Warren Kinsella and Jamie Heath Together Flog NDP/Lib Merger

Nope, no deal! My thoughts. I know, I am vile, contemptible, blah, blah, blah. My reply, whatever.

Interesting that they both put out articles on the same topic (more or less) on the same day.

I suspect that behind the scenes there may be more going on than we know - which I believe is a good thing.

I think Heath's piece speaks more to me - go figure, I'm his target audience - than Kinsella's but they are both correct to conclude that the current trajectory does not look promising for either Liberals or New Democrats come the next general election.

Heath's reference to the cooperation option (as opposed to the merger option) seems more likely to get traction and is, I believe, more likely to succeed in the long-term as well.

In the NDP we have a long-standing policy in favour of proportional representation.  The Liberals, for reasons that escape me at the moment, have recently expressed an interest in looking at electoral reform.  While it is a nice thought to believe proportional rep will be implemented by a majority NDP government federally, just as it has in every province where the NDP has formed a majority government, but I fear other priorities may divert our attention should we form a majority at the federal level.  Perhaps we would be more able to bring about the representative changes we seek by acting in a collaborative manner to bring about the electoral reform we desire.

Working with Liberals to bring this about seems anathama to many New Democrats, I get it.  Were we to get proportional rep by some other means, who would you expect us to work with thereafter?

Swallow some pride.  Arrogance is not our strength, working through differences is.  The cooperation plan makes too much sense not to get moving on.

I have no problem in pursuing a social democratic agenda or being involved in electoral politics - I have actively engaged, and will continue to actively engage, in both.

It is not inconsistent with these goals, in my view, to pursue our social democtatic agenda as part of a governing coalition - just as social democratic parties have done so around the world in countless functioning democratic systems.

Interesting statement in Kinsella's piece: 

Liberals will switch places with New Democrats in 2015.

I wish this thread could be closed. We've been through this already.

Steve_Shutt wrote:

Working with Liberals to bring this about seems anathama to many New Democrats, I get it.

It's anathama on THIS forum, (as I found out in 2009 when I first came here & suggested co-operation) but not amongst the general public.

On political forums, most of the posters are long-time members & activists within a political party.  Those here have a hatred of Liberals which I feel the brunt of every day, and I've come to understand why.  It's because the NDP members here are not representative of the public, (just as Liberal partisans are not necessarily representative of the public.)  When you have devoted your life to a party and fought 'the enemy' on the other side, your job is to attack those in the other camp.  Therefore, I am seen as an enemy by most of the NDP posters here, and not to be trusted under any circumstances!

Amongst the general public there is not the same loyalty to one party over another because those who are swing voters and who go back and forth between the Liberals and NDP see common ground amongst the two parties.  That's basically what Joyce Murray, Nathan Cullen and others are trying to get at.

I agree with most of those above though that the cooperation idea is premature at this time and not likely to be implemented before 2015.  It would be a monumental job to which there is still a lot of opposition.  I think both the Liberals and the NDP want to see how they fare in the next election before making any final decisions.

To oppose electoral cooperation to defeat Harper, it is important to:

1. See significant differences between the Liberals and NDP, in both platform and especially practice.

2. See little difference between the Harper government and previous Liberal (or for that matter PC) governments.

I don't see either #1 or #2. That's why I enthusiastically wished success to the Dion-Layton coalition. And that's why I'm on the Cullen-Murray page.

Quebecers don't seem to have the same undying loyalty to party labels as others. That's why they their votes are hard to predict. That's why they voted for a party they knew nothing about, except that it was opposed to Harper and it was actually running candidates outside Québec (quelle idée!).

I am a Quebecer.

I was working in government while PET was PM, but in fairness I can't remember who I voted for back then. I was pretty pissed off at the people who were running my department (Manpower and Immigration Canada) while I was in Ottawa: Bryce Mackasey, Robert Andras, and Otto Lang. I'm pretty sure I voted NDP in protest against those guys.

