Angry in the Great White North

Actions speak louder than words.

First, the words from just before the election:

NDP Leader Jack Layton launched an aggressive attack on the Conservative platform, and asked people who have voted Liberal in the past to vote NDP to get real results for working women and working men. Layton was speaking to a large and boisterous rally in Toronto.

“Yesterday, the Conservatives put out their platform. It was full of ideas that are wrong for Canada,” Layton said. “The Conservatives are proposing lots of tax cuts, including corporate tax cuts for banks and oil companies. We’d all like lower taxes, but not if they mean cuts to health and education.”

Now, not even a week after the election, the actions:

Jack Layton meets with his 28 other New Democrat members this week to see whether they can work with the Conservatives, who were vilified by the NDP leader in the election campaign as completely out of step with basic Canadian values.

And despite Layton's initial skepticism, he's sounding more conciliatory and ready to deal on a half-dozen issues where left and right appear to intersect.

"I am going to make a legitimate, determined effort to find things where there can be common action," he said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Remember in the leader's debate, when Jack Layton was asked about how he might work with the Conservatives? He snarled about how the Conservatives were wrong on the issues, and provided no answer. Stephen Harper's reaction? It's an election, and every leader has to play to win. After the election, we'll talk.

Guess Harper was right.

But is talking going to be all that easy?

Recall how I wondered if the angry reaction by the NDP crowd listening to Jack Layton's election night speech to Stephen Harper's name being mentioned might presage a rough time for Jack Layton? I'm not the only one who thinks those boos are more significant than just some tired and wired election workers letting off some steam:

Reaching out to the Tories will require a delicate tightrope act for the NDP leader, who faced a chorus of booing from his supporters election night with the mention of Harper's name.

The NDP is a complex coalition of pragmatic and dogmatic socialists, spanning the spectrum from organized labour to eco-activists, with a healthy sprinkling of all sorts of special interest groups -- public service unions, gay rights organizations, abortionists, anti-globalization activists, rural farm market supporters, urban anti-poverty groups -- the list goes on and on.

Each and every one of these will resist any accomodation with Stephen Harper's Conservatives, but to different degrees, and over different issues. Just as Stephen Harper will have to form coalitions in Parliament on an issue-by-issue basis to get legislation passed, Jack Layton will have find support from different elements of his own party on each different issue. But even as he disappoints a faction within the NDP by helping the Tories on one particular issue, Layton will have to remember that that faction might be a critical ally in another fight just around the corner. If he plays it wrong, critical factions might abandon Jack Layton, perhaps replacing him with a hardline leader willing, even eager, to topple the government. These factions might be willing to take their chances with another election, hoping the next configuration of parliament favours their agenda, or at least denies Stephen Harper the power to enact his.

These people might find it difficult to understand that helping Stephen Harper can help the NDP too. Jack Layton seems to get it. Now he has to convince the people who booed his speech on election night of that fact of life in politics.