This majority is not the NDP's fault

The Liberals are just pissed and they are lashing out. The people who voted Tory gave them a Majority, no one else!

I am afraid that the propagenda of just visiting Iggy worked so well on Canadians. I guess Canada is the new America.

The Liberals are the same as the Tories. They care more about power for its own sake and about ensuring their friends have a trough to eat from than they do about the Canadian people. The Liberals had 13 years to implement  electoral reform, including 2 where the NDP would have pretty much written Martin a blank cheque in exchange. It's not our fault they were too stupid and too selfish to stop the Tories. I'd say blaming the NDP for this result should be cause for an insta-ban here.

As everyone here has stated, the Liberals are responsible for their own demise. Specifically, it began with the undemocratic ouster of Dion, and the even more undemocratic coronation of Ignatieff, who was to support Harper against a democratic coalition Canadians desperately needed (even if some didn't understand it).

Their backroom elites were too clever by half, and in the end, they couldn't even be bothered getting the basics right - like having their handpicked leader show up in Parliament.

Iggy started the campaign with an unfair strike against him, due to the damage from the Cons' negative ad campaign.

The next two were all his own:

Being unprepared for the coalition question on the first day of the campaign, and allowing Harper to trap him into rejecting the possibility. I'm rather certain that many Canadians abandoned the Liberals because they once again weren't willing to step up and replace Harper if given the opportunity.

And the coup de grace, of course, was the revelation about Iggy's Parliamentary attendance record.

NDPMajority wrote:

I'd say blaming the NDP for this result should be cause for an insta-ban here.

Constructive suggestions like these belong in the "rabble reactions" forum, not here. Just head over there and make a list of all the people and viewpoints you'd like instantly banned. Thanks.

Slumberjack wrote:

 The Liberals were finished when they followed up after Martin by presenting Iggy and Rae as their most viable leadership contenders.

I tend to agree. What sank Ignatieff was not any imaginary "left" policy of his (didn't hear a single one myself - he even boosted the Afghan mission) - but rather, his ugly scheming partisanship. He destroyed the 2008 coalition (probably in a backroom deal with Harper to support the Jan. 2009 budget), and swore off a coalition at the start of the campaign. Canadians are not mindless partisans like some I could name. They sent the U.S.-sounding backslapping bastard packing. Glory to Canada (especially Québec)!

And of course, Ignatieff has now announced his resignation. The Liberals would do well to go apologize to Dion and ask for his help, provided they find some decent video equipment...

Unionist wrote:

Slumberjack wrote:

 The Liberals were finished when they followed up after Martin by presenting Iggy and Rae as their most viable leadership contenders.

I tend to agree. What sank Ignatieff was not any imaginary "left" policy of his (didn't hear a single one myself - he even boosted the Afghan mission) - but rather, his ugly scheming partisanship. He destroyed the 2008 coalition (probably in a backroom deal with Harper to support the Jan. 2009 budget), and swore off a coalition at the start of the campaign. Canadians are not mindless partisans like some I could name. They sent the U.S.-sounding backslapping bastard packing. Glory to Canada (especially Québec)!

And of course, Ignatieff has now announced his resignation. The Liberals would do well to go apologize to Dion and ask for his help, provided they find some decent video equipment...

 

The liberal party is beyond Dions ability to help, although if he ran again on a platform of merging with the NDP he could win the Leadership. He is a fracophone after all.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Iggy started the campaign with an unfair strike against him, due to the damage from the Cons' negative ad campaign.

Even then, he didn't even fight against the negative advertising when it could have made a difference. I can assure you that Layton will not roll over that easily.

Unionist wrote:

I tend to agree. What sank Ignatieff was not any imaginary "left" policy of his (didn't hear a single one myself - he even boosted the Afghan mission) - but rather, his ugly scheming partisanship. 

When I refer to the left wing message I mean the attack ads that they ran featuring the jets and prisons.  Their platform was the same old liberal grab bag of recycled NDP policy. I thought the imagery in their attack ads was designed specifically to appeal to the left in Canada without having to discuss any policies. 

Aristotleded24 wrote:

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Iggy started the campaign with an unfair strike against him, due to the damage from the Cons' negative ad campaign.

Even then, he didn't even fight against the negative advertising when it could have made a difference. I can assure you that Layton will not roll over that easily.

I don't know about the attack ad stuff.  It was only successful because it fed into some very basic truths about Ignatieff. 

