babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Support rabble | Advertise with us | Contact our staff | About rabble | Log-in or Register for a new account | Corrections | Privacy policy | Newsfeeds | Mailing lists
rabble: Features | Columnists | In Cahoots | Blogs | Books | Photos | What's Up | Polls
babble: Forum Topics | Active Topics
The rpn: About the RPN | Become a podcaster
rabbleTV: Program Guide | Features | Indie Inside | Best of the net
Copyright © 2001-2013 the authors
Syndicate
..the quebec students are showing us how canadian resistance is unfolding. so is the grassroots coalition and resistance building that is going on in bc against the pipelines. you think that's not going to spread fidel? this is where real change will come from or not at all. this is direct democracy in action.
I like it and like it a lot. But we will still need to send the Harpers packing by 2015.
..i agree that it is an important goal for the left fidel, to get rid of harper. more urgent to me is building resistance today and “hitting the streets” today. the longer we wait the more people will be thrown into desperate states.
I believe we all want essentially the same thing. The whole world wants for social democracy.
..that's not true. i don't. social democratic governments do not go far enough in policy nor do they have the enforcement capability that you give them credit for nor are they democratic.
I'm saying on average they do. You may be more politically conscious than most. But if you were to ever visit a third world democratic capitalist country, you would understand. Hundreds of millions of human beings in those countries seek justice of any kind their whole lives, and they never find it.
..i mean using the right tool for the right job. capitalism has to go. it has zero political masters. some say revolution i say revolution but not in the tradional way. direct democracy provides platforms for us to become fully activated in our political lives rather than passively allowing governments and corporations and the police to destroy everything we cherish about life. this is global.
In other words, you're fine with the priorities of the Dexter government.
What happened in NS for 160 years before the NDP?
Why has it taken this long to realize that things have gone awry in NS, and that it's the NDP's fault?
" I think you want Walt Disney not the NDP."
That's pretty much what we have in Ottawa when it comes to NDP. pass the popcorn!
I'll admit that it's fun to daydream of a party promising the nationalise thousands of corporations within their first four-year term in power. And by seizing what was pawned and sold-off at firesale prices over the course of the last 30 years, we could avoid having to compensate wealthy foreigners according to today's inflated stock market share values.
We could avoid shovelling tens of billions of dollars in interest payments to banksters and private owners of capital: the new means of production and debt-driven business plan since the 1980s.
But what realistic chance for actual election to phony-majority federal government would you give a fictitious Walt Disney Party if they campaigned on the promise to seize the branch plant factories and three dozen majority foreign-owned and controlled key sectors of Canada's economy?
Failing that enough people would vote for such a party, what else can we do?
Most Canadians don't support the NDP's program the way it stands today. They consider it the Walt Disney Party.
Does that mean, according to the above logic, we should dump the existing program and adopt something that will be more appealing to Liberals and Conservatives?
Or should we - oh, I don't know - try to persuade people to change their minds? Now there's a novel idea!
No idea what you're talking about. Most Canadians did not vote for the Harpers, either. And yet that party owns 907% of political power in Ottawa today.
The NDP is now the largest opposition party ever elected to oppose a phony-majority government in Ottawa.
We need a modern electoral system in order to unite all left wing parties and allow for all democratic voices to be heard in the halls of power. Chavez knows what it is like to bite off more than one chew with they proposed dozens of sweeping changes to that country's constitution and economic re-structuring. It almost passed but didn't have the support they needed at the time.
The NDP needs a first term in government for starters. But as things stand today none of what you propose is realistic with the dictatorial setup we've been enjoying for the last 140 years in a row non-stop.
You seem to have real trouble sticking to the subject. You say the NDP can't adopt a left-wing program because it couldn't form a government if it did. Throwing the same argument back at you, I point out that the NDP is already too left-wing for most Canadians to allow it to form a government anyway, so it's not as if there's a non-arbitrary dividing line on just how left-wing the NDP can get away with being.
But suddenly you have gone from talking about a "realistic" chance to form a government to talking about forming an official opposition and having representation of left wing parties in parliament. That's a totally different issue from the question of forming a government.
The Harpers won 24% of the eligible vote last election. Most Canadians are not politically conservative.
The Harpers are quite beatable, and that's exactly what we intend to do in 2015.
Just watch us.
Bravado and bluster is not a political argument.
Instead of pretending that the majority of the population supports the NDP's current policy, you should be thinking about how you're going to persuade them to change their votes from Liberal or Conservative to NDP. Instead, you seem to prefer tailoring the party program to the existing backwardness of the voters (by becoming more Liberal and Conservative) and hope that this will attract them. Why would it?
Again you're not making a lot of sense.
Iggy was Harper's best friend for years, and now the Liberals are relegated to third party where they belong. Canadians don't want another conservative party. Those who did vote punished the Liberals for trying to out-conservative the conservatives. All the NDP has to do is present themselves as neither Liberals nor Conservatives and continue opposing as the record on Parliamentary votes is there for all Canadians to observe.
Next the voters will decide between the NDP and that party which most Canadians tend to vote against in order not to elect another Brian Mulroney. We have to target swing voters same as the Tories did with their robocalls. It's not democracy by any means but it's what we have to focus on jts.
That kind of thinking is guaranteed to send the NDP right back to fourth party status in the House of Commons.
The very last thing you should do is proclaim that Canadians don't want the Liberal Party, or that the Liberal Party is dead. It's premature, it's wishful thinking, and it represents a static, fixed-in-stone perspective that contrasts with a very fluid and unpredictable reality.
The NDP has no right to assume the voters will sweep it to power in 2015 in return for merely showing up and voting "no" in the House. You have to present an alternative vision to both the Liberal and Conservative agendas and you have to sell it to people. You have to know when people are angry about something the government has done or not done, and you have to connect with them and show them how the NDP would do things differently.
That means that, for example in Ontario, you don't support austerity programs that will hurt millions of Ontarians. People remember stuff like that. It also means you have to have political courage, and confidence in your ability to sell your program to people.
But apparently this doesn't make a lot of sense to you. You prefer a strategy that would turn the NDP into the Liberal Party so it would be more attractive to voters.
The third party will not be resurrected from the dead. I predict even more of their voters fleeing to the NDP by 2015. They will vote strategically and for the NDP this time in order to stop the Harpers.
It worked before, and it will work again. The NDP will be seen to be the only alternative to the Harpers even moreso now than before.
That might be true in Nordic countries, like Denmark where a united left is now setting out a course for oil-free economy by another eight year's time.
In Canada, though, we have the dysfunctional electoral system as they do in the U.S. People in both countries vote out of fear of electing a bunch of right wing wackos. And now that the Liberal democrats are pushed aside here in Canada, people actually have a valid alternative to vote for that doesn't carry the Liberal Party baggage of broken election promises past. Canadians don't want or need a redundant conservative party, and that is evident with the NDP now the largest opposition party in Canadian history elected to oppose phony-majority government.
You are confusing provincial and federal politics again. Ontarians rarely if ever vote for the same party federally as provincially.
Not even the Liberal Party wants to be the Liberal Party anymore. They vacated the centre-left decades ago. Lo', observe their third party status today as a result. They should try re-inventing themselves for a change. Canadians are not politically conservative, and now the LPC is beginning to understand that. Alas, the Liberals will not be saved.
"Rarely, if ever"? LOL!
I guess that means you've got Ontario in the bag for 2015!
The provincial NDP's in Nova Scotia, Ontario, BC, Manitoba, etc. can continue pursuing their Neo-Diperal austerity agendas with abandon, secure in the knowledge that voters understand the federal NDP is not like them at all!!
Long thread!