Tom Mulcair Defends Doug Ford Aganist Auditor General Report

Never liked or trusted Mulcair, and since he has been given his pulpit, he never ceases to disappoint me in my original assessment.

I know some here are quick to demonize Mulcair but to say he wd have suffered a worse defeat in '19 than the party under Jagmeet is quite absurd.

You forget that even in 2015 he had a substantial net positive rating. He was highly respected by the electorate at large outside some fringe posters on Babble. People did not vote against Mulcair in '15. They simply voted for the party they thought best able to defeat Harper. 

He has a gravitas and substance that would have compared well to the pygmies who were Andrew Scheer and a diminished Trudeau.

I suspect he would have done quite well.

And that is not to mention Quebec where the party lost 15 seats. Mulcair would have held them as well as preventing the Bloq from taking sole advantage of Trudeau's slippage in that province.

That's right, Michael, I was indeed talking about what what would have happened if Mulcair had WON in 2015.  It seems clear he'd have devoted the next four years to nothing but budget-balancing(i.e., massive austerity) and that since this approach would have meant that nobody in the NDP base would have benefited from anything he could have done in those four years-since you can't balance the budget without significant raising taxes on the without wealthy without having to do massive cuts in benefit and without agreeing to do nothing whatsoever to fight poverty or any other forms of injustice- and the only possible consequences of that approach would have been a defeat on the massive scale of that experienced by the Ontario NDP in 1996 or possibly the BC NDP in 2001. 

That said, it is also worth noting that, once removed as leader, there was no excuse for Mulcair to insist on staying on in the job for another year-a year in which he simply refused to keep doing the job he'd been fired from, while at the same time denying whoever might have succeeded him- and btw, I don't think his successor has been anything close to an improvement- I'd have preferred Nikki Ashton or Guy Caron- the time that successor would need to establish anywhere close to the sort of presence that that successor would need to run a credible campaign in 2019.

There was no good reason for Mulcair to NOT stand down immediately so a new leader could be in place as quickly as possible.

Last observation- in an era where he faced, as opposition leader, a Conservative government that was slashing social benefits, attacking unions, and using as many means as possible, including the removal of tax-exempt status from non-profits to silence dissent on global issues and the imposition as gag orders on government silences to prevent them from committing truth on global warming, there was no excuse for Mulcair to devote the vast majority of his time, during question period and in parliamentary debate, to going after the government on an issue essentially nobody out in the wider electorate cared about:  a minor corruption allegation involving a powerless and irrelevant Con senator.

When Stephen Harper was going after everything that made Canada anything close to a humane, decent, somewhat progressive society, what freaking difference did it make where Duffy claimed to live for the purposes of claiming parliamentary expenses?  

It was an issue political junkies cared about and absolutely nobody else.

And every moment Mulcair devoted to it was a waste of his party's time, energy and resources.

He had agency in that- 

He could have done any of the following:

1) Called on the party to hold the leadership convention earlier rather than later;

2) Stood down and given the party a chance to proceede under an interim leader:

3) If he was going to stay on for all that additional time, he could actually have taken the job seriously and spent his last year in the job actively doing the work of being leader- and in that time, adjusted his performance in response to the issues that actually drove the party to remove him- rather than just phoning it in and spending at least half his time not even showing up at the House.

All he was doing in that last year was punishing the party for turfing him out.  And by the time he was replaced, it was too late in the game for any new leader to make a significant impact before the election.  There was no way for any replacement to make a credible showing in the 2019 election with only a meaningless year and a half to work with.   

Nothing would have been worse if he'd gone the day after the leadership vote and that party had then worked with an interim leader until the next convention.

contrarianna wrote:

One can see the logic, however flawed; they had the momentum of history on their side. It was Jack Layton who temporarily put the NDP in the position of official opposition who is now beatified, despite embracing NATO and moving the party more to right than any previous NDP leader.

Jack won Quebec and no where else. Mulcair lost Quebec and the only reason he was made leader was the party was told he was the only person to hold Quebec. Imagine if instead we had gotten Alexandre Boulerice instead and the party had allowed its MP's to stand in the streets and beat pans like every other progressive person in the province. The people of Quebec elected good MP's who were muzzled by the NDP's Ottawa power structure led by Mulcair the brilliant strategist.