Racist Memes, Andrew Coyne, the NDP's Disaster & more! -- The Top Ten Posts and the year on The Left Chapter in review

The Left Chapter was launched as a blog at the beginning of February of this year. I wanted to start an eclectic space that presented views, analysis and opinions from a leftist perspective but that also featured recipes, art, fiction and poetry, little bits of whimsy and whatever else it seemed fun or appropriate to feature!

The first year has been a success far beyond expectations in no small part due to the contributions  of several different writers and the feedback of readers and friends.

We have had political blogs about ISIS, the mythology around Naheed Nenshi, the LCBO, the uprising in Baltimore, a call for non-violence, an open letter to Tom Mulcair and an analysis of the the strategy of the peace movement in Canada among many other topics.

There were 323 posts of various types in total!

Today we are going to look at the top ten political posts of the year in terms of hits. (Watch for the top food posts of the year before New Year's Day!)

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the blog and to our readership for such a great launch and I look forward to what 2016 brings.

1) Stop sharing the false -- and racist -- Ontario niqab driver's licence meme

Have you seen this meme circulating around Facebook and the internet the last few days?

It purports to show a woman on an Ontario driver's licence  wearing the niqab -- a religious headdress a very small number of Islamic women in Canada wear and that is being shamefully used by some politicians as a dog-whistle in the current federal election.

Read More! 

2) Reinforcing male privilege -- The Trudeau cabinet, Andrew Coyne and the mythology of "merit"

You really have to love it when the beneficiaries of the greatest social assistance program in the history of Western Civilization and Canada -- the one that did and has rewarded white men for having been born white men since the day the country was founded -- talk about "merit" to bemoan newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to make his cabinet have an equal number of men and women, thereby reflecting the actual gender composition of the country.

Read More! 

3) Delusion continues to rule the day in Mulcair NDP

By Fraser Needham

In the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign that wrapped up earlier this week, the Justin Trudeau led Liberals won a smashing 184-seat majority government.

Perhaps what is most amazing about the Liberal victory is that the party started in third place in terms of both number of seats and in the polls when the campaign began in early August.

Read More!

4) Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to

It is, ultimately, astounding how facile and false political narratives come back to haunt those who insist on their veracity.

And so it has happened with the "government-in-waiting" liberal led NDP.

Read More!

5) BC NDP posts a meme about "foreign" workers -- Xenophobes show up in approval

There is a wing of the left -- and especially within the mainstream "social democratic" party, the NDP -- that thinks that the path to power is in part paved by pandering to what are traditionally right-wing populist narratives.

Read More!

6) NDP campaign enters panic mode

By Fraser Needham

If in politics a week can be a lifetime, a month can be an eternity – especially in an election campaign.

Just put yourself in the shoes of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s top strategists to see how much things can change over the course of four weeks. On a late August afternoon when members of the Mulcair team looked out on a bright and sunny day from the confines of the NDP war room, they must have been feeling pretty confident about themselves.

Read More!

7) Doubling down on disaster

In the wake of the catastrophic election result for the NDP -- an election that saw the party squander its position as official opposition and "government-in-waiting" and what seemed its first real shot at power -- comes news that the leader who "led" the party there, Tom Mulcair, intends to stay at the helm.

Read More!

8) The NDP's phony “credit card” analogy: a neoliberal conception of the public household

By Matt Fodor

In an attempt to shore up the NDP’s fiscal credibility, Tom Mulcair recruited Andrew Thomson, the fiscally conservative finance minister that served in the NDP provincial government of Lorne Calvert in Saskatchewan.

Read More!

9) Mulcair's NDP ran a great campaign! We know this because they say they did.

By Fraser Needham

It has now been almost three weeks since the NDP suffered a devastating loss in the 2015 federal election and the party remains shell shocked as to what exactly went wrong.

The Liberals are forging ahead on their mandate after winning the party’s first majority government in 15 years. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named his first cabinet this week with gender parity and significant minority representation. If early signs are any indication, it appears clear the Liberals intend to run a much more open and accessible government than their predecessors.

