama spent on renewables was so horribly misspent as to do nothing but discredit the industry.

The argument for “who cares” is simple enough.  Yes, Romney will be worse than Obama in certain respects, but if Obama is not in charge, then the Democrats are far more likely to oppose both civil liberties absuses and efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Let me tell you how Obama’s second term will play out.

1) He will appoint a milquetoast “liberal” to the Supremes.  You’ll keep the remains of Roe vs. Wade, but he’ll keep doing things like overruling Plan B as an over the counter medication, because he doesn’t really believe that girls impregnated by their fathers have a right not to have the child.  And every case that enshrines oligarchy, like Citizens United or HCR, will go for oligarchy (you aren’t stupid enough to think that Roberts switched his vote for any reasons other than to give insurance companies their bailout and gut Medicaid, I hope.)

2) The economy will struggle along till he gets his grand bargain, then it will absolutely crater.  You’ve got a couple years of lousy but not awful economy at most, use it, because years 3 and 4 are going to be awful.

3) He will make a Grand Bargain.  Winning by only a small margin of the popular vote will help with this.  The rich will pay slightly more, but most of the money will come from cutting Social Security, Medicare and other such programs.  The Republicans will give him just enough votes to pass it, so that it will be the Democrats who have gutted SS and Medicare.

4) The Republicans will nominate a right wing crazy in 2016.  He will stand a good chance of winning, because the Democrats, having cut SS and Medicare will now stand for nothing other than “fear the Supreme Court!”  In fact, the Republicans will run as the defenders of SS and Medicare.

Because the Republican Congress is now extremely far right wing, in fact reactionary, when they get their President, they will be able to do almost anything they want.  And all they will need is the House and 51 votes in the Senate, because they will not play stupid games about the filibuster, they’ll pass under reconciliation or just do it with 51 votes and tell everyone to go fuck themselves.  There will be no nonsense about super-majorities.  HCR will, at that point, be removed or gutted.  The court decision making Medicaid optional, however, will remain the law of the land.

Reelecting Obama does mean a better economy for the next couple years.  It does mean that people who can afford health care with mandated issue, and who must have it to make the bridge to Medicare, will get that.  It means nothing else.  It will gut the Democratic coalition, it will make a reactionary right wing president far more likely, it will kick the restructuring of the economy which is needed down the road further, making it more difficult when, or rather if, it ever occurs.  It will make the Grand Compromise, meaning SS and Medicare cuts, far more possible than if Romney were in power and Democrats were opposing the bill.  And yes, poor women will still be able, at least theoretically, to get abortions (upper middle class women are always able to get them, since they can travel.)

Is it worth it?  I don’t, personally, think so.  As with Matt Stoller and many others, if I could vote, I wouldn’t vote Obama.  To be clear, I wouldn’t vote for Romney either.  I’d probably vote for Jill Stein, making a third party viable starts with, oh, voting for it

On edit: one more thing, there is no excuse to vote for Obama if you are not in a swing state.  NONE.  Vote third party.

Observations on Canadian NDP leader Mulcair and the politics of class

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On March 30, 2012

14 Comments

Last weekend, the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) elected a new leader: Thomas Mulcair, an MP from Quebec, who was a minister in the provincial Liberal government there, before he resigned rather than open a park for development.

Mulcair was the front runner, and his victory was hardly a surprise.  Many NDPers thought that he would move to the center and would abandon left-wing principles in pursuit of power, and a number of key members of the prior leader’s team have left.

I had my doubts, but Mulcair has gone a long way to assuage them in just a week.  First, this, in his first day in Parliament:

Speaking to reporters afterward, he laid out his concerns for the state of the Canadian economy and accused the federal government of neglecting workers as it promotes the extraction of natural resources, mainly in Western Canada.

“That’s driven up the value of the Canadian dollar, made it more difficult to export our own goods. We’re killing our manufacturing sector,” he said. “The way the Conservatives are acting has had a devastating impact on good jobs with pensions.”

There was a lot of whining from Alberta about this statement, but it’s just a fact.  The classic Canadian economy was a mixed one, which combined resource extraction and manufacturing.  When manufacturing does well, resources generally don’t.  When resources do, manufacturing doesn’t.  In the old model this was considered a strength, since it meant that part of the economy was doing well, no matter what resource prices were.  And when one sector was up, it was meant to subsidize the other sector.

