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Four months of this stuff yet to go. Arrrggghhhh. Why does it have to be such a long campaign??? By today we should have had at least two debates, and be getting ready cast ballots at the end of this month.
We have a social democratic national party?
@ Gaian, post39:
I think you overate how much most people are driven by "anyone but ________ ".
They SAY that in the run-up. And we all mean it. But when it comes down to the final choice- if your preferred is not there, and ______ is, anything might happen.
Example: it will come as no surprise that unless Mulcair changes his stripes, which I think unlikely, I do no want him as leader. But if the other choice on the last ballot has been screwing up or under-performing to my expectations.... the choice will be up in the air. And by the time we get to the end, those expectations will be higher than they are now. Translation: fewer allowance made for the under-performance of candidates we had previously ranked higher.
I don't see why people are upset at Mulcair pointing out that the party is run by a bunch of corrupt ninnies
Must have missed that.
Add that to missing the memos that let people be comfortable he's not just another centrist.
I was at provincial council as well, and I am not supporting anyone just yet. So I think my views are fairly objective. I honestly don't know how you could make the above assessment. Dewar offered pizza, a lot of people came, heard him speak and left. I was totally underwhelmed by him, as were others.
Mulcair did okay, but sometimes it is the little things that matter. His workers putting up an easel to announce his meeting location that deliberitly blocked off access to the Dewar gathering might have been cheeky, but it also turned a lot of people off and seemed symbolic of an attitude, big mistake on such a stupid, petty thing, as that is the kind of thing that travels and people notice.
My sense was that Romeo Saganash did himself a huge favour by being in attendance. Everyone I talked to was really impressed with him. He is smart, articulate, engaged and when speaking with him he just feels more 'real' somehow. I expect he is going to become the 'heart' candidate and will have a lot of 2nd place support if that continues. Being most people's 2nd choice on a ranked ballot could open up some real surprise finishing. I find the group starting to surround Saganash very interesting as it is made up of lot of up and commers in the party. I don't know if it means anything, I just find it interesting. This is a campaign to watch.
No one was talking much about Topp. I think his support is vastly over-estimated and based on an assumption. If the concern about him is his retail ability I didn't see anything to convince me he has it.
Yes Nash had lots of whoops for her when she was introduced, and people like her because she is just such a nice person, but I didn't see much excitement about her campaign. That might not matter in the end, but in a leadership campaign you need to have something to gell support, and I don't see a very compelling narrative from Peggy yet. Maybe it will come, but it isn't there yet.
By not showing the flag, even through proxies, Ashton, Chisholm, Cullen and Singh showed a lack of understanding of the needs of a campaign by taking a pass on such a large group of Ontario party activists, who will then be going back to their ridings and talking things up. They didn't need to be there, but they should have sent someone to speak on their behalf if they had other committments. Heck even having someone put a flyer on the tables would have been an improvement. Shows a lack of organizational strength and thought to me. I am sure our delegates were not unusual in taking back home those flyers that were available to share with others.
Pierre Ducasse has endorsed Peggy Nash.
Chisholm was at the Leaders Levee. Mulcair went back to Ottawa for the Press Gallery Dinner and Niki was at the Gallery Dinner as well. I'd have to look up where Cullen and Singh were on their FB pages or Twitter feeds.
Like I said I don't begrudge anyone a scheduling conflict. But the campaigns I mentioned seemed to put little effort into reaching out through other means. That speaks to a lack of organizational capacity and understanding to me and tells me who is and isn't really in the race. But that's just my opinion.
No, I hear you on that, for sure.
The Ashton campaign seems to be struggling to get on its feet, Cullen's seems to have pretty limited resources, and I dont get the feeling the Chisholm campaign even tries to be more than a flag out there somewhere.
Romeo's campaign presumably has no more resources than these others, but does a bang up job on putting Romeo where he needs to be and excells.
That's a moderately significant development, especially for some of the other campaigns.
I think that it is important for all the candidates to demonstrate some "Quebec credibility" and Ducasse helps Nash in that regard - on top of that his Youtube on what he was looking for in a leader was well done and the fact that he sees Nash as the one who fits the bill is a minor coup for her...but at this stage all the coups are "minor".
Hence my use of the qualifier 'moderately'. It for sure helps Nash, and maybe hurts a few others, but it isn't earth shattering. But I am also sure there isn't a single campaign team that when they saw the endorsement thought 'damn'.
does anybody think Chisholm is only in the race to get a senior cabinet position? (when we get one in 2015)
Dewar's people might have since it would have helped address a weakness of his to have had an endorsement by a high profile person in the Quebec NDP.
