Jody Wilson-Raybould & Jane Philpott: Where do they go politically from here?

Mackenzie Gray (CTV National News Producer) recently tweeted that EMay offered to step down as Green leader after the 2019 election if either JWR or Philpott wanted to run for the post. They both declined.

Mackenzie Gray clarified the first tweet by saying that May said the leadership decision would be up to Green Party members and that she also offered Paul Manly the opportunity of taking over.

Debater,

You can say that you are voting Green but I for one see you as being a Liberal. And you talk through the lens of a Liberal hardliner.

it doesn’t matter how you vote but you don’t come across as a Green to me anyway. 

Misfit wrote:

Debater,

You can say that you are voting Green but I for one see you as being a Liberal. And you talk through the lens of a Liberal hardliner.

it doesn’t matter how you vote but you don’t come across as a Green to me anyway. 

Nor to me. It seems you are hoping to suppress the NDP vote in the hopes of winning more ridings for the Liberals by encouraging lefties to vote Green, but that is a dangerous game, because growth in the Green vote will also come from the Greens. Since the Greens have so far to grow in most ridings, this could end up costing both the Liberals and NDP seat losses to the Conservatives more than any gains for the Greens, possibly helping them gain power. You hardly ever comment on issues, including green issues, just on the rise and fall of parties that always seems to end up favouring the Liberals. 

Philpott and JWR: How the mighty have not yet fallen

The two MPs are attempting to pull off the Jerry Maguire of Canadian politics by running as independents. The odds are long.

by Paul Wells

May 27, 2019

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/philpott-and-jwr-how-the-mighty-have-not-yet-fallen/

Wilson-Raybould and Philpott begin their journey to obscurity

 Andrew Cohen

May 28, 2019

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/cohen/wcm/bef6ecb1-b137-4d2b-ac12-4b083eb6ba3f

Meet the activist who persuaded Jody Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpott to go independent (Toronto Star, June 2, 2019)

Spoiler alert: its Dave Meslin.

Quote:

They should start a party of Independents. They could band together logistically around the ideal of being able to represent their consituents without the interference of a party. It would have no ideology.

Until the first Conservative gets turfed from caucus over a bozo eruption about refugees getting gay abortions and sits as an independent.  Then it would get an ideology.

I thought the Liberal Party already stood for nothing except getting elected.

Misfit wrote:

If they have no ideology then they don’t stand for anything. Sounds silly.

And Elizabeth May is a very accomplisghed lawyer. 

Didn't know that about May. I have only ever known her as the Green Party leader. 

It isn't necessary to have an ideology to make practical governing decisions. It is possible to decide pharmacare is a good option because it costs less. No ideology necessary. I think most Canadians would be relieved to have a government that makes all decisions based on logic and practicality rather than on ideology. 

Quote:

It isn't necessary to have an ideology to make practical governing decisions. It is possible to decide pharmacare is a good option because it costs less. No ideology necessary.

Pharmacare could exploit the government's buying power, yes, but Pharmacare isn't just about buying in bulk, it's also about nationalizing prescription coverage.  I'm not arguing against it at all, but it's not as though there isn't a giant value judgement in there -- that everyone should pay for my meds because the cost to everyone would be less than the cost to me.  It's not the same simple economics as buying milk for $2/l instead of $3/l.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

It isn't necessary to have an ideology to make practical governing decisions. It is possible to decide pharmacare is a good option because it costs less. No ideology necessary.

Pharmacare could exploit the government's buying power, yes, but Pharmacare isn't just about buying in bulk, it's also about nationalizing prescription coverage.  I'm not arguing against it at all, but it's not as though there isn't a giant value judgement in there -- that everyone should pay for my meds because the cost to everyone would be less than the cost to me.  It's not the same simple economics as buying milk for $2/l instead of $3/l.

Lack of ideology doesn't mean lack of values.

The general public isn't putting that much thought into pharmacare. Medicare=good therefore pharmacare would also be good. If you want to go farther Pharmacare is simply a collective insurance that lowers the cost of drugs. 

Pharmacare has broad public support and reduces inequality, one of the main challenges of our time. Even the IMF recognizes that inequality is bad for the economy. Poverty is not good for business. The key to a robust economy is keeping money in circulation. Children are the greatest resource or future burden a country has. Education in large part determines the future of the country as a whole and payback is fairly short term. Cities with clean air, great transportation, and educated citizens attract tech companies and head offices.

Poll in Jane Philpott riding

Liberals (35%) Conservatives (30%) Jane Philpott (19%) Green (4%) NDP (2%)

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/jane-philpott-faces-long-odds-of...