Read More!

10) Unintended consequences: Attacking Leadnow and "strategic voting"

As I have noted before, partisan political narratives often die very hard -- even when these narratives have begun to do far more harm than good to those who continue to espouse them.

One of these, increasingly, is the fixation by many New Democrat partisans on insisting that they are the only "real" "progressives" (while all the other parliamentary parties are supposedly the "same") as well as on attacking their old nemesis among progressive voters -- the Liberal Party.

Read More!

Thanks again for a great first year. See you in 2016.

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

November: Andrew Coyne, Mulcair's NDP, Non-violence and Islamophobia -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

November saw the least number of posts in The Left Chapter's short history with only 20, though it also had the blog's highest number of total hits for any month so far.

While all of the top posts did very well, the first post in terms of hits truly struck a nerve and had the second highest number of hits of any piece on the Left Chapter to date.

Without any further ado the top five posts in terms of hits for the month of December were:

1) Reinforcing male privilege -- The Trudeau cabinet, Andrew Coyne and the mythology of "merit"

You really have to love it when the beneficiaries of the greatest social assistance program in the history of Western Civilization and Canada -- the one that did and has rewarded white men for having been born white men since the day the country was founded -- talk about "merit" to bemoan newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to make his cabinet have an equal number of men and women, thereby reflecting the actual gender composition of the country.

Read More!

2) Mulcair's NDP ran a great campaign! We know this because they say they did

By Fraser Needham

It has now been almost three weeks since the NDP suffered a devastating loss in the 2015 federal election and the party remains shell shocked as to what exactly went wrong.

Read More! 

3) As Liberals and Conservatives look for success, Mulcair NDP embraces failure

By Fraser Needham

The NDP has become a very funny organization these days.

And by this I mean funny “strange” and not funny “ha ha.”

Read More!

4) Non-violence -- There is a way to stop the cycle

In a world so full of anger, oppression, hate and counter-hate, so full of racism, misogyny, homophobia, bigotry, so full of the disasters of nationalism and the extremism of ideology, it is always seen as somehow naive or utopian to point out that at some moment, somewhere, the cycle of violence has to end.

Read More!

5) North America's wave of Islamophobia -- This is what the start of fascism looks like

This has been a week where the pretence of civility, acceptance and  multi-cultural tolerance has been challenged in North America not just by the usual suspects that are the forces of right wing reaction, but as well by those who call themselves progressive and who should know better.

Read More! 

The top food post for the month was "Slow Cooker Sausage Lasagna"

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

Check out our review for the month of October: October: Delusion, catastrophe and panic beset the NDP -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

Reinforcing male privilege -- The Trudeau cabinet, Andrew Coyne and the mythology of "merit"

You really have to love it when the beneficiaries of the greatest social assistance program in the history of Western Civilization and Canada -- the one that did and has rewarded white men for having been born white men since the day the country was founded -- talk about "merit" to bemoan newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to make his cabinet have an equal number of men and women, thereby reflecting the actual gender composition of the country.

As is always the case about efforts to redress historic injustices it is met with cries of outrage about "quotas", "reverse sexism" and a bunch of other total rubbish.

Usually, as Andrew Coyne did in the National Post, they pay lip service to the fact that no past cabinet was ever based on anything remotely like merit and, in fact, had an outright quota system that ensured that all positions of power in both our government and society as a whole were 100 per cent held by white men, but they will not then accept either that these systemic biases continue to this day or that anything done to reverse them has any merit.

The injustices do still exist and it should come as absolutely no surprise that those like Coyne, who are in no small part where they are due to the cosmic crap shoot of birth that has a lot less to do with their own merits that they might care to admit, will then go on to pontificate in ways that serve to obfuscate their own profound privilege.

There is little doubt that positions of power in our economy and politics are greatly skewed and that white men remain the overwhelming beneficiaries still of the ultimate example of societal welfare.