Couple of things:
1) Topp's French is considerably worse than Mulcair's. Muclair is flawlessly bilingual, along the lines of Pierre Trudeau or Jean Charest. (although he does have a very slight English accent). Topp makes basic grammatical mistakes (getting basic nouns' gender wrong), but he is still far more proficient than Layton. Peggy Nash's French is o.k. (based on hearing her answer questions in parliamentary debate) but the concerns that others have raised are definitely justified. As I've said before, Dewar's French is just not acceptable. When you are running to lead what is now a Quebec-based party, you can't be competing with Stephen Harper for French proficiency.
2) The NDP's Quebec support is already slipping slightly. http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/336655/sondage-le-npd-perd-des-...
On the Radio-Canada's show "le Club des ex", former PQ cabinet minister Jean-Pierre Charbonneau asked why the leadership candidates were not aggressively coming out against any of Harper's anti-Quebec policies. I was wondering that myself. Wouldn't Mulcair's campaign (especially) benefit if he was seen addressing 'Harper's attacks against Quebec". In general, he seems to have disappeared from the media radar. Why not at least issue press releases commenting on the issues of the day? (something like what Topp is doing on the Gliobe and Mail website). Perhaps someone from Mulcair's campagin could explain....
Actually, to my ear Topp actually sounds slightly BETTER in French than Mulcair. Mulcair is 100% fluent but has a slight anglo accent in French (no big deal). When I've heard Topp speak French he sounds more Quebecois as if French was nhis mother tongue. He has a better accent.
I suspect that the reason Mulcair is not coming out guns a blazing over Tory policies that are seen as "anti-Quebec" is that he probably realizes that he won't win the leadership by being seen as "the Quebec candidate". He needs to broaden his appeal and show NDP members in the rest of Canada that he is one of them as well.
For Mulcair to take stands on the issues he would have to move away from being all things to all people.
It's not just my opinion that Mulcair speaks better French than Topp:
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/chroniqueurs/lysiane-gagnon/201109/22/01-44502...
It's not just Mulcair who seems timid on the Quebec files. In Question period today, no NDP MP raised the Conservatives' justice policy, whihc is THE big federal story in Quebec. Judging by the polls, the NDP is missing an opportunity to consolidate its standing among QC voters.
To my francophone ears, I think the Mulcair/Topp French questions are splitting hairs. As you (and Gagnon) note, both have French that is superior to Layton's.
I'd agree Muclair is more technically fluent and linguisticlaly facile than Topp.... I suspect that comes from a political career spent as a MNA and working in Quebec law, politics and government. As a result, French has been his primary language of work for three decades. He definitely has a detectable anglo accent, but it never inhibits his ability to communicate in any way.
Topp left Quebec 20 years ago, and has spent most of his professional life in English Canada. So it isn't surprising that his French is "rusty" compared to Mulcair's. Despte that, I'd agree with the previous poster who said that Topp's accent is a little bit better than Mulcair's - he sounds a bit more like a native speaker, at least until he makes a grammatical error. I know (from peripheral personal acquaintance with Topp) that in the early 1980s when he was working in Montreal, he didn't make those kind of mistakes (screwing up verb tenses, getting gender wrong), so I suspect those types of errors will be less frequent as he spends more and more time functioning in French and some of it "comes back" to him.
But I'd remind people that most Quebec voters don't decide their votes based on a grammar score or how much of an accent the party leader has. French speaking voters expect a party leader to be able to communicate clearly in our language, to express their ideas without language getting in the way, to be able to answer questions from voters and the media in French, and to "connect" on a visceral level.
The fact that Duceppe's French was better didn't stop Quebec voters from relating well to Jack and voting NPD as a result.
Based on what I have seen/heard of the various candidates in French, I would argue that at this point Mulcair, Topp, Nash, Saganash and Ashton have all demonstrated their linguistic competence sufficiently to be credible messengers in Quebec and other francophone areas. (Whether they have the communication skills to do that is a different question, but it isn't about linguistic competence.)
I still haven't heard enough from Cullen or Singh to gauge if their French is sufficient - the little I have heard tells me they both have very strong anglo accents but appear to have at least a fair vocabulary and command of the language. I'm looking forward to hearing them more extensively in the debates and unscripted appearances to better measure. Dewar is painful to listen to - his speech is halting, heavily accented, grammatically challenged, and with a limited vocabulary. But he is better than many anglo politicians and definitely gets points for trying -- but he would need to show significant improvement to convince me he has the skill set needed. Chisholm describes himself as unilingual, and I simply don't believe that he could learn enough French quickly enough to be an effective leader in a party with a majority of caucus from Quebec.
Given the previous history of NPD leaders with extremely weak or limited French, I can't begin to tell you how much better it feels to be having this discussion about a group of candidates with this degree of linguistic/cultural competence.
That's because French IS his mother tongue.
Great answers by Romeo Saganash in an interview!
NDP leadership candidates divided on the registry.