Unite(?) the Left

This election, the NDP ran as good a campaign as it was possible to run under the circumstances. It was tight, well-scripted, logistically near-flawless and fully funded for the first time. They had a leader who, arguably, made fewer mistakes than the others (outside the occational skinnydipping dopehead) and reached out to people and places ignored by previous NDP campaigns.

The national NDP results were pretty good. The party attracted 2,517,075 votes or 18.2% yielding 37 seats and 67 second places. Compare this to the 2006 general election where the party attracted 2,589,597 for 29 seats and 53 second places. And the budgets? $13,524,525 in 2006 compared to an estimated $20,000,000 this time.

But after spending almost 50% more money, or $6M, the party attracted a mere 8 additional seats and a relatively minuscule number of additional votes. And they never broke the 20% barrier.

Have they, as one comentator put it, hit the orange ceiling?

It's time for the NDP to explore the idea that they have gone as far as they can under their current party structure. The question is Are theose in charge of the NDP is willing and able to pay the required price for greater success.

Can they cut the formal structural ties the party currently has with the Canadian union movement.

To put it another way: Would you vote for a party which reserves 25% of policy convention delegates to affiliated union organisations? Or would you vote for a party which reserves 25% of leadership convention delegates to affiliated union organisations? Yet that's standard operating procedure in today's NDP party.

Would you feel any better if 25% of your party's delegates came from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce? Or maybe the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League? Isn't one special interest group equivalent to any other?

Tony Blair, early in his tenure as leader of the Labour party faced this choice. He had the courage required to make fundamental structural changes to his party. He cut ties to the British labour movement and thus modernised his party to turn it into a real alternative to the Conservative party.

Is Jack Layton ready to do the same?

Which brings us back to the Unite the Left movement. This is a popular trope among casual political observers and the argument is a simple one: in order to confront the menace on the Right, the Liberal party and the NDP (and possible the Greens) must and should unite under one banner in order to prevent vote splitting.

After all, didn't Reform and the Progressive Conservatives successfully unite? Sure they did. And it took years of negotiations, talks and compromises to make ithappen. Couldn't the Liberals and NDP do the same?

In the long term, it's possible.

But Canada does not want or need the further polarisation of national politics between the hard-right to center-right umbrella that is the national Conservative Party on one side and a creature of the Canadian union movement on the other.

No responsible federal party should ever be as beholden to national organised labour as the NDP party is now.

If there is to be a true Unite the Left movement, the NDP will have to agree to shed it's formal union ties as a precondition to those talks.

Liberals - A way out of the woods (III)

It's easy for an organization to turn in on itself and go wobbly in times of trouble.  It happens to all organizations at some time or other.  But when it happens to political parties, it's in the public eye and far more visible.

 

For political parties, there's a term coined for that; "Opposition Syndrome".  Academic George Perlin coined the term in his 1980 book on federal PC politics about the federal Tories but it applies locally just as well.

 

Perlin argued that when a political party is excluded from holding office, the party members tend to indulge in internal politics on the basis of motives that make conflict difficult to resolve.  Political self-interest and other conflicts trumps communal party interests.  Members fight among themselves for greater influence over smaller spheres of activity and responsibility.  Internal conflicts come to dominate, and then hinder, party activity.

 

These conflicts generate and harden factions.  The factions make it hard to achieve organizational cohesiveness.  Factions focus on other internal factions, instead of outside factors, as the main obstacles to the party taking power.

 

Internally, parties in opposition syndrome reject desperately needed reforms and cling to obsolete tactics and ideas.  The party look inwards instead of out, backwards at old grievances instead of forward to new opportunities.

 

This undermining and display of organizational ineffectiveness, with some played out in the glare of media and others safely away in the backrooms, leads to further electoral defeat.  Those defeats maintain, reinforce or even intensify the internal warfare.

 

Thus the cycle deepens.

 

To the public eye, the party looks unstable and that undermines public confidence in the party's ability to govern.  The party can't attract new volunteers and sheds whatever public support it has left, down to a floor.  Donors abandon it.  The leadership positions are occupied by a string of short-term and interim leaders.  Labradore has generated a great graphic showing the leadership eras of both main provincial parties.

 

The Liberal party experienced this through most of the 70's and 80's under a string or leaders.  It was only when Clyde Wells took over in 1987 and worked diligently for 2 years to quell the internal warfare, impose peace, focus and discipline on the party structure to win electoral victory in 1989 was the cycle broken.