Resource booms always end.  Every single one.  The oil boom will end, the question is when.  If Canada doesn’t have a manufacturing sector left when the boom ends, we will become a basket case South American country.  And Alberta will become the new Maritimes (remember, the Maritimes was originally a resource boom area.)

Politically speaking, this is also smart, because the NDP just isn’t going to get a lot of MPS out of Alberta in specific or the Prairies in general.  If attacking the tar sands, and calling for Canada to add value to resources before shipping them out of the country costs votes there, so be it.  The battleground is not Alberta.  Alberta went all in with the Conservatives, and they have to live with that.  There’s no point in pandering to Albertans, it would take a huge shift in voting to gain many more seats.

The places in play are the Maritimes and Ontario, and it is there that the election will be won or lost.  It is Ontario which has been losing its manufacturing due to the high dollar, and the Maritimes has been treated shoddily by the Conservatives as well.  So on both politics and economics Mulcair’s stance is a good one, which appeals to the regions where the NDP can make gains and pisses of people who would never vote NDP anyway.

Then there was this, yesterday, when the Tory austerity budget was unveiled:

“The Conservatives have caused the problem by gutting the fiscal capacity of the government,” Thomas Mulcair, the newly crowned NDP leader, said Wednesday.

“Now they’re saying, oh, gee whiz, no more fiscal capacity in the government, we know what we’ll do, we’ll start cutting the services of the government.”

Oh my, pointing out the obvious.  Conservative tax cuts and reckless spending caused the defict.  But tax cuts for rich people are sacrosanct, so old folks will have to wait till 67 to retire.

And this:

“Everything indicates the Conservative budget will be synonymous with cutbacks and job losses. A few months ago, the Prime Minister promised textually, in this House, that he would not touch pensions, would not cut health transfers to the provinces, would not touch services to the population?” Mr. Mulcair said. “Will the Prime Minister live up to his word, or will he break his promise?”

And then, Harper cut pensions and cut health transfer to the provinces.

Ouch.  That had to smart.

Yeah, I’m liking Mulcair.

One of the things which has distressed me most about the West is that no one on the left has really been willing to hammer the politics of class.  Mulcair, who has also hit inequality, shows some signs of doing so.  It is conventional wisdom that tax increases won’t fly, but the polling data doesn’t support that, at least not if you want to tax the rich and make that clear.  Heck, if even Globe and Mail readers (the primary business newspaper in Canada) want tax increases and more spending, I think we can conclude that it’ll fly (yes, I’m aware of the limitations of that particular poll).  But even the upper middle and lower upper class think that the true rich should pay their share.  Coming out of Quebec, which is somewhat insulated from the political culture of the rest of North America, Mulcair seems willing to play class politics, and seems to know how to do so.

So far, so good.  And as for the budget, Prime Minister Harper isn’t going to get the cuts he wants from the public service without causing great pain.  Nor is cutting other forms of spending going to help the economy.  Harper better get down on his knees and pray to God that there isn’t a major downturn in China, because he’s betting everything on resource prices.  If they crumble, the Canadian economy will go with them.  And so will Harper’s job.

This is opposition politics 101: whatever the government does, you oppose. If Harper’s bet on the resource economy works, then the Conservatives will get another term.  If it doesn’t, the NDP needs to be seen as the party which opposed his policies.  Mulcair is positioning them for that, and doing so in a way which allow him, if he gets in power, to put in place policies which will reward the constituencies he needs to win—everyone not attached to the oil teat.

The NDP Leadership Debate in Toronto

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On January 19, 2012

20 Comments

I came. I saw. I listened. And what I listened to was a lot of what MP Nathan Cullen characterized as “violent agreement”.

The packed crowd (people had to be turned away) listened to candidates who agree, violently, on what government should do. Grow the economy sustainably, help the downtrodden, ensure equality, and so on.

The disagreements, with one exception, were subtle. They were either about political strategy, or about implementation. Everyone may agree on what to do, everyone does not agree on how to do it. But with only a minute or 30 seconds to answer each question you had to listen sharply to hear the differences.

With that one exception. Cullen proposed open primaries for all non Conservative parties with only the winning candidate running, so that there would be one candidate in each riding to oppose the Conservatives.