Pondering wrote:

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

It isn't necessary to have an ideology to make practical governing decisions. It is possible to decide pharmacare is a good option because it costs less. No ideology necessary.

Pharmacare could exploit the government's buying power, yes, but Pharmacare isn't just about buying in bulk, it's also about nationalizing prescription coverage.  I'm not arguing against it at all, but it's not as though there isn't a giant value judgement in there -- that everyone should pay for my meds because the cost to everyone would be less than the cost to me.  It's not the same simple economics as buying milk for $2/l instead of $3/l.

Lack of ideology doesn't mean lack of values.

The general public isn't putting that much thought into pharmacare. Medicare=good therefore pharmacare would also be good. If you want to go farther Pharmacare is simply a collective insurance that lowers the cost of drugs. 

Pharmacare has broad public support and reduces inequality, one of the main challenges of our time. Even the IMF recognizes that inequality is bad for the economy. Poverty is not good for business. The key to a robust economy is keeping money in circulation. Children are the greatest resource or future burden a country has. Education in large part determines the future of the country as a whole and payback is fairly short term. Cities with clean air, great transportation, and educated citizens attract tech companies and head offices.

I'm not sure why you keep using the term "ideology"-it's a Cold War/Red Scare term, used to accuse people of Stalinism or Maoism and nobody on this board-I'd also say no significant numbers of people in North America or much of anywhere else, for that matter-are arguing for anything even remotely similar to that.  

There are a lot of people who are kept too busy by our current system to have time to think about politics and ideas in great detail-but that doesn't mean those people have no deep, burning wish for something better and different within them, it simply means they may have less time and energy to express those wishes than people like us do-and it can't be concluded from that that the NDP HAS to keep looking as though it has no passionately-held core values, has to commit itself to never proposing any major break with the status quo.

From what I've read in your posts, you seem to think the voters have repeatedly been given the option to vote for significant change and repeatedly said no to that option.  That simply isn't reality.

There has been no major party in Canada which has carried out a parliamentary strategy OR fought an election based on a call for significant change since the CCF renounced the Regina Manifesto.  Since then-while there have been personally radical CCF or NDP(or, on some occasions in Quebec, BQ)federal candidates and MPs, the leadership of the NDP, since the mid-1940s, has been just as committed to largely keeping things as they are has the Conservatives or Liberals-the CCF/NDP has advocated that the status quo be made slightly less brutal and nasty, but that's about it.    

Ever since the abandonment of the Manifesto, the NDP's approach has been a kind of anti-ideology ideology, and could be characterized as "sectarian dilutionism"-which I will define as an unvarying tendency to respond to each setback NOT by finding a more compelling message, not by creating a narrative that actually connects with the lived experience of people, but by continually blurring the differences between the NDP and the other parties, simply by saying less and less and less.  

Therefore, there is no basis for the idea that we can simply conclude that the voters would automatically move away from the NDP if it started speaking of transformation.

To call for transformative politics is simply to express true hope.

What worked for Jack Layton in 2011 was not any moves to moderate the program-he didn't change it much at all from his previous campaigns-but the sense of optimism, passion and energy he conveyed, the sense of possibility.  The possibility-based campaign Jack ran that year would have created an NDP breakthrough on ANY manifesto.

If voters are going to listen to a campaign based on enthusiasm and possibility, they are willing to vote for a politics of transformation.

The need is simply to find a way to present transformation in a language everybody can grasp and understand:  That's what Tommy D. did with his "Mouseland" fable:  he made an argument for radically redistributing wealth and power as a children's story with a comic punchline.

The key is not to avoid "ideology"-it's to make whatever the NDP or any other Left party calls for sound practical and acheivable, and relevant to the experience and need of the voters.

A dream of a better world can easily be presented in such terms, because a better world will have a direct positive impact on the lives of the majority.

There have been two situations, in the last three decades, in which sectarian dilutionism has prevented the NDP from making a major breakthrough: 

The first was In 1988, when the leader and his advisors, even though the NDP was in second place at the beginning of the campaign, refused to run on a theme of passionate opposition to NAFTA and recognition of Quebec's right to self-determination-a choice which allowed the PC's, who were effectively endorsing that right through their constitutional proposals, to win the votes of a huge number of Quebecers who started the campaign supporting the NDP);

The second was the 2011-2015 period, when the leader of that era refused to lead a crusade against Harper's assault on the social welfare state, kept the party distant from the Quebec student protests and Idle No More(even though nobody who opposed the students and their fight against massive tuition increases OR the FN cause would even have considered voting NDP) and joined the Cons and the Liberals in giving unquestioning public support to Netanyahu and everything he did to the Palestiniand, and instead of fighting the right on any major matters of public policy, focused almost entirely on erasing all vestiges of internal party democracy, on presenting the NDP as a guarantor of balanced budgets above all else, and on a melodramatic but pointless battle to have an irrelevant Conservative senator prosecuted on corruption charges, a matter nobody out there in the electorate ever cared about; and who, during the disastrous 2015 election campaign he led, ignored the lesson he himself had taught only months earlier in his opposition to C-51, an opposition that represented the only truly progressive moment of his tenure as leader, that voters RESPOND to and support public figures who actually make a passionate stand on issues of the day.

