NDP Ex-MPs to rock Couillard's world?

Yes, Mme Paré is wonderful. I had the pleasure of meeting her during the opening of Boulerice's campaign office.

Here is her story in another context. She refers to herself as Burkinabé, though she was actually born in Ivory Coast. https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/cultur/citoyennes/cityn17e.... She grew up in Burkina Faso.

No, I don't think she'll beat Mr Dress-up, but she can speak out for the many people in Papineau who have extremely poor living conditions, especially in Parc-Ex. Now they also face rapid gentrification, after Villeray. The Sciences faculty of Université de Montréal has a new campus there, and new condo buildings are going up.

Antonia will certainly remember Parc-Ex when it was largely Greek (though it has always been multi-ethnic) and some of you might know that there is also a large South Asian population, from the different countries in that huge region. But there are now also quite a few sub-Saharan Africans; both francophone and anglophone (obviously referring to the colonial languages, not the many African ones). Maghrebis tend to live more in the Villeray and St-Michel parts of the riding, as do Latin-American people.

Obviously many Papineau residents voted for Trudeau believing that having a PM as their MP would benefit their riding, but this hasn't materialised except for the Libs (federal and Québec) courting ethnic élites.

As for Laurier-Dorion, it is also solidly Québec solidaire and Projet Montréal; Luc Ferrandez was its mayor for years, pissing off anti-environmentalists. (Yes, Luc could be abrasive). And yes, Nima Machouf is the spouse of Amir Khadir, but also won an election for Projet; however there was an arrangement for her to give up her seat to Bergeron if he didn't win his own.

And of course, like the whole Machouf-Khadir clan, she has long been active in supporting the Iranian people, both in terms of continuing repression of labour, social and feminist movements, while at the same time opposing Western belligerance towards the people of Iran, and caricatures of Iranian society.

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> wrote:

MULCAIR: The rise and decline of the NDP's Quebec triumphs

Tom Mulcair

Published: October 22, 2019

Updated: October 22, 2019 6:32 PM EDT

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh delivers his concession speech at the NDP election night party in Burnaby B.C., Oct. 21, 2019. (DON MACKINNON/AFP via Getty Images)

I’d just celebrated my 18th birthday. For a kid who’d always loved politics, I was in luck, there was about to be a federal election. It was October 1972 and, together with most of my classmates at Vanier College, I went out and supported the NDP. David Lewis was the leader and as a Montrealer who spoke fluent French, he was well liked in La Belle province. He was also the first, and to this day the only, Jewish leader of any federal party. Progressives love firsts. 

As usual, the NDP didn’t win any seats in Quebec, but the election did produce a Liberal minority and an old negotiator like Lewis knew what to do: get some of his own priorities passed in return for support. 

The NDP could never aspire to do that as a government because it never had a national presence. 

In the 1960’s Robert Cliche, a highly-regarded NDP figure and labour lawyer, was supposed to help establish an NDP beachhead in Quebec. The Liberals resolved to hold back the NDP and recruited progressive provincial minister Eric Kierans to defeat Cliche, using every trick in the book. 

Other Quebec efforts followed. John Paul Harney, a fluently bilingual professor and longtime NDPer tried to rally the troops for Ed Broadbent, but he too came and went. In fact, neither Lewis nor Broadbent, nor any other NDP leader before Layton, had ever won a single seat in Quebec during any of their general elections. 

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And so it went. Despite years spent by champions of human rights such as Frank R. Scott building the CCF/NDP in Quebec, the party never connected with Quebecers who viewed it with suspicion, preferring the Liberals, then the Bloc, time and again. 

When I quit Charest’s Liberal cabinet in Quebec City on a question of principle, I was approached by every federal party except the Bloc. 

It was Jack Layton, another anglophone Quebecer with deep family roots in Quebec politics, who impressed me the most. The NDP didn’t exist in Quebec City and all federalists coalesced around the Liberals. Federalist, both left and right, are held together by an overriding purpose of… holding Canada together. 