The hissing was immediate. A heartbeat later, the clapping began. Because the NDP wants to be government, wants it bad. They’ve been in the wilderness for too long, and they sure don’t trust the Liberals to do the right things. But NDP supporters also understand that Harper is a transformational Prime Minister–in the worst way possible. He is making a Canada which is less equal, less prosperous and far, far meaner. He is undermining medicare, undermining small farms and plans to center Canada’s economy around resource extraction of the kind which leaves behind only a legacy of ruin. (Every resource boom ends. Every single one.) So defeating Harper is important.

That aside, there was so much agreement that I began doing what I prefer not to do in American politics: I started considering electability.

There were only three candidates on that stage, in my opinion, who had the raw charisma and polished speaking skills necessary to lead the NDP to victory. Thomas Mulcair, Nathan Cullen and Peggy Nash. The NDP cannot afford a leader who is not charismatic, and the others simply don’t have the ability to hold attention. Nash and Mulcair are bilingual, Cullen’s french is weaker, but getting better.

Below I’m going to go through my observations on all eight, starting with the three I feel have the charisma for the job.

Thomas Mulcair

Mulcair has a reputation as a firebrand, but the man I saw on the stage was calm and in command of the facts. Able to switch easily between rabble rousing and policy, he also showed a clear command of the actual policy levers, as when he commented that the CMHC (the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation) was the key to affordable housing, or when noted areas of provincial jurisdiction. He was also the strongest opposing voice to Cullen’s suggestion of open nominations, making a passionate case that the NDP can win as the NDP. I didn’t go in with a very favorable impression of Mulcair, but I came out with one. He would be vulnerable to attacks on his strong support for Quebec provincial jurisdiction, and I’d like to hear his current views on the role of the federal government in areas on Provincial jurisdiction, but his charisma and command of the issues made a strong impression in the debate. His point about youth engagement being key to victory was also well taken, and I’d like to hear more about how he plans to increase the youth vote.

Peggy Nash

Nash was the most relentlessly rah-rah of all the candidates. Her answers were much more often pep talks and rally the troop moments than any other candidate. She reliably commanded the crowd. Her rhetoric on issues of social equality was very skillful, making the point that if some people are better off (union workers who have pensions, for example) the solution isn’t to take those pensions away, the solution is to make sure everyone has good pensions. Of the three candidates with charisma Nash left me coldest, but I was in the minority in the crowd. She didn’t demonstrate the same ready command of the nuts and bolts of issues as Mulcair, Cullen and Romeo Saganash but given the format of the debate and her background, I would assume she is just as knowledgeable and she certainly has enough policy proposals out. I like to hear her plans for winning the next election, and holding on the the gains in Quebec.

Nathan Cullen

I should confess first off that Cullen said many of the things I like to think I’d have said were I up on the stage, and said them the way I’d say them. He was the most combative of the candidates, and he was the one to call for specifics, and to call BS. The open primary suggestion was the main point of conflict in the debate, but he also made the point that when it comes to professional associations recognizing immigrant’s qualifications, “dialogue” isn’t going to cut it. He showed a ready understanding of the actual dynamics of power and how parliament works. And he was a smooth and clean speaker with charisma. As with Nash or Muclair, he commands attention. I don’t know his ideas on how the NDP should win, if the Liberals reject his open primary idea (which I’m pretty sure they would), but I’d like to hear them. As with all candidates not from Quebec, I’d like to hear how he plans to maintain the NDP’s success in that province, as well as grow outside it.

Niki Ashton

Ashton has a tendency towards mushy talk. The solution to too many things is apparently dialogue. We need to “talk” about everything. Certainly right on the issues (but so is everyone) but I didn’t get the impression she was ready for the leadership spot yet. She didn’t demonstrate the ability to make the case in a short, pithy, commanding way, and in our media environment, that’s disqualifying.

Paul Dewar

Comes across as likeable. The bloke you’d want to have a beer with, which so many political reporters seem to think is important. Good on the issues, like everyone.. Kind of forgettable otherwise. Nothing stands out from him in my mind other than “such a swell guy”. Of course that can go a long way in politics, and if Dewar were fluently bilingual his likeability could pass as charisma. As it is I think he’s a good candidate for the leadership in the next race, if he fixes his french.