Debater wrote:

In yesterday's Vancouver Granville poll, NDP support seemed to also be going to Wilson-Raybould.

One of my friends who lives in Vancouver-Granville and who usually votes NDP (her politics are of the Sven Robinson/Libby Davies variety) wrote on FB that JWR would get her vote if an election were held now, and another woman who lives in the riding and previously voted NDP said the same in the comments. A couple of other folks convinced my friend to wait to see where JWR comes down on the issues before making a final decision.

Debater wrote:

Yeah, it's a bit ironic that JWR is attracting NDP support, because her policies as Justice Minister were somewhat conservative.  And one of her former legal colleagues has been on Twitter for months saying she was pretty conservative when he worked with her.

But it's good for JWR if she can attract NDP votes.  Less good for Jagmeet Singh & the NDP, however.

The other ironic part is that my friend's reason for saying she would vote for JWR was  that she thinks JWR will suck up the "progressive" vote in Van-Granville, and therefore the NDP can't win. So if the NDP vote collapses and goes to JWR, it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Left Turn wrote:

Debater wrote:

Yeah, it's a bit ironic that JWR is attracting NDP support, because her policies as Justice Minister were somewhat conservative.  And one of her former legal colleagues has been on Twitter for months saying she was pretty conservative when he worked with her.

But it's good for JWR if she can attract NDP votes.  Less good for Jagmeet Singh & the NDP, however.

The other ironic part is that my friend's reason for saying she would vote for JWR was  that she thinks JWR will suck up the "progressive" vote in Van-Granville, and therefore the NDP can't win. So if the NDP vote collapses and goes to JWR, it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Van-Granville was never a winnable riding for the NDP; in 2015(the first election where the riding existed)JWR, as the Liberal candidate, beat the NDP candidate by over twenty points).

And there was simply no circumstance in which she would ever have considered crossing over to the NDP anyway-assuming the party's riding association in Van-Granville could be made to accept her as candidate, which is questionable at best.

Debater wrote:

In most years the NDP should be competitive in a riding like Vancouver Granville, otherwise it does not bode well for the NDP's ability to win nationally.

What I'm saying is that your use of the term "idology" is a strawman.  Nobody in this discussion is actually arguing that the NDP should campaign in the dead phraseology of Leninist or Maoist street pamphlets.  

As to the reaction the Leap Manifesto received-there was a limit to how much "enthusiasm" it could generate simply because, at the time it was released, no party was supporting anything similar to the Leap, so it was received simply as a set of broadly-enunciated goals that nobody, at that time, was going to act on.  We have no way of knowing how what sort of reaction the Leap would have received had it been part of any party's election manifesto.  It would have been an interesting exercise for Elizabeth May to commit the GPC to the basic ideas of the Manifesto-and she might have been the only party who could do so, since her party literally had next to nothing to lose(the Manifesto would never have cost her her riding)

We're in agreement that Mulcair's balanced-budget obsession-coupled with his absolute refusal, in the one televised debate he chose to participate in, to mention any of the progressive planks in his program-cost him the election-I assume you would also agree that Mul had NO excuse for not immediately resigning on election night, since he knew instantly that no leader can ever lead her or his party to any future gains after leading their party from second to third place in an election-because he hung on so stubbornly long and insisted on staying on for a year AFTER BEING OUSTED AS LEADER, and since he singlehandedly created the conditions that caused the GPC victory in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith by-election, we can fairly say the NDP won't be free and clear of Mulcair until after this election-an election where the party may experience another 1958- or 1993-style disaster-which would put the party in a situation in which it was NOT clear that it would be able to recover.   The NDP's core values would still exist, and those values retain their resonance with the people, but it's an open question as to whether anyone would believe that the NDP could ever again be an effective vehicle within which to fight for those values.

What I'm saying is that the NDP doesn't need to sound like a party of bland complacency to prosper at the polls-it doesn't need to run a "vote for us-if we win, you won't know we're there" campaign.  It simply needs to find a way to make transformational politics sound practical and achievable, and to make the case that a transformational program would make a real and positive difference in people's lives.