Ignatieff never made the case about why we came back to Canada after publicly declaring himself American.  He clearly even cultivated an American accent he never lost.

Ignatieff never supplied any sense of vison for the Liberals and Canada- it was all back of the envelope calculations of maybe this will work to get us into government.  

Ignatieff never seemed to understand modern Canada and who we have become as a people, and seemed instead to want us to retain a nostalgic love of our inferiority complex and the Liberals. 

Ignatieff never really seemed committed to anything. 

And finally Ignatieff just didn't understand progressive politics.  He had a chance to do something profound with the coalition and maybe even have destroyed the NDP through that process.  Progressive Canadians would have risen up to defend a coalition government that had actually had two years to get things going with a clear agenda.  But Ignatieff was in the end only in it for himself and so scuttled the coalition and sent Canada on the path to a majority Conservative government.

Evan Solomon was on the tube last night and looking like he'd just attended a funeral for the LPC. He was explaining that the Harper majority was a result of "vote splitting". He pointed to the results in a few ridings where NDP and Liberal votes combined were more than the winning Harper candidates'. 

So there we have it - the very undemocratic results were caused by too many people voting NDP and even "vote splitting" and apparently has nothing to do with our dysfunctional electoral system. Vote splitting. CBC says the problem was vote splitting. And, of course, the Harpers said they view the result as a clear mandate from Canadians. And never mind that the large majority "of Canadians" did not vote for them.

Incorrect wrote:

I think I will start a website selling "Don't blame me, I voted NDP" t-shirts and bumper stickers.

I'd buy them. But hey that reminds me, I think I'll start a "Conservative Fail" blog.

There are now several threads basically on the same topic. Please can we try not to create any more?

They all are about --

what to do/why it happened/is or is not NDP's fault

Think I'll try the Michael Ignatieff Diet... How to lose your seat in 37 days!

Unionist wrote:

Constructive suggestions like these belong in the "rabble reactions" forum, not here. Just head over there and make a list of all the people and viewpoints you'd like instantly banned. Thanks.

 

Can anyone play this game? I have been keeping a list for some time now...

Here's a Liberal supporter [url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/silver-power... the Liberal campaign:

Quote:

We entered the election with a clear strategy to triangulate the NDP on just about every single issue save Afghanistan. Pick an issue, look at the NDP, look at the Liberals, we consistently got as close to them as possible. The strategy was to push the NDP down, polarize the election as a choice between us and the Conservatives and bob’s your uncle. At least that was the theory.

That makes it clear that the Liberals weren't trying to compete with Conservatives for their voters, nor were they pursuing a strategy designed to stop Harper by working with other parties to attack Conservative incumbents. They were competing for NDP voters and hoping to do to the NDP what the NDP ended up doing to them. They may not have aired attack ads against Jack Layton early in the campaign but they were certainly trying to pose an existential threat to the NDP.

The only way the NDP could have made some of the more vocal Liberals happy would have been to withdraw from the campaign entirely. If they wanted to survive, they had to fight back and to suggest that they could fight back selectively enough to avoid vote-splitting is patently ridiculous.

That was an interesting article. It shows how each party is consumed with their own party, and their own power. Thus the center vote gets split, and Harper rules.

By the way, as a moderate progressive voter, to me Iggy seemed like a neo-liberal, who was just saying BS to try to appeal to the center-left.

No one knew what was going to happen, but now they know. Will the NDP and Libs work together against Harper now? Sadly, one must predict no.

Karma in action

Well, this sure didn't take long:

Quote:

The Conservative Party can finally lay claim to Ontario - and the majority bragging rights that come with it - but it was the NDP that may have made the decisive blow to the former Liberal fortress, according to a riding-by-riding analysis at threehundredeight.com.

 

Several of the ridings that went Conservative last night were very close (all totals rounded to the nearest hundred, as results are not official):

» Bramalea-Gore-Malton was won by the Conservatives with 19,900 votes to 19,400

...

» Etobicoke-Lakeshore, where 5,000 new NDP voters helped defeat Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.

...

But in these five ridings, the New Democrats gained anywhere from 2,200 to 13,500 votes only to finish in second or third, behind the defeated Liberal incumbents. Simply put, NDP gains in these ridings handed them over to the Conservatives, who in many cases did not see their raw vote totals increase by more than one or two thousand votes.

This is, quite frankly, horseshit. First, in Bramalea, it was the NDP who finished second to the Tories. How did the NDP 'cost' the Liberals that seat? If anything, it was the reverse.