Romeo Saganash

Romeo isn’t a good public speaker. I winced when he made his introductory speech. But he grew on me through the debate. He had an excellent grasp not just of the details of how government works but of what is most important. He made the single most important policy point in the entire debate – that the government has almost 200 billion dollars worth of tax loopholes, subsidies and so on. (He gave the exact number, but I didn’t note it down at the time.) The 5 billion in tax cuts for the rich which could be rescinded is just the top of the iceberg. That money means that if the NDP is serious, it can remake Canada. And his record in Quebec, bringing Quebec Hydro to heel and making it work for everyone in Quebec, is impressive. In any NDP government I’d want to see Saganash in a senior ministerial role. He impressed me as a man who could turn good intentions into policy which worked. He wouldn’t make a good leader, because he’s not a man for the soundbite era, or a great giver of speeches. But for the actual work of government, he’d seemed perfect.

Martin Singh

I think Singh knows he isn’t going to win. But he kept making the same point and it’s well taken: Canadians trust the NDP on social values, medicare and so on. They know the NDP will do the right thing. The sale which needs to be made is that the NDP can handle and grow the economy. I think that his point, and Nash’s combined, are the argument the NDP should go with: that Canadians don’t have to be mean to each other to grow the economy, but that we can all be prosperous together. Make that case, and the NDP wins. Fail to make the case, and the NDP can only back into power if Canadians hate Harper and see the NDP as the alternative. The other candidates, and the eventual leader, should listen to Singh on this.

Brian Topp

Another likeable man, though he doesn’t come across quite as personable as the immensely likeable Dewar. I get his mail, and he or whoever writes his pieces is a great writer, who hits all the right emotive spots. His policy papers are smart. But he came across flat and wasn’t a significant presence in the debate.

Closing Remarks

It’s important for the NDP to elect a leader who can win, and who if he or she becomes Prime Minister will do the right things, and do them effectively. Eight years of a Harper majority will change the country dramatically, and when adding in his years as minority leader, will make him one of the longest serving PMs in our history. Incredible damage will be done to the country as Harper’s policies strip mine resources and largely ignore the rest of the economy, leaving Canada in great danger when the resource boom ends, as they always do.

I don’t know enough about the candidates to make an endorsement, I will simply say that electability and ability to govern are the two things which I believe matter most. The candidates who struck me as having the necessary charisma, administrative chops and sheer bloodymindedness required were (in alphabetical order), Cullen, Mulcair and Nash.

There’s more I’d like to hear, including some big ideas. Instead of “increased sustainable housing” something like “in 10 years, every building in Canada will be energy neutral”. Or “we will roll make university tuition $2k a year, and student aid will be 80% grants.” (Oh, and bankruptcy from student loans will be allowed again). “We will overturn everything Harper has done.” Big things. The vision thing. Not “tax rebate for X”. Ten point plans are all very nice, but they won’t win the election, a clearly different vision for Canada will.

In the era we’re going into Canada has a lot going for it, not the least of which is that we have oil and other resources in a period when resources are scarce and prices will stay high for a while. Offhand I can’t think of a country better positioned to prosper over the next generation. But resources can destroy us, annihilating the other sectors of our economy, including manufacturing, so that we become nothing but hewers of wood and drawers of oil. When the eventual resource crash happens, we can become Argentina north. The grab the money and run strategy of the conservatives is incredibly shortsighted.

So the Conservatives must lose. The NDP must win. And having won, it must govern effectively. For the sake of Canada, may the NDP choose the right man or woman for the job.

(View the Toronto NDP Leadership Debate yourself.)

NB: corrections made. I used the word Sovereigntist sloppily with regards to Mulcair.  He has never been for Quebec independence, he does have strong views on the role of the Federal government in Quebec which could be charitably characterized as asymmetrical federalism.  Nathan Cullen is not fluently bilingual, but does speak French.

Ron Paul Hysteria

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On January 3, 2012

170 Comments

So, I’m noticing a ton of attacks on Ron Paul from progressives.  The reason is simple enough, Ron Paul is great on some key things the left cares about, and horrible on others.  His last ad in Iowa says he’d ban abortion, for example.  On the other hand, he wants to withdraw all troops from foreign wars and bring back the troops from America’s far flung military bases.  And he’s the only candidate to unequivocally state that he would never order the assassination of Americans.

Paul’s economic policies are straight up insane, and would throw the world into a full catastrophic Great Depression, even worse than the one we’re in now and worse than the one in the 30s.

But the problem is that current policies by more “mainstream” candidates just get to the same place more slowly.  And maybe not even that much more slowly.  Numerian thinks this could be the year of the big crash, for example, one where even the first world has food shortages and so on.