I agree that parties and social movements can't act in exactly the same ways; my disagreement is with the idea that left-of-center political parties must make a point of asserting that they have no connection with social movements, or must make a point of anathemizing activists and activist culture.   Remember, most activists come out of ordinary communities and normal life-their activism is informed by their lived experience and the actual reality around them-it's not as though all activists land in Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal after journeying from the planet Leftzar 3.4 or something.  Activists are human beings who live real, day-to-day lives.

It's not possible to build support for a left-of-center party by refusing to defend activism as a valid purpose in life.

As to ideas that can and do connect with people:

There is a large bloc of votes the NDP could get in actually fighting for the ideas of the Green New Deal-you could create "Mouseland" type fables or short pieces on its basic ideas...the GND can basically be summarized as "Jobs AND Survival".   It also connects with the income inequality question, since the jobs created by the GND would mainly be high-wage jobs.

Encouraging the growth of co-ops is also a popular idea that connects with the ordinary people having coffee down at Tim Horton's-the NDP could push for the creation of a National CO-OP bank so that, when the corporate overlards(spelling intentional) at Tim's close another few hundred franchises, the customers could form co-ops under their own management, get jobs out of the deal, and probably make BETTER donuts for themselves and their friends in the bargain.

People want a sense of hope from those who ask for their vote-speak the language of hope and you can win support for things that wouldn't have seemed possible.  That's what Tommy taught us; that's what Jack taught us.

Mulcair failed because he spoke the language of contempt and disparagement, the language of dismissal and of fear of change.  The only people who were going to respond to THAT language were people who wouldn't have vote for any party OTHER than the Cons.

A group of independents, for that matter, would need to speak the language of hope and difference; if they made a point of sounding like the status quo, nobody would see any point in voting for them.

If you're using Syriza as an example of non-leftist banding, Pondering, their name is literally an acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left.

swallow wrote:

If you're using Syriza as an example of non-leftist banding, Pondering, their name is literally an acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left.

Even so their election campaign rejected it and asked people to put aside left and right. They ran purely on the austerity issue. 

And you're misrepresenting my views when you say I want the NDP to endorse "all social activist positions".  That's not true.  I simply want them to have a different relationship with the social movements than the Cons and Liberals have-a position that says "unlike the other parties, we don't assume that electoral politics is the ONLY valid form of political expression, and we don't believe that nobody other than political parties should have a say in the political discussion".  What would be so terrible about THAT?                                                                                                                                                  

Also, if you look at the polling, a LOT of what you would call "social activist" positions are quite popular-I think that even applies to most FN issues.

And to correct a misconception you have, most "social activists" are solidly pro-labour and work in alliance with the labour movement-many, if not most, are union members themselves.

There simply isn't this massive divide between social activists/social movements and ordinary people.  The fact that most people don't have the time to be activists does not mean that most people are actively hostile to social activists and social movements.  A lot of non-activist people see those activists as fighting for things that they, the non-activists, would benefit from.

When you hear the term "social activist", is your perception of those people stuck back in 1970?  That is, do you equate everybody who identifies as a "social activist" with the people who went to rallies in solidarity with the FLQ in the days before the October Crisis?

Have you not noticed that almost a half century has passed since then?  That the FLQ has been extinct since the Crisis?  That nobody on the Canadian Left in THIS era uses or endorses tactics even remotely similar to them?

And the 2015 elections-an election in which the Leap was not endorsed by any party-were no more a rejection of the Leap than the French National Assembly elections of 1968-an election in which no party endorsed the agenda of the student/worker alliance of May-were a vote AGAINST the student/worker alliance-or, for that matter,that the U.S. presidential election in the same year, in which both major party candidates supported the continuation of the war against Vietnam even though the rank-and-file voters of one of those major parties had overwhelmingly voted against the war, was a U.S. national vote to tell the peace movement to eff off.

In both cases, what you had was a statement of defiance or the release of a set of alternative ideas occuring more or less around the time of a parliamentary/legislative election in which no one on the ballot was supporting that statement or those ideas.

Pondering wrote:

Private insurance companies have to charge premiums to create profit. Paying into any insurance means you are paying for someone else's meds. Pharmacare is a non-profit single-payer insurance program. 

It seems to me that for ideological reasons people on the left tend to support establishing new public insurance programs and for ideological reasons people on the right tend to oppose establishing new public insurance programs. In Canada I think there is a clear ideological divide on the issue of Pharmacare whereby the centre-left parties, the NDP, GPC, LPC, and BQ, tend to support establishing a new Pharmacare program and the right of centre parties, the CPC and PP’s tend to oppose a new Pharmacare program. I think most Canadians see this ideological divide.