Second, in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ignatieff got 23,247 votes to 17,575 for the Tory in 2008. This time, the Tory got 21,963 to Iggy's 19,058. In other words, Ignatieff's vote went down by 4,000 and the Conservative vote went up by almost exactly the same amount. 4,000 people who voted for Iggy in 2008 voted Tory this time. It's as simple as that.

But leave it to the Globe to not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Ken Burch wrote:

M. Spector wrote:

josh wrote:

Walkom's whole thesis fails because of a faulty premise.  It wasn' t vote splitting in Ontario that was responsible; it was Liberals voting Conservative.

This is true. Liberals seem to believe they are "entitled" to the support of NDP voters in close races with the Cons.

In my riding, Etobicoke Centre, the incumbent Liberal lost to the Conservative by 26 votes (there will be a recount). The Liberal blames the NDP, who ran third. In actual fact, the Conservative vote increased by 2,822 and the Liberal vote decreased by 2,902; those Con votes didn't come from the NDP, but from the Liberals.

Personally, I blame the Marxist-Leninists for the Con win. Their 149 votes exceeds the Conservative margin of victory! [img]http://i32.tinypic.com/oi5aw2.jpg[/img]

Damn straight.  The  Marxist-Leninists always have been a Mickey-Maoist organization.

Wasn't Lenin a right-wing deviation of Marxism?

observer521 wrote:

The Libs were also trying to go left to crush the NDP.

All that does is split the center votes. I know lots of people who are center-left who have always voted Lib, as it was perceived as socially progressive and moderate.

In itself, thats not ideal. Nonetheless, legitimate for the Libs to go after NDP/Lib voters.

The problem was not the so called "vote splitting." The problem was that the chickenshit Liberals REFUSED to make an anywhere near equally dedicated play for Cons/Lib swing voters.

Sweet justice that their cynical strategy choice totally backfired and bit them in the ass big time.

ghoris wrote:

,,, the Liberals offered a pale-pink imitation of the NDP, thinking the voters would fall for it again, but this time left-leaning voters saw through it and decided to go for the genuine article.

From my position, it appeared that the NDP out-Liberaled the Liberals. They have been trying for years to replace the Liberal Party; by burying all appearance of being left-wing, and by embracing warm and fuzzy social-liberal issues like pensions, credit-card interest rates, and physician shortages, they finally achieved in this election what they have long wanted to do. The discomfort of the Liberals with their own leader and campaign strategy was the perfect opportunity, and once the surge began in Quebec with the nationalists turning to the NDP, the left wing of the Liberal party slid easily into supporting the NDP in English Canada as well (many of them perennial swing voters and "strategic" voters with a history of migrating back and forth between the NDP and the Liberals). The NDP was, in short, the natural place for left-of-centre Liberals to park their votes.

The rest of the damage to the Liberals was the defection of their right wing to the Conservatives. Two main factors were responsible for this: The Canadian capitalist class has been badly shaken by the economic crisis of the last few years and has decided to pull back from liberal democracy into authoritarianism and austerity, by throwing support to the Harper Conservatives; and secondly, an existential panic caused by the possibility of an NDP-led minority/coalition government hit the conservative wing of the Liberals pretty hard last weekend, and they voted strategically with Harper to curb the NDP surge.

To hold the Liberal votes it has attracted, the NDP will move even further to the right. The federal NDP convention this summer will be carefully managed to ensure that the voice of the left wing of the party is smothered, and the new-look party that emerges will bear an even closer resemblance to the Liberal Party than ever.

SRB wrote:

Then those who are truly Left will have to push back hard, put forward all kinds of resolutions on the environment and social policy etc.

I agree. Just don't expect to see any of those resolutions come to the floor of the convention.

SRB wrote:

Perhaps some of the voices from Quebec will inject some left-wing blood into the party.

The Quebec support comes mainly from the ex-BQ. The BQ is/was not a particularly left-wing force.

If the left goes too hard, it will kill the NDP chances of getting elected.

What is better for those truly on the left? To get the party they belong to elected with compromise? Or to have their views front and center, and not get elected?

I can tell you this, mainstream Canada will not elect a gov't that is too left wing. I think Jack was smart to talk about small business, etc.

If the left pushes too hard on the center parties, they won't get elected, except in fringe areas. Quebec is something else right now, it seems to be a protest vote, it may not hold.