A spectre is haunting Canada, as Marx and Engels said in a different era (and not about Canada): the spectre of the Canadian left. But I think phantom would be a better term. As in phantom limb. Take two examples.
A Liberal-NDP merger. This has often been a subject of speculation. It has now moved into serious discussions. However, an anonymous Liberal organizer told the Toronto Star it won't happen, because "They're socialists, we're not." Would that it were so, as they say in the Talmud. It would be nice to have someone at least make the case. But most NDP-like parties in the West long ago abandoned socialism to embrace free-market orthodoxy. Some, like New Zealand's Labour government in the 1980s, were more zealous than the official right-wingers. In the U.K., Labour leader Tony Blair admired Margaret Thatcher; he modelled New Labour in imitation. In Canada, Bob Rae's Ontario NDP government killed its own 1990 election promise of public auto insurance. I once asked Jack Layton what distinguished the federal NDP's views from Stéphane Dion's Liberals. He replied, it's that people can believe those things when we say them. That may be arrogant and implausible, but it's not socialist. Let the merging begin.
Such backpedalling is fairly inevitable when parties get serious about gaining power. They focus on the short-term task of hitting whatever notes will get a swift nod from the voters, at that moment. More marginal parties, like the old Reform or the old CCF-NDP, play a different role: they float innovative ideas like populist democracy or socialism. But a narrow focus on power means a shrinking focus on those ideas. Why notions like democracy or socialism, which have (or had) lots of general appeal, fare so poorly in an electoral context is a mystery I'll leave for a more contemplative time.
The coming Canadian version of Fox News. Its mission, says its head, former Harper aide Kory Teneycke, is to take on the leftist mainstream, or "lamestream," media, typified by the CBC, a "left-wing channel." I've been beaten to punch on this by John Moore, writing as a "house liberal" in the National Post, who noted that "Canadian conservatives already have talk radio, the Sun newspaper chain, the National Post and Maclean's," while 17 of 18 major newspapers backed Stephen Harper last election. I could cheerily extend his list, but I'll restrain myself. In other words, the mainstream media are largely right-wing. What left-wing media? If you're a right-winger like Kory Teneycke, Ezra Levant or the gang at the National Post, you've probably been gainfully employed in government or lamestream media since you left university. If you're a genuine left commentator like Yves Engler (Who? you say) with four good books to your credit, you probably financed your magnum opus on Canadian foreign policy by working nights at a Montreal hotel and only rarely sneak onto those left-wing channels. (For the record, I am not now nor have I ever been an actual mainstream media employee. I've always gone freelance.)
But if that's so, where is the phantom Canadian left? Who is it? Is it? Well, there's lots of left activity but not much definition. The old centrepiece of socialism is either missing or under heavy, tentative reconstruction. (I'd put my money on an anarchist version.) Unions, once the left's backbone, are in serious decline precisely when most working people need a way to resist the power of an increasingly compact corporate sector. It's unclear whether labour can rejig itself to meet that need. There's lots of disparate activism to support foreign "struggles" (Haiti, Free Gaza) along with environmentalism, save public health care, etc. But in mainstream party politics, or in the mainstream media -- Poof! Now you see them, now you don't.
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Some out of the box thoughts: I wonder if the 'left' in Canada hasn't been infiltrated by the masters, and defanged and diverted into harmless pursuits? Harmless, that is, for the rulers - all of the little issues that 'progressives' get incensed about and fight incessantly about amongst themselves that have the basic effect of divide and conquer, keep 'us' quarrelling merrily and endlessly amongst ourselves, and so engaged, thus presenting no challenge at all to the rulers as they carry on with their plans for our country and world? In so many ways, it seems the 'left' has become officially 'capitalism light', and as such does not speak for 'the proles' in any meaningful way. Petitioning the masters for better conditions is not, in the view of some of us at least, the path forward to a better world. A better, new world means getting rid of the capitalist masters altogether, and confirming their authority by asking them please sir may we have a bit more porridge is NOT the way to get rid of them. A true 'left progressive' movement would, at least in the view of some of us, be fighting much more strenuously for the two things that would seriously threaten the rulers - democracy and getting control of 'our' money supply. As long as we have a 'faux-democracy' in which people have the trappings of democracy, the vote and political parties with apparently different programs to choose from, but in reality everything is controlled from Bay St so it doesn't really matter who gets elected, the Big Business agenda is the order of the day, nothing is going to improve here - and equally, as long as capitalists control our money, we have no chance of achieving democracy (and conversely, of course, so it's truly a conundrumitic situation). And then, as long as we spend most of our time quarrelling about an endless number of 'urgent' social issues, and getting angered about whatever the latest capitalist outrage is, and spending great amounts of time and energy and money organising demonstrations that really accomplish nothing (great smoke and fire signifying nothing, as a much earlier bard saw this type of behaviour), no progress whatsoever is made on the only two fronts that really might threaten the capitalist overlords, democracy and money. It often appears as if the 'mainstream left' (the people the mainstream media acknowledge now and then) is sanctioned by the rulers as a safe place to keep those unhappy with the current situation corralled without getting up to anything that actually threatens them. (I've noted my own ideas on what needs to be done to really challenge the capitalist rulers elsewhere - i.e. Green Island http://www.rudemacedon.ca/greenisland.html and What Happened? http://www.rudemacedon.ca/what-happened.html if anyone is interested ..)