Michael Moriarity wrote:

JKR wrote:

Pondering wrote:

Private insurance companies have to charge premiums to create profit. Paying into any insurance means you are paying for someone else's meds. Pharmacare is a non-profit single-payer insurance program. 

It seems to me that for ideological reasons people on the left tend to support establishing new public insurance programs and for ideological reasons people on the right tend to oppose establishing new public insurance programs. In Canada I think there is a clear ideological divide on the issue of Pharmacare whereby the centre-left parties, the NDP, GPC, LPC, and BQ, tend to support establishing a new Pharmacare program and the right of centre parties, the CPC and PP’s tend to oppose a new Pharmacare program. I think most Canadians see this ideological divide.

Yes, but the evidence is clear that public insurance is always better and cheaper than private because there is no profit added on to the actual costs of administering the insurance, which is a well understood and easily managed task. A cost benefit analysis will always favour public over private insurance.

So why doesn’t universal public insurance cover areas such as pharmaceuticals, dental, optometry, and home care?

Both political parties and social movements are undermined by close association.

Ken Burch wrote:

 I simply want them to have a different relationship with the social movements than the Cons and Liberals have-a position that says "unlike the other parties, we don't assume that electoral politics is the ONLY valid form of political expression, and we don't believe that nobody other than political parties should have a say in the political discussion".  What would be so terrible about THAT?

Social activism is all about having a say in politics regardless of who is in power. The NDP already has a different relationship with social movements than the Liberals and Conservatives on issues on which they have common ground. 

Political parties must compromise because they serve a varied population. Social movements must not compromise because it would be a betrayal of their cause. Social movements can have supporters across all parties not just the NDP. 

Ken Burch wrote:

 Also, if you look at the polling, a LOT of what you would call "social activist" positions are quite popular-I think that even applies to most FN issues.  

Indigenous peoples represent 5% or less of the population. People are very supportive of virtue signaling and symbolic apologies and even improving funding to reserves. Doesn't mean they are ready to acknowledge the right of indigenous peoples to have a veto on resource projects. 

Ken Burch wrote:

  And to correct a misconception you have, most "social activists" are solidly pro-labour and work in alliance with the labour movement-many, if not most, are union members themselves.

Unions were involved in both Occupy and the Student marches both of which I attended. You need to stop putting me in some box that has nothing to do with who I am. I present my reasoning. You ignore it and start arguing against positions I have never supported and opinions I don't hold.

Unions are an industry that support workers for a living. That has led to clashes between the interests of unions versus the interests of social activists which lean more towards environmentalism and the people disadvantaged by corporate exploitation operating through a very well-paid and privileged workforce, union workers. 

A political party, to win, has to weight the interests of multiple players. They can't fully support one movement over another no matter how righteous the cause. A political party has to balance what's right with what's possible. 

Ken Burch wrote:

 Have you not noticed that almost a half century has passed since then?  That the FLQ has been extinct since the Crisis?  That nobody on the Canadian Left in THIS era uses or endorses tactics even remotely similar to them?  

This is where you go off the rail. I have been posting on this board a long time and I attended Occupy and the student marches in Montreal. Did you? Did you bring food to the occupiers? Attend meetings? Do you go to marchs for the environment? That's a real question. How active are you in real world actions? 

Ken Burch wrote:

 And the 2015 elections-an election in which the Leap was not endorsed by any party-were no more a rejection of the Leap than..... 

It didn't go viral even with activists. Idle No More, pipeline protesters and Occupy types didn't rally around and nor did unions. 

Ken Burch wrote:

In both cases, what you had was a statement of defiance or the release of a set of alternative ideas occuring more or less around the time of a parliamentary/legislative election in which no one on the ballot was supporting that statement or those ideas.

Years have past in which The Leap Manifesto could have been promoted both within and without the party. After Mulcair lost the election NDP members could have rallied around The Leap Manifesto. They could have written letters of support. During the election for the new leader members could have insisted that they address it.  

There is no silent majority of people willing to vote for disruptive or radical change. It isn't that Canadians are neoliberalists it is that they are risk adverse because the country is pretty great as is. 

Absolutes are almost always exagerations so I should not have said "all social movements". I am guessing it is pretty close to right. I think you would like the NDP to be more vocal in supporting decriminalization of the prostitution industry, objection to interference in Venezuela and every other issue in which you believe there is a clear right and wrong. 

So I ask you, what do you mean when you say the NDP should be closer to social justice movements or work with them or whatever? What does that look like to you?