We’re going to get there.  There is a consensus for austerity amongst the transnational developed world elites which is breathtaking in its unanimity, imperviousness to argument and lack of regard for democratic niceties.  There is no consensus on how to deal with the oil bottleneck, no plan for actually dealing with the leveraged debt overhang, no understanding of how to create real growth, as opposed to bubbles.  If they do manage to hang on, what will happen is a huge non-conventional oil boom (read Fracking) and that will devastate ground water and turn large areas into wastelands.  Nor will it last all that long or feel all that good (it’ll be better than now, but probably not even as good as the best Bush years.)

After that I see no scenario in which things don’t crack up, completely.

So Ron Paul will cause a crack up, possibly a little bit ahead of schedule.  That sucks for old people who might have died before the world went to hell, but for young people, you might as well get it done.

But Ron Paul also might do some real damage to the military industrial complex.  There is no route forward for the US which does not require taking that misallocated effort, and using it for other things.  So this is necessary.

Also the movement of manufacturing and other expertise overseas means that the US labor force is a wasting asset.  The longer the decline goes on the fewer people there will be with the skills to bootstrap back up, the less of an industrial base other than defense there will be, and so on.  Infrastructure will be more degraded, not less, and so on.  So from that point of view, cracking up sooner, rather than later, is preferable because it leaves a clearer path to the future.

But let’s move back to the title.  The reason Ron Paul causes hysterics is he pits interest group against interest group, morality vs. morality. He’s a different kind of lesser evil.  If Afghans got to vote in the US election, who would they vote for?  How important is Habeas Corpus to you really?  What about pot legalization?  Etc…  Ron Paul is awful on some issues, and very good on others.  Are abortion rights more important than dead Afghans and Pakistanis at weddings?  (I don’t claim they are, or aren’t, I simply note Paul forces you to make that choice.)  And Paul would end all bank bailouts.  Hate the banksters?  Think they’re the key problem?  Paul’s your man.

Obama is objectively awful.  Paul is objectively awful.  But unlike Romney, Paul is objectively awful in different ways than Obama.  Romney would just be Obama, but slightly worse.  If you’re going to choose a lesser evil, you might as well choose Obama.  But when it comes to Paul vs. Obama the equation changes.

And that’s why many progressives are attacking any other progressive who says anything good about Paul, because Paul threatens to split the left, and because Paul makes progressives decide what they value most.

Ontario Liberals Win

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On October 7, 2011

3 Comments

They are fundamentally a right wing party, and their leader is a serial liar about important policy issues.  But, at the end of the day, the NDP did not want to win.  If they had wanted to win they would have promised a referendum on repealing the HST.  They refused to do so, they chose to run as liberal light “no new income taxes” and so they lost.  If Ontarians want to be lied to about taxes, they can vote Liberal.

As for Horwath, she needs to go.  Does not have what it takes.

Liz Warren decides to lose to Scott Brown

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On October 4, 2011

86 Comments

Seems her comment on #Occupy is that people should obey the law, and she wasn’t talking about the cops.  Oh, and she’s against marijuana legalization.

Leaving all else aside, this is awful politics in the most technical sense.  Her statement, if she didn’t want to endorse #Occupy should have been something like “this movement shows that until we reform Wall Street and the Banking system unrest will continue to grow,” or something similar.  As a politician, when asked about something, say it proves the need for your program.  In Warren’s case it’s even plausible.

But let’s be frank, she is a stalking horse for Obama. She is deep in his pockets, supported strongly by his organization.  She is the spokesman for “saving the Middle Class”, saying things which Obama can no longer say and pass the laugh test.  The problem with “saving the Middle Class” is that for the people in #Occupy movement, it’s too late.  Most of the core people are no longer in the middle class.  Saving those still in it will do nothing for them, even if the policies suggested would work, which they wouldn’t.

But what this mainly reveals is that Warren is incompetent.  She has just told most of the left, the very people who are reluctant to work for Obama, that there is no real point in working for her.  She may believe in some consumer protections, but she’s still a conservative Democrat, who just wants to tweak the status quo.  She regards the #Occupy people as illegitimate, as law breakers.  She wants to keep the war on drugs going, even though, as a Law Prof, she has to know it doesn’t work and causes unimaginable suffering.

Contemptible and incompetent.

