Thursday, June 10, 2010

NDP -'Happy' Jack and 'Oncle' Thom Sell out Anglos

In politics, expediency trumps principles most of the time. All political parties face moral dilemmas between sticking to the values and principles that define their party or bending to public opinion in order to gain the votes that will keep them in business.

While no party is immune to public opinion (save the Greens,) there's no doubt that the NDP is the champion at selling out their ideals in the sad and often futile pursuit of votes. While the Liberals and the Conservatives flop around on occasion, at least they have some semblance of a cohesive national policy.
The NDP currently faces such a dilemma in relation to the scrapping of the long-gun registry. It would seem natural that ideologically the party would  be in favour of keeping the registry going, but many of its elected members from rural ridings are going to vote with the Conservatives to scrap the registry. In fact the Liberals, who have nothing to protect in rural Canada and whose constituency clearly support the registry, are trying to humiliate the NDP for its unprincipled stance with a nasty poster campaign. LINK

So the NDP, remains all things to all people.
In British Columbia they are a light imitation of the Greens, espousing a policy of environmentalism and sustainability. They appeal to the upper middle-class Yuppies, who are just a tad afraid of the radical greens.
In Ontario they are the union party, manning the barricades for the working man.

Between these two provinces lies the NDP constituency, the rest of the country provides a seat or two here and there but nothing sustainable. Most members outside the traditional power base have won their seats on the strength of their own candidacy or other quirks such as a constituency that is on the outs with both major parties.

Nothing hurts the credibility of the NDP as a national party as the almost complete lack of representation in the province of Quebec. And so back-stopping the NDP's lone member in Quebec,  'Oncle' Thomas Mulcair, in his Outremont riding remains of paramount importance.

Outremont is a strange riding that combines upper income Francophones with a hodgepodge of well-off English and ethnics including Canada's biggest congregation of Hasidic Jews. The riding has traditionally gone Liberal, but with the sponsorship scandal and the Liberals at the nadir of their popularity in 2007, Mulcair was able to eke out a protest vote victory, when Liberal Jean Lapierre abandoned politics in a huff. Within a year of his by-election win a federal election was called where he managed to hold onto his seat - barely.
He is by no means safe next time around, so tailoring a platform that appeals to the yuppie Francophones in the riding, who represent his major constituency is of critical importance to the NDP.

But more important than that, the NDP is now looking forward to a possible coalition with the Liberals in the next federal election. Layton and the NDP are carving out a position that will make them a popular second choice in Quebec, representing a suitable dancing partner for a coalition. Since the Bloc Quebcois has demonstrated itself wholly unacceptable to Canadians, it befalls the NDP to take up the mantle of Quebec radicalism. 

That is why the NDP has become the second national Canadian political party to espouse an anti-English/pro-Quebec nationalist platform and have been front and center promoting a French nationalist agenda. It is a NDP member who proposed that Supreme Court judges be bilingual, a wildly popular concept in Quebec, not so much outside.

Uncle Thom and Happy Jack are careful to  speak in French when denouncing Bill 103 and avoid any talk of language issues when talking to reporters in English. When the Francophone press appears, it's back to Anglo-bashing.

The latest outrage is the NDP lending its name and support to a rainbow coalition of Separatist, Nationalist and semi-violent radical organizations that have banded together to do battle against the 'nefarious' Bill 103.

Here's a press release put out by the Saint Jean Baptist Society, Quebec's leading separatist organization, who proudly welcome the NDP into its ranks of a coalation formed to fight Bill 103.
Des représentants de plusieurs autres organismes appuyant la Coalition seront présents. Ces organismes sont : Québec Solidaire, le Nouveau Parti démocratique, les syndicats FTQ, SFPQ et FAE, le Mouvement national des Québécoises et des Québécois (MNQ), le Mouvement Montréal français (MMF), le Mouvement Montérégie français, le Mouvement Laurentide français, Impératif français, le Réseau de Résistance québécoise (RRQ), le Rassemblement pour un pays souverain (RPS), les Jeunes Patriotes du Québec (JPQ) et le Mouvement Pacifique pour l'Indépendance du Québec (MPIQ) et plusieurs autres.
Welcome aboard, boys, you're in good company!

It is utterly unbelievable that the NDP's pandering to the Quebec radical movement goes unreported in English Canada. Try any Google search coupling 'Bill 103' and 'NDP' together and you'll get nothing in English. Do a French search using 'NPD' plus 'Loi 101' and you'll get a flood a flood of stories about the NDP joining forces with a coalition of radical French separatist organizations. Try it...

9 comments:

  1. Interestingly, there is a Québécois term to describe Messrs. Layton and Mulcair, and I'll get to that a paragraph or two from now.