There are very few people on this board who were 21 in 1968.  I'm an old timer and my first election was 1972.  As a university student I loved campaigning against corporate welfare buns. By his last election in 1980 Trudeau was hated by NDP supporters more than Joe Clark. The invocation of martial law and then wage and price controls both took any progressive veneer off of him.

I wasn't just referring to the 1968 election - I was referring to all of the elections between 1968 & 1980, and whether anyone here voted for Pierre Trudeau in any of them.

And by the invocation of martial law, do you mean the use of the War Measures Act in the early 1970's which was requested by the Government of Quebec at the time?

It's also important to remember that Pierre Trudeau's support continued to go up in Quebec in the years after his handling of the FLQ crisis, culminating in a record 74 out of 75 seats in 1980, so he certainly had the support of Quebecers.

What year did Ed Broadbent become NDP leader? I can't remember. I faintly recall him railing against Trudeau.

1975

For people on dial up I don't mind doing a quick Google search.

The debate over merging the NDP, Liberals, and Greens shows why establishing fair voting / proportional representation should be the primary issue for Canada's centre-left.

If the Conservatives win yet another phony FPTP government in 2015, a merger between the NDP, Liberals, and Greens will invariably become a viable solution for Canada's centre-left. If merger negotiations occur, establishing fair voting / proportional representation should be the primary issue strictly agreed upon by all parties involved. Proportional representation would be the basis of merging until fair voting allows political parties to operate within a system that's not plagued by vote-splitting.

"And by the invocation of martial law, do you mean the use of the War Measures Act in the early 1970's which was requested by the Government of Quebec at the time?"

Just because someone wants others rights taken away, doesn't make it right. I am not sure how looking at things this way justifies its use. Canada was a dictatorship; people had no rights. It was excessive, and over reaction. My father, a long time CCFer thought upto his final days Trudeau was in many ways the greatest PM the country ever had. But as noted above, he never forgave him for the WMA. My dad, who fought in Europe against the Nazis understood what fascism and undemocratic actions were. This is a very really questionable legacy for PET. Far too many people are willing to dismiss this.

And as I have written elsewhere, I certainly never joined my country to fight its citizenry. I would have taken my release if this had put me in a position to act against my fellow citizens. This is very real. It does not get the kind of serious consideration it deserves. Far too many people are willing to dismiss what is a truly very dark spot in the history of this nation. Make no mistake about it. I wish people would stop dismissing it so lightly in the sake if perserving an imagined legacy. We, as a nation have never really come to grips with this. We deserve to have a mature discussion about this.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

If you are talking federal politics it was Stephen's Dad David you voted for. Stephen led the Ont NDP

Wow, my memory really is getting bad!

Yes, of course it was David Lewis. Isn't he the guy that coined the phrase "Corporate welfare bums"?

We don't even know whether Harper is going to run in the next election.

Steve Paikin suggested in a recent piece that Harper may pack it in before 2015.

Ken Burch wrote:

Although, in 1972, the election after the War Measures Act, the Liberals got less than 50% of the vote in Quebec for the only time during the Trudeau era.  If the NDP had had its act together at the time, it could have made major gains in Quebec in that election...but David Lewis was too much of a fossil to connect with the voters there at the time(and too paranoid about "communism" to engage with the wider Left outside the party, thus losing the chance to make much larger gains in the country as a whole).

And the vision of federalism that Trudeau espoused is now politically extinct in Quebec.

 

Well, in 1972 it was the year when Trudeau was reduced to a Minority across Canada, so some decline in the vote may naturally have occurred in Quebec.  The point is that support for Trudeau remained strong in Quebec in every one of his elections - even the one election he lost to Joe Clark, he still won Quebec.

To this day no one has ever beaten Pierre Trudeau's record in Quebec of 74 seats and 68% of the vote.

I'm not personally opposed to a coalition. I just want to know what form it would take. I liked the Dion coalition. He was a decent guy with real principles. Ignatieff was dangerous. So is Trudeau, to the extent that he has no policies, and what policies he has proposed are all in line with Harper.