Conservatives Win Majority

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On May 2, 2011

29 Comments

And with a fairly decent margin.  The collapse of the Liberals in Ontario, and the choice of BC to go largely Conservative seem to have been the key. Looking closely at the results, I don’t think the robocalls were the deciding factor in enough ridings to have changed the overall result.  Hopefully the courts will show their independence and investigate this question aggressively, but with a majority government, Harper will be in a position to shut down such investigations and has show in the past that he has no qualms using such power.

Southern Ontario, outside the city cores, went hard Conservative, in most cases over 50% (call them Alberta South).  This continues the trend of Ontario suburbs thinking that the man who has presided over the destruction of Canadian manufacturing is going to save them by keeping their housing values high and driving Toronto into the ground, because suburbs don’t need healthy cities.  This bet on the part of Canadian suburbanites will work out as well for them as it has for American suburbanites.

Going forward this is probably good for the NDP.  Their job now is to be a good opposition, and to make the case that everything Harper does is wrong, destructive and will be rolled back by an NDP government.  As for the Liberals, job 1 is to ditch Ignatieff, job 2 is to make the case to Ontario that they are the party that can actually run government properly, and make the economy work again.  “You had it pretty good in the 90s, didn’t you?” should be their mantra.  Especially as it looks to me like Canada is about to go into recession, certainly it’s in danger of doing so.  Of course, Harper has 4 to 5 years to try and ride it out, but I’m going to say that now that he has full power, he will screw it up.  He’s that sort of guy.

For Canada?  Not so good.  But, under the rules as they exist (minus the robocalls), the Conservatives won.  Even if Harper did cheat (and I would be highly surprised if the Conservatives weren’t behind the robocalls), it’s highly unlikely that the Courts will call him to account, since he will be in a position to shut down police investigations.  Still, there is nothing he can do that can’t be undone by another majority government, and apparently Canadians need to learn what happens when you let someone like Harper have a majority.  That learning will be unpleasant, but I guess it’s necessary.  In particular for Ontarians, who have voted against their own self interest.  It’s one thing for the Prairies to vote for “loot now, worry about the hangover later”, it’s another for Ontario to vote “make Dutch disease permanent and destroy our industrial base.”

On the NDP Surge in Canada

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On April 26, 2011

55 Comments

So, amidst the standard gloomy news of austerity, autocratic elites who don’t give a damn about anything but themselves and populations who keep voting for the wrong people, some actual good news arises: the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada has surged into second place in the polls.

The NDP are the leftmost party in Canada with the exception of the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec separatist party who runs candidates only in Quebec.  They are strongly union associated.  They have been the third party in federal politics basically forever.  Provincially they do run some provinces.  Their birthplace was the prairies, but in the last few decades they’ve been strongest in Canada’s Pacific coast province, British Columbia (BC), though that does fluctuate.  I’d argue that the NDP are BC’s natural ruling party and has been for about 30 to 40 years.  The other parties, to defeat them, have generally had to agree that only one of them seriously run against them.

The NDP is most famous for having created Canadian Medicare, provincially under Tommy Douglas, who many Canadians consider the greatest Canadian to have ever lived.  The Feds adopted the plan after he pushed it through at the provincial level.

The scourge of the NDP has been the perception that they can’t win Federally.  As a result, in most Federal elections vote switching has often cost them at least 5% of their vote, and I’d argue up to 10%.  Canadians would vote Liberal in an attempt to keep the Conservative party out.

As a result, parties that range from Center to Left (the Liberals, NDP and Bloc) have regularly pulled in about 60% of the vote, and yet the Conservatives have had minority governments for much of the last decade.  This is also due to the fact that, like the US system, ours is first past the post, winner take all.  Geographical concentration counts big, and the Conservative’s hard support in the prairies and Alberta in particular has translated well into seats.

So the NDP being second in the polls is a really good sign, because it means that core NDP voters now have no reason to switch, and Liberal voters whose first priority is making sure the Conservatives don’t get a majority government may switch to the NDP, instead of the other way around.

The NDP surge is particularly impressive in Quebec, where they are now clearly in the lead.  The Bloc Quebecois has collapsed.  Why this has happened, exactly, isn’t something I’m entirely clear on, Quebec politics are somewhat opaque to me, but I will note that it is particularly in Quebec’s interest to make sure that Harper (the Conservative leader) doesn’t get a majority.

You may have noticed the emphasis on “majority”.  In a parliamentary system like Canada’s, with extraordinarily strong party discipline, a prime minister with a majority is pretty close to an elected dictator.  If he wants to pass a law, it gets passed. If he wants to do something administratively, it happens.  God only wishes he had as much power as a Canadian Prime Minister.