    In Michel Gratton's book "French Canadians", Gratton starts of by introducing himself. He grew up in Vanier, an Ontario mostly Francophone working class suburb just over the Rideau River east of Ottawa. For those of you who don't know who Michel Gratton is, to be brief, he is a syndicated newspaper columnist in both English and French. He was also Press Secretary in the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) during Mulroney's time in office.

    When he was a teenager, the parish priest recommended to young Michel's parents that he should go to seminary school. His parents complied, and Michel was sent 40 miles away to Papineauville, QC, on the banks of the Ottawa River on the Quebec side.

    Michel wrote about his days in the seminary. He was endlessly and relentlessly ridiculed by his fellow students and WORSE YET, by several of the teachers as well. The derogatory connotation they labelled him with was «vendu», i.e., a sell-out, because he wasn't born in Quebec. He was someone less than they were, i.e., a second-class citizen! Several years ago, I met a Franco Ontarian, born in North Bay, who told me he used to get into fistfights over this when he was growing up.

    Getting back to the NDP, what Messrs. Layton and Mulcair are doing is akin to acting as «vendus». The're both blatant two-faced hypocrites! They'd sell their mothers' souls to crack the voters' impasse they have faced in Quebec.

    As the editor noted, Mulcair did fine in the by-election where he won, but won in the next general election by a cat's whisker. It has some historic merit, I suppose, because Mulcair is now the first NDP MP elected two consecutive times in Quebec, but he is only the second NDP MP elected in Quebec period! The first was American-Born Phil Edmonston, author of the famous car book "Lemon Aid", a consumer advocate and I believe he was at one time one of (American consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph) Nader's Raders. Edmonston won a by-election in the early 1990s and then lost in the next general election. So much for NDP history in Quebec.

    In short, Mulcair is just one of many, many politicians who swallows himself whole to get elected, and he'll abandon his true principles in a heartbeat for that reason. Layton is proving he isn't far behind Mulcair. Because of this, notwithstanding the fact I live in Ontario, I absolutely and unequivocally will NOT vote NDP even though I'm far removed from Quebec now. They're both a couple of bold-faced liars, not unlike too many politicians!

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  2. Vive le Québec libre et Vive Mc Gill français !!:) Attention à la crise d'urticaire, pauvres Rhodésiens !

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  3. If you want to see how pathetic the federal NDP has become, take a look at Saskatchewan. The NDP used to be guaranteed most of the seats here, but now, they can't even win 1! In the past several elections, the NDP, in the province of its birth essentially, can't even knock off a bunch of light-weight, generic Conservative MPs. They blame the Liberals for splitting the progressive vote, but really, it's their own fault. The NDP has been Mulcair-ized. It's unlikely we'll see Jack letting Thom campaign for the NDP in places like Moose Jaw or Yorkton or other places where the NDP used to stand a chance.
    No doubt Mulcair would prefer Jack whip votes like gun control, but in order for the NDP to survive in constituencies like Churchill or the NWT, they have to compromise. If the English media would report on how the NDP is now pandering to Quebec nationalists, it would be another nail in the coffin of the NDP in the rural west, where they used to be competitive.

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  4. Adam's post proves to me how provincial (please pardon the pun) the NDP has become. Jack Layton is a born Quebecer, in the très WASP community of Hudson, just 25 miles west of Montreal. Paradoxically, Mulcair was born in Ottawa!

    If the central mind and management of the NDP rests between to guys who can take a canoe between where they grew up, they have a problem, esp. if their homes are far east of the Manitoba-Ontario border!

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  5. I guess Jack figures there's no point in having a soul, if you're not going to sell it for something you value more. In his case, a glimpse at a shot at power.

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  6. The best way to nail the NDP is to expose to the rest of Canada what the NDP is doing in Quebec. If you live in a province other than Quebec, pass the info on. Expose them for what they are doing.

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  7. 'All political parties face moral dilemmas between sticking to the values and principles that define their party or bending to public opinion in order to gain the votes that will keep them in business.'

    I have yet to see any political figure opting for the first option, they all go for the second which means the utter survival of their bread and butter.

    regards,

    TM

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  8. NDP = No Damn Principles

    As amoral as the NDP is, how slow-minded are
    the people of Outremont? NDP election posters
    in the last election did'nt have a word on
    english on them.
    In the (classic/classless) ignorant separtist response above, Mulcair has more in common with a Vichy Frenchman (ie.selling out his own to a repressive regime)than a Rhodesian.

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  9. Your three "federal" parties campaign signs
    in Quebec (last federal election).

    Click on 3CanadianWeasels above

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