 

If the Rideout PCs had won that very close 1989 election, Liberal history would have been very different; Wells would likely have been dumped as leader and the cycle would have gone on for one or several more terms.

 

The PCs had two eras where they suffered from Opposition Syndrome.  The first was 1949-1972 barely broken by a combination of an exhausted and unpopular Smallwood government facing a new and energetic PC leader in Frank Moores.  The second era was from 1989 to 2003 (partially documented here).  That stretch was broken by the entry of another strong personality who imposed his will over warring factions to lead his party to victory over another spent and unpopular government.

 

Both the Liberal and PCs had their periods in Opposition Syndrome and both eventually snapped out of it*.  How did that happen?

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 *The NDP are in a permanent and persistent variation of the state of Opposition Syndrome; no change expected soon.

End of a bad week

It's been a while since any party in the province experienced a week as bad as this one. Certainly I can't remember one in the last 20 years. The current activities and the future direction of the Liberal party has enjoyed more media (press, radio, web) attention and public discussion than any party has for a long time.

Turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity.

First there was the debacle of the deferred election in Grand Falls-Windsor Buchans on Tuesday and the sparkling candidacy of John Woodrow. The fact that his selection as candidate was publicly rued by 1/3 of the elected caucus as being worse than no candidate at all demonstrated refreshing honesty and was a perspective well-received and obvious in this corner.

Then there was the final pronouncement that Gerry Reid was laid-off by the people of his district. This was on top of the story that the final court recount process was officially completed without anybody from his party there to perform or even witness the final rites of washing and wrapping the political body.

Surely that final respect deserved to be performed. Gerry did yeoman's service under difficult circumstances in stormy times; his political career deserves better than an unmarked grave in potter's field.

Capped off the week was a scathing editorial in the Telegram. A penetrating insight into the obvious, it says:

There's only one thing the province's Liberals should be thinking about right now: cleaning house. Cleaning house completely.

Somewhere out there in Liberal-land, there must be someone with enough skill, smarts and sense to run a capable opposition.

Here's a message to the Liberals. Hurry up and find that person. Right now, you're a political joke.

Yes. There is. And we know.

The challenge now is in how to act on that.

It's a mess - part 2

Just when you thought things might have hit rock-bottom, a new sub-basement is discovered.

This man is loopy and somebody needs to take the gun away from him before he shoots himself in the head yet again. He should never have been let near an election campaign or ballot box except as a voter; he has no idea what he's doing to himself nor to the people who ever thought his candidacy might be a good idea.

Better off with no candidate than this candidate. He harms and embarrasses not only himself but many others.

It's a very big mess.

It's a mess

I'll start this post on a quasi-personal note: On Friday, October 26 my wife woke me with a sympathetic preemptive apology, "Dear, I'm sorry you belong to a party of idiots."

Not being fully awake, I had no idea what she was talking about until CBC radio went into the next news segment. Then I heard this news piece which outlined that, within days of his declaration of intent to run the media discovered that John Woodrow, the Liberal Party candidate in Grand Falls-Windsor-Buchans was previously in a bribery controversy which led to the resignation of Beaton Tulk.

And it gets better when you look at the documents which outlined his charges at the time. It's was not as if Tulk had demanded bribes from Mr. Woodrow, then he refused and blew the whistle. No, he freely gave the bribes (so he claimed) and only then did he blew the whistle when Minister Tulk had not kept up his end of the bargain. So, according to his initial claims (later withdrawn) his reason for going public was not because bribery was bad but merely because in the quid pro quo he was involved in, the pro quo was not forthcoming.

It's notable to mention that both offering and receiving bribes are criminal offence. It seems Mr. Woodrow was not necessarily aware of those subtleties in criminal law when he made his claims.

And all the party brass could say was they had no idea about any of this. Never mind that all the party had to do was a simple Google search or check out the CBC website. And never mind that any sensible candidate vetting process would have picked that up had one been in place.

And more to the point, given previous opposition charges of government self-interested actions, the party had to be extra careful in weeding out questionable candidates.

In the days that followed the breaking of this story, I'm sorry to say that party officials declined to make a definitive statement about the matter.

However, in a moment of startling political clarity, the local campaign organization told a Telegram reporter that they did know about it, that it didn't really matter, and would he please not write about it.