Harper is run by energy interests from out West.  Essentially they want to pump oil and exploit the oil sands, and they want to keep all the money from their windfall profits.  Quebec’s economy, in export/import terms is also an energy economy.  Quebec, essentially, is a hydro-power farm for New York State.  That money allows Quebec to run their economy the way they want—lots of farm subsidies, lots of good food, a generally fairly relaxed lifestyle. Quebec isn’t France, but it’s as close as you get in North America.  It’s a pleasant place to live in many respects.

If Harper gets his majority, the energy interests he is beholden to may cast their eyes on getting control of Quebec’s energy.  That would be the end of Quebec’s pleasant little economy.  I doubt most Quebecois are explicitly aware of this, but I think they may feel it in their guts.

And other than in terms of independence, the NDP and BQ aren’t very far apart on policy. If anything the BQ is slightly to the left of the NDP. (In American terms, they’re practically communists, not that they are in reality.  But they definitely are socialists.)

There are other factors.  Ignatieff, the Liberal leader, is a sleazeball who apologized for torture.  Most Canadians don’t really care about the torture apologetics, but Ignatieff comes across as a sleazeball with no actual convictions.  So when the Liberals went on the offensive against the Conservatives, claiming Conservatives couldn’t be trusted with Medicare (which in Canada means universal single payer health care), I suspect that many Canadians thought “well, that’s true.  But I don’t think I can’t trust you with it either.”  On the other hand, the idea that the NDP would ever harm Medicare if in power is ludicrous.   Whatever one thinks of the NDP, even its detractors know that the NDP loves universal healthcare.

Jack Layton, the NDP leader, is someone I’ve always liked.  He used to be a Toronto city councilor.  Back in the early 2000’s I went and watched city council during budget deliberations.  As it happened, it was a session when ordinary citizens were giving depositions.  They were limited to 5 minutes each, and there were plenty of them.  In essence, many of them were begging for money to whatever they cared about to keep coming, or for tax changes, and so on.  It was obvious that for most of them, whatever their issue was, it was extraordinarily important.  I remember one guy, admittedly a bit of a crank, with 5 boxes of documents.

Most of the councilors clearly weren’t paying any attention.  They were talking amongst each other, laughing, walking in and out of the room, in some cases clearly mocking the people ostensibly speaking to them.  Now I get this, it was the end of a long day, and really, most of these people were asking for money they obviously weren’t going to get, or that they obviously were going to get.  The councilors had already made up their minds.

But the people giving depositions, they cared.  Some of them were desperate, all of them had put a lot of work into it.  Ignoring them, laughing while they talked, or even mocking them, was extraordinarily cruel and disrespectful.

There were only three councilors who at least appeared to be paying attention to what the citizens were saying.  They may not have been, they may have been off in space, but they at least had the common decency or basic political cops to pretend to give a shit.  Jack Layton was one of them, his wife, Olivia Chow (now a Federal MP as well, and my MP, as it happens) was another.  There was a third female councilor whose name I forget as well.  Every other one was a complete jackass, being cruel to desperate people who had put a lot of work into the speeches they were giving.

So ever since then I’ve had a soft spot for Jack Layton.  I don’t know if he’d make a good PM, but at least he isn’t an asshole to constituents in public.  And at least he showed he could handle the basic blocking and tackling.

So, what’s outcome of this election going to be?  Damned if I know.  The polls are all over the place.  The most likely outcome remains a Conservative minority government.  The second most likely outcome seems to be that the NDP and Liberals, together, get more seats than the Conservatives, in which case they could form a coalition government, probably with the NDP as the senior coalition member (at which point I will spend a few minutes rolling on the floor laughing hysterically.)

If the Conservatives get a minority government, odds are the NDP will be the official opposition party.  Layton will be a far more effective opposition leader than Ignatieff.  And Ignatieff’s days as Liberal leader will soon be over, the Liberals will turf him, as being third party is a complete and absolute disaster for them.  The Liberals and Conservatives have traded being the government of Canada back and forth for as long as Canada has existed.

