The NDP $15 federal minimum wage pledge is straight up nonsense

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

This quote really embodies the terrible and ludicrous narrative being laid down by New Democrat partisans and bloggers/correspondents in various forums.

They have created "opinions" and excuses to replace what are the facts about the NDP's minimum  wage "plan".

The key one being that the "plan" is a grotesquely cynical one that is not meant, in the slightest, to help workers living on poverty wages in the here-and-now but is, rather, simply aimed to help get NDP MPs reelected by being one of the very few attempts they are making to appeal to their traditional "base".

(i..e. what is left of the disoriented and defeated anti-capitalist left many of whom grasp at any excuse to show up and still vote for this crassly opportunistic party and make pretend that this makes them better than those who vote Liberal or Green.)

That the Liberals, who are the titans of cynicism, have pointed out that the NDP are spinning their minimum wage plan in a way that is misleading when the Liberals have no minimum wage plan at all is typically Liberal. This does not mean they are wrong!

While the hacks have done their best to spin otherwise, the centrally vital fact that they refuse to acknowledge the real significance of  is that the NDP's plan is not for $15 now for any workers -- even the relatively small number ultimately covered by a $15 an hour federal minimum wage -- it is for $15 in four years in 2019 (maybe--we all know how promises work).

So, all those slogans about how people deserve a "living wage" -- well apparently they mean they deserve a living wage at the end of what would presumably be the first term of an NDP government of incredibly well payed MPs pontificating about the "middle class".

Not before.

Will it still be a living wage then?

Of course not. It is not even one now.

The NDP is simply opportunistically using a slogan that came from the United States and that represents a real and meaningful movement there -- the $15 NOW movement -- and perverting and distorting it for its own short-term electoral goals.

This is hardly surprising. The NDP has been a shallow shadow of its own past for a very long time and is not even a social democratic party in any meaningful sense anymore.

This is a straight-up poverty wage plan.

Anyone supporting it or excusing it is supporting and excusing a straight-up poverty wage plan.

When leftists become so desperate that they reinvent as "progressive"  the capitulation of Canada's so-called "left" party to right wing narratives and the reinforcing of poverty wages, it is time for a fundamental period of reevaluation and self-examination.

The NDP $15 federal minimum wage plan is misleading, is terrible, and is totally cynical. It is total nonsense.

And almost everyone claiming otherwise knows this.