Maybe Stephane Dion is right. Maybe I'm not sophisticated enough to understand the subtleties of politics:
Meanwhile, Jim Laxer, a former party leadership candidate [for the NDP] in the early 1970s and a political scientist, said he supports the idea of not running a [Liberal Party] candidate against [Green Party leader Elizabeth May]. A pact could help unite the opposition against Mr. Harper, Mr. Laxer said.
"I kind of think the deal is interesting because it's got some potential for a way for opposition parties who don't want to be divided up by Stephen Harper," he said.
He said Mr. Harper is dealing with the opposition against him piecemeal, which makes it difficult for the opposition to coalesce.
So let me get this straight. Right now the three opposition parties, Stephane Dion's Liberals, Jack Layton's NDP, and the Bloc Quebecois led by Gilles Duceppe, are all left of centre, and that fractionalization allows Stephen Harper to to manage a minority government by playing the opposition parties against each other. It works because the opposition parties share a similar voter base, and so each one is concerned that the success of one will come at the expense of the others.
Now here's the tricky bit.
Apparently introducing the Green Party, yet another left-of-centre party, into the mix with one or more MPs will make things better.
Huh?
Oh wait, I think he means...nah, thought I had it there for a moment. Still not getting it. Maybe the key is the word coalesce.
So I decided to check Laxer's blog to see if I could understand what he's getting at. So what about cooperation by left-of-centre parties versus competing for votes?
In the last week of the campaign, Layton advocated strategic voting, urging traditional Liberals to “lend” the NDP their vote, while the Liberals went into the “repair shop” for refitting. To cap it off, in what was billed as his last statement as an MP, Ed Broadbent thundered that power “should be taken away” from the Liberals, that the party “no longer has the moral authority to deserve people’s votes.” Meanwhile, Broadbent said not a word about what a Harper government would mean for the country.
With Harper in office, Maude Barlow thinks that “dialogue and healing need to take place” among progressives. For her, the road ahead needs to spring from an alliance of forces inside and outside parliament, which could include New Democrats, some Liberals, and some members of the Bloc. “If Stephen Harper wins a majority in the next election,” she says “we will lose decades in the social struggles we are involved in.”
Talk of tactical cooperation is one thing. This must be tempered, though, by the the clear need for a left political party in Canada. Merging the NDP with the Liberals would extinguish a seventy-year social democratic tradition. It would kill an important part of what makes Canada distinctive. The NDP must survive. Ironically, its survival is most threatened by its move to the centre, which has led many to conclude that the country does not need two liberal parties. A critical outlook on capitalism and the championing of the interests of the non-affluent majority were the reasons the party was founded in the first place. Those reasons remain as compelling as ever. The NDP should fight avidly to expand its influence, but that does not mean that its leaders should give in to the cynical politics of short-term electoral advantage, as they did in the recent federal election.
So does that mean the left-of-centre parties ought to cooperate or not? Does the NDP go for more seats or not? Laxer is all over the map on this. I think, on the balance, Laxer advocates cooperation:
The NDP is ensnared in a long-term strategic dilemma that was rendered more acute by the outcome of the last federal election and the role played by the NDP in the campaign. Jack Layton calculated that by pulling the plug on Paul Martin’s Liberals and by helping shape the central issue as Liberal corruption, he could hold the existing NDP vote and add to it. What the NDP feared above all was what party strategists referred to as “the demonization of Stephen Harper.” The NDP desperately wanted to prevent a panic among progressive voters that could drive them to vote Liberal to stop Harper from taking power.
Throughout the campaign the NDP insisted that a Harper government was no more to be feared than a Martin government. In its national advertising and in Jack Layton’s national tour, the relentless target for abuse was the Liberals. Only in a few cases in Saskatchewan and B.C., where the NDP was locked in races against Conservatives, did Layton take on Harper directly. National reporters found Layton unwilling to say anything about Harper beyond a pat statement that “the Conservatives are wrong on the issues.”
The consequence of Layton’s disciplined, tightly scripted campaign was a tactical victory. The NDP seat total increased from 19 to 29. In my view, this was a Pyrrhic victory, a strategic disaster.
So if I'm reading this right, the NDP ought to concede seats to the Liberals to keep Stephen Harper from getting into power (or getting a majority in the next election). Laxer has problems with the NDP just going for the maximum number of seats:
The trouble with short-term tactical victories, cynically won only by systematically hiding the truth from Canadians, is that they lead nowhere. Ed Broadbent’s attacks on John Turner in 1988 helped re-elect Brian Mulroney’s Tories and opened the door to the ratification of the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. Five years later, Broadbent’s record seat total was followed by the winning of only nine seats by the NDP as Canadians rushed in their disgust to throw out the Conservatives. What will happen next time out when a sizeable number of NDP voters switch to the Liberals to throw out Harper?
But then he supports the Liberals giving up a race for a seat that to help the Green Party. The Liberals are short a seat, right? How do they end up with more seats if they are fighting for fewer seats? No wait, I get it!
Jim Laxer, NDP strategist, wants the Liberals to win the next election! It's not that he wants Elizabeth May to win in Central Nova. He doesn't care if she does. He's hoping that this deal will boost the Liberal Party's environmentalist credentials. In doing so, the Liberals can grab votes that would go to the Greens and to the NDP. By weakening the Green Party and NDP vote nationally, Laxer hopes the Liberals will win marginal seats, and so keep the Conservatives in a minority, or even push them from power The cost will be reducing the seats going to the Green Party and to the NDP, a price he is willing to pay.
He says it clearly:
That is how the NDP should see the coming electoral contest. The party should make itself the vehicle of a national campaign, inside parliament and out, to expose the Harper government for what it is and to drive it from power. If things go well, the Liberals will replace the Conservatives in power, hopefully with a minority government. This does not mean that the long-term goal of the NDP is to elect Liberals, but rather to truly act as the tribune of the people, warning of the dangers ahead and advocating progressive alternatives.
Yeah, tribune of the people. Sounds like the name of a newspaper. But then according to Jim Laxer, NDP strategist, the NDP ought to be working to help the Liberals to win. Why bother having a political party in the first place? Why not just transform the NDP into a pro-Liberal newspaper and stop working for those Pyrrhic victories that allow the plurality of conservative Canadian voters see their goals become public policy for a change? The Tribune of the People can become like Pravda. I know Laxer prefers a Liberal minority, but really, once you start down the road of having the NDP support the Liberals, how do you guarantee that? Voters aren't going to work to a script. Democracy is such a nuisance. All that voting leads to mistakes. Better to have just one left-of-centre party and be done with it. The NDP can become a faction within this single-party state, maybe with some important cabinet posts permanently assigned to them. This might meet Laxer's requirement that the NDP remain separate from the ever-ruling Liberals, have significant influence, but satisfying his desire that the Conservatives never enjoy power, regardless of the level of support they might have in the electorate. Thanks Comrade Laxer.
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