If Layton does do a good job, he might be able to cement the NDP as the second party in Canada, and if he does that, eventually the NDP will be the government.  That’s a big deal, because the Liberals are essentially centrists.  They campaign slightly left, rule slightly right, and are certainly neo-liberal friendly.  I say this as someone who actually has a lot of respect for the government of Chretien and Paul Martin.  They did a good job overall and managed a period when Canada had to kiss America’s ass very well.  Chretien, in particular, is due a lot of credit for telling Bush to fuck off when Bush tried to coerce Canada into joining the Iraq war, as that took a lot of guts from a Canadian PM, and was clearly the right thing to do.

What does this mean for the rest of the world? Canada was one of the first nations to go to a right wing government.  Through the 2000’s there has been a wave of right wing governments in the West.  The NDP doing this well might be a sign that things are beginning to turn.  Again, the NDP aren’t the wimpy left, they are actually socialists, not a party like Labor in Britain, which is clearly right wing, just not as right wing as the nutbar Conservatives.

How good a government Layton would run I don’t know. I don’t have a good feel for the wonks behind him, or for how strong a leader he’d be.  Nonetheless I am confident that of the possibilities, he’s the best man for the job.  Ignatieff is a weasel, and no one who has apologized for torture should be in charge of anything, anywhere, while Harper is a conservative ideologue who thinks that Canada should be more like the US, as well as being an autocrat who spits over Canada’s democratic and parliamentary traditions.  The sooner he retires, the better.

The outcome is still uncertain.  Heck, it’s even possible the Liberals could come back into second place, or that the Conservatives could surge.  The polls are all over the place, as noted, and this has been a very volatile election.  Someone could put their foot in it.  But still, for the first time in a long time, I am actually seeing some hope for the future.  Canada, amongst countries in the world, is uniquely positioned to ride out the next couple decades.  We have everything we need to do really well, to be one of the most prosperous and free nations in the world.  But doing so requires a course change that will never happen under the Conservatives and is unlikely to happen under the Liberals.  The NDP are the best chance, not a sure thing, but a decent chance.  So here’s praying they keep surging.

More Details for those who care

Ontario.  The largest population province in Canada is Ontario, and the Conservatives are doing gangbusters here.  This really bad for the Liberals, whose heartland Ontario is.  One of the most depressing political results of the last year was in Toronto, where Rob Ford, a conservative whose first act was to tell the unions he was canceling their contracts, was elected on the strength of the suburbs deciding that they didn’t want to pay taxes to keep the goose that lays the golden eggs healthy.  Ontario, as with much of Canada, is in a mild housing bubble, a bubble which has been deliberately kept inflated by the Conservatives.  The actual cities (not the burbs) vote Liberal or NDP, but the suburbs have been going Conservative.  Southern Ontario’s employment has been devastated by the decline in the US auto industry, and the Conservatives have really done nothing about that, but what they have done is make sure housing prices stay high.  So people who, in essence, have nothing else, are voting for them.

Alberta: Ah, Alberta.  Think of Alberta as Canada’s Texas, except that Alberta still has lots of oil, even if most of it is in the form of the oil sands.  Alberta votes Conservative both out of old resentments against central Canada (somewhat justified, though the most legitimate complaints are getting to be decades old, and I say this as someone who grew up out West) and for cold hard cash reasons: exploiting the oil sands is brutally environmentally degrading, and the Albertans want to do it dirty so they make more money.  They also don’t want their windfall oil profits taxed, nor do they want to be forced to sell oil to other Canadians (ie. they don’t want a pipeline to Central Canada).  Since all of these policies make sense if you think of Canada first, and Alberta second (ie. if you’re looking out for all of Canada) and some of them make sense even if you think of Alberta first (the oil economy will end, and if they’ve fucked up their groundwater, Alberta will be in a world of hurt, plus they aren’t reinvesting properly),well, Alberta doesn’t want a leftish party in charge of Ottawa.  What should be done is windfall profit taxes on the oil, and policies which make it necessary to reinvest in Canada (and not in real estate.  It should be made very hard or impossible to invest these profits in real-estate.)

There’s still a ton of stupidity and greed in Canada.  The five big banks have never forgiven the Liberals for not letting them merge, there is a housing bubble, there is insufficient investment in our industrial base, which is collapsing, and no one is really thinking properly about the future. Even brain dead simple obvious things, like expanding Halifax’s harbor to make it into the major northern east coast container port or like making a pipeline from west to east for oil so that we can credibly threaten to withhold oil from the US when the US fucks with us, are not being done.   How much of even the brain dead obvious stuff Layton will do, I don’t know.  But I know there’s at least a chance with him, and no chance with Harper of Ignatieff.

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