Here's a tip to aspiring political operatives: any story about a candidate that you don't want the media to write about will be written about sooner or later. Assume sooner and prepare accordingly.

As expected, the media did cover the story with glee and bated breath; Woodrow and the party was roundly criticised and pilloried. A pathetic defense on Woodrow's part that he was focused on the future instead of the past rang hollow and empty.

Now, the latest news is that over the weekend, Mr. Woodrow has decided to do what he should have done weeks ago: withdraw from the race. And to cap it off, Woodrow handled the withdrawal so ineptly that his name will still be on the ballot for all in the district to see. After offering up a stellar candidate like Gerry Tobin, this is just sad.

It's only too bad that the party didn't do what it should have done which was to ask him to resign. I can only assume that the party declined to look bad but the reality was that it was going to look bad either way. At least by asking for the resignation it would have looked bad in doing the right thing instead of looking bad for having it's head buried in the sand; sometimes you just have to take it on the chin and move on.

And besides, under the circumstances, it would not have been so bad not having a candidate in the district.

It's bad enough that the party appears to be in total disarray in the wake of four unimpressive years in opposition which was followed up by an election campaign which brought the party to a showing which could only be envied by the NDP.

It's not like the party has to go out of it's way to prove that it can't keep even the most elementary aspects of it's house in order.

All this makes the party looks bad. The party has become an object of derision, ridicule and it is being dismissed as a political force. Even long-time supporters have been sharply critical of how this party found itself here and the people responsible for that.

I am fed up of being embarrassed by the actions of the political party to which I belong.

It has to change.

Liberals - A way out of the woods

In the last few weeks since the provincial election, more than a few local pundits of the print and video variety, have offered advice for the Liberal Party for the long march back to power.

Now let me offer my own. . .

To start, let me puncture the notion that the Libs are down and gone forever - that's just self-serving nonsense from government partisans who prefer the "responsible" (read "tame") opposition style of the NDP. This reached a low point under the leadership of Jack Harris who interpreted the concept of "principled opposition" as license to nestle in the warmth of the government's back pocket. I'm glad to see that this has changed somewhat under the leadership of Lorraine Michael.

The NDP, God bless their righteous hearts, are never going to be in the position of government-in-waiting because that's a position they have chosen to pass on. To be a real alternative, they would have to start by severing their relationship with Big Labour in a similar way that Tony Blair did with the Labour Party in Great Britain. And since they are not ready to do that, they forfeit any right to be the government-in-waiting. You can't have a government-in-waiting in Reg Anstey's pocket anymore than you can be a government-in-waiting in the pocket of the Board of Trade.

The day the NDP really shake up their organization is the day they become a force to reckon with - not before.

Until that day comes, our political system is predicated on one party being the passer of political power while the other party acts as the receiver. And unless we all wish to formalize the one-party state then we have to accept the inevitable process: after the political tide comes in, the political tide inevitable goes out. So the the next time that happens, it will be the Liberals receiving power from the PCs.

The Liberal Party, like the PCs and unlike the NDP, are big tent parties where hard ideological positions are eschewed in favour of pragmatics. That means that the parties can shrink and expand to cover the necessity of the times they live in. This is not to say that the PCs and Liberal are interchangeable. They are not. They have very different histories, political cultures, and socio and geodemographics.

And even under the official party banners, there are many shades of red just as there are many shades of blue. Many of the shades of blue currently holding the levers of power are dismissed by some of the other shades of blue. Similarly, some of the shades of red which cheered on the Liberal campaign strategy in the last election felt an enthusiasm unshared by other Liberals of a different shade of red.

There are Liberals who love Danny and PCs who hate him. There are schools of Federalist thought which crosses party barriers just as there are schools of nationalist thought with roots in both the Libs and the PCs.

Research shows that the province is not dominated by Liberals or PCs or the NDP. Maybe 25-30% of the voting population consider themselves Liberal with a roughly same number considering themselves PCs. Less than 1/2 those numbers consider themselves NDP. So in any given election, the Libs can count on about 25% of the vote, the PCs the same and the NDP about 10%.

Most people, about 40%, are undecided/independents who think little of politics, change their vote from election to election and don't consider themselves adherents to any of the parties. They swing around from party to party depending on the issues of the day and the qualities of the leaders and parties they are faced with.

This is only a rough approximate model of the provincial electorate. There are many more complexities than that but this will suffice for the moment.

I'll continue this in a day or two.