Kinsella is a bit of a hack. He's generally "rah rah" Liberal until they screw up, and the dust has ettled. If he's talking about a coalition again, it's because he doesn't believe in Trudeau.

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I am still sorting out my views on electoral cooperation with the Liberals (and Greens)

Like most of you I have a low level of trust in the Liberals. Although there are a number of Liberal progressives with whom we could work there remains a large faction of social and economic conservatives within the party. A few years back for example about 40% of the Liberal caucus was anti-choice and anti- gay marriage.  Finance Ministers like Manley and Martin were little better than Flaherty. I could go on and on in this vein citing numerous examples that are blindingly obvious to everyone except Debater.

The  real crunch for me (and I think Tom Mulcair from what I understand) was the coalition negotiations in late 2008 to early 2009. The NDP compromised to put the coalition together. It agreed to take only a quarter of the cabinet seats where it had half as any MPs as the Liberals. There is a great untold story about how the Liberals backed away from the coalition. In essence the party succumbed to corporate pressure not to allow the NDP into government. And because of that the country will have suffered maybe seven more years of Harper.

Because the Liberals have such a large conservative element they are inherently untrustworthy coalition partners.

On the other hand it seems to me beyond question that the Conservatives have benefited from  the split in the opposition vote and will continue to do so, particularly under the new redistribution. The optimal situation for the Conservatives is that the NDP and the Liberals be more or less equal in support. That will allow the Conservatives to maximize their seats in a FPTP system. The continued presence of the Greens also siphons off anti-Conservative votes into an electoral garbage bin.

There have been many arguments raised against the efficacy of electoral cooperation and I have not found any of them to be very convincing. Poll after poll shows that the NDP is by far the second choice amongst Liberal, Green and  Bloq voters.  The same applies for the Liberals when measured against the Conservatives.  The Liberal and Green electorates are more progressive than the parties themselves.

Some of the arguments against merger are to the effect that The Conservatives would get a large enough share of the second choice vote to win any way. But these same studies all show that the Conservative win would be by far less than without a merger.

I also think that there would be much less leakage of votes between coalition partners if their voters knew there was an electoral arrangement.  More recalcitrant Liberals would be more likely to vote NDP if it had the imprimatur of their party.

The argument is also made, most recently in http://blunt-objects.blogspot.ca/ that the Conservatives will not win a majority anyway so we should wait until after the election before sorting out coalition arrangements. We all heard this kind of talk before the last election and we know how that turned out.

I certainly do not favour a merger of the parties, nor joint nominations which can be swamped by one side or another. But I think we should explore the possibility of a limited form of electoral cooperation. We might consider an arrangement whereby we not run candidates in selected ridings. The NDP could stand down in down in perhaps 25 ridings in which the Liberals are the best placed challengers. The Liberal could reciprocate. We could allocate 4 or 5 seats to the Greens in return for their cooperation in the rest of the country. Polling could identify those ridings in which his would be most effective.

Otherwise we may be risking 5 more years of Harper.

I oppose any sort of gerrymandering of the election.  The parties and activists within them should put forth their ideas as best as possible, and where the chips fall, so be it.

mark_alfred wrote:

I oppose any sort of gerrymandering of the election.  The parties and activists within them should put forth their ideas as best as possible, and where the chips fall, so be it.

Electoral cooperation or outright merger are the exact oppsites of gerrymandering. Electoral cooperation or merger are attempts to deal with the gerrymandering that invariably occurs with FPTP. Electoral cooperation or merger are attempts to produce electoral results within FPTP that more accurately reflect the will of the voters.

FPTP only produces accurate and fair results for single-seat elections that are limited to only two candidates. In other kinds of elections FPTP produces unfair results. That's why all political parties use preferential ballots for their single-seat elections and why most countries use proportional representation to elect their multi-member legislatures.

FPTP should only be used in presidential-type elections limited to two candidates. Presedential-type elections that have more than two candidates should use preferential ballots. Legislative elections should use proportional representation.

Basic math, not political expediency, should be used in choosing appropriate electoral systems.