Jack’s own Dad, Bob Layton, was my Conservative MP in Quebec’s West Island. I knew him well. Jack and Olivia had supper with Catherine and me in his old hometown of Hudson and we hit it off.

He recruited me as his Quebec Lieutenant and I went on to win an implausible by-election victory in the Liberal stronghold of Outremont and to get elected a total of four times for the NDP in Quebec. In 2011, our years of tireless work across Quebec finally brought the long-sought breakthrough and Jack and I were elated. We also knew that the trees we’d just planted needed to grow roots. After the miraculous orange wave of 2011, the NDP still had its best result of any province electing 16 MPs in Quebec in 2015. 

I was saddened to see stalwarts, who’d grown into the job, like Ruth Ellen Brosseau bite the dust on Monday night. I was perplexed to watch the NDP dance as if going from 44 to 24 seats and losing 15 of those 16 Quebec seats was a great result. 

Who knows what the future will hold. There are amazing people in and around the NDP and perhaps, at some future date, another leader will do as Jack did and make the inclusion of Quebec a priority. For now, progressives there are being steadily corralled back into the Liberal fold, faute de mieux. 

From a historical Liberal perspective, that’s one of Justin Trudeau’s greatest results from this election: once again helping keep the NDP out of Quebec. 

Spare us, Mulcair.

The NDP would never have started collapsing in Quebec at all if you hadn't refused to let Quebec NDP MPs support the Quebec students.  That lost the party a generation there-a generation it will probably never regain-and it gained no one's support anywhere else.  You broke down most of the rest of the vote by not offering a strong response on the niqab issue until it was too late to matter.

Then you finished the sabotage by spending your last year as "interim" leader refusing to do a damn thing to help create an effective fundraising apparatus for the party AND by refusing to play any active, meaningful role in parliamentary debate or in working to rebuild the party's election operations.

Singh made mistakes, but he'd have had far more to work with there, had it not been for your incompetence, treachery, and arrogance there.

Unionist wrote:

Is there a solid reason why we are now discussing federal politics in this thread? Sheesh.

There's a lot more ex-MPs to rock...uh...Couillard's world?

Yes, that thread was about NDP Québec, which went nowhere. Their campaigns against Québec solidaire - from the right - were just silly.

Misfit wrote:

In that Tom Mulcair article post #454. Tom Mulcair wrote: "In fact, neither Lewis nor Broadbent, nor any other NDP leader before Layton, had ever won a single seat in Quebec during any of their general elections. "

Phil Edmonston won a by-election in 1990 making Tom Mulcair the second NDP MP to win in Quebec. But, yes, if you want to get technical, Tom Mulcair won his riding during a general election as opposed to a by-election for Phil Edmonston before him.
 

And a couple of years before the disastrous 1993 election-an election where even Dave Barrett couldn't hang on to his riding-Edmonston defected from the NDP, due to the party's refusal to support Quebec self determination and its insistence, at the time, in staying with Trudeau's outdated notion of symmetrical federalism and of treating Quebec like nothing but another province-and sat as an independent for the remainder of his term.

It's an open question as to whether at least a large chunk of the votes which went to the Bloc in 1993 might have gone NDP if only the party had listened to Edmonston on that issue.

It was one of two pivotal moments that stopped the NDP cold in Quebec.  The first was David Lewis' all-out opposition to the NDP giving its support to Quebec self-determination in 1971.  The second was the split with Edmonston and the pointless insistence on backing the status quo in Quebec under Audrey McLaughlin.

The lesson is clear:  saying "no" to Quebec self-determination means permanent failure for the NDP in Quebec.  

No Ken, Edmonston did not defect. He simply did not run for re-election

I dunno; it is an open secret that in central-eastern Montréal volunteers often work for QS, the NDP and Projet Montréal, despite their declared differences on the national question (and Projet, like the RCM before it, scrupulously avoiding the issue). I certainly do.

I'm terrified that faux-cul Guilbeaut's victory will harm the other progressive parties in the riding just south of mine, which sparked so many important social and environmental initiatives.

Kropotkin, I don't expect parties outside Québec to favour independence here - the important point is supporting self-determination.