Take the corporate world. As Kate McInturff , a Senior Researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives noted in 2014:

What makes the top 100 CEOs different from the rest of us (aside from the money)? For a start, they are almost entirely men. If the top 100 looked like the rest of working Canadians then 47 per cent of them would be women. In reality only 3 per cent are women.
In a recent survey, senior Canadian executives suggested that a lack of qualifications was the reason for the absence of women at the top. Yet two in five business post-graduates in Canada are women. Senior executives suggested that women were less ambitious than their male peers. Yet, 81 per cent of female MBA graduates seek corporate jobs following graduation. For those women who do manage to get their foot in the corporate door, there is no lack of hours to work. It's their pay that looks different. Women with MBAs earn $8,167 per year less than their male colleagues in their first jobs after graduation. And the pay gap, here as in every other field, just keeps on growing as they enter their 30s and 40s.

Note that here too, of course, the claim of "merit" and "qualifications" are used as a lie by male executives and their apologists to buttress the argument for doing nothing about the very real male privilege that still exists in their world. 

Never mind that, as she also notes:

It would take the average working age woman in Canada 235 years (or 85,778 days) to make as much as one of these CEOs makes in a single year. It would take a first-generation immigrant woman 268 years to do it. Visible minority women and Aboriginal women would have to work the longest, at 273 years and 285 years respectively.

Or take the fact, as noted in the Globe and Mail that when it comes to the persistent gender based pay gap:

After decades of narrowing differences in pay and labour-force participation rates, momentum has stalled, with some measures deteriorating in recent years. Canadian women still take home on average 73 cents for every dollar men earn, even as educational attainment has surpassed their male counterparts. The gap remains when controlled for measures such as occupations and hourly wages. 

In politics this same pattern has, of course, played out, and to such a degree that even Wikipedia, when commenting on the lack of women in leadership roles in Canadian politics, has come to the conclusion that:

This dearth of women in political leadership may, in some ways, be attributable to women's general exclusion from important cabinet positions that are seen as stepping stones to leadership. Women were largely excluded from Canadian cabinets until the 1970s. Only in rare instances do women comprise a significant proportion of Canadian cabinets, as in the case of then-Ontario Premier Bob Rae's first cabinet in 1990, in which 11 of 26 ministers were women. As of July 2013, the Harper Cabinet had 11 female ministers in a cabinet of 39, though most hold minor portfolios.

"This dearth of women in political leadership may, in some ways, be attributable to women's general exclusion from important cabinet positions that are seen as stepping stones to leadership." I think this needs to be emphasized as it points to the basic and grotesque hypocrisy and contradiction at work when primarily white male commentators pen these types of apologias for historic sexism.

Again, for example, we see Andrew Coyne state:

But nothing we have seen before can quite compare to the course the Liberals have embarked upon: an explicit 50-50 gender quota. This is not an objective or a target; not a balancing of merit and other considerations. It is a fixed rule, to be adhered to come what may.

And yet he himself, now obviously forgetting this in the typical way, already acknowledged that we had very much seen something that "could compare" -- the historic, and far more dramatic and exclusionary, white male quota!

Only now, when a Prime Minister seeks to actually upend the quota imposed on our society by white men for the benefit of white men do white men suddenly care at all about "merit"!

Where were all the white men whining about this when only, or virtually only. white men (and rich ones to boot) were the bulk or entirety of basically every cabinet in Canadian history?

That certainly was not based on merit! It was based on sexism and racism. It was only not considered a quota as the white men running the system had constructed racist and sexist narratives that claimed that only white men had the alleged "qualifications" necessary.

So folks like Coyne need to cut the false, self-serving sanctimony and bullshit. Trudeau's plan is not a quota, it is an effort to include voices deliberately excluded from being heard for the entire history of our country and perspectives that have been deliberately kept out of the real power positions of our government. Voices and perspectives that came from half the population.

The fact that countless white men were afforded positions of power and privilege not due to any merit but due solely to being white men is now supposed to be simply forgotten and ignored according to the Coynes of our discourse. It is a call for little more than business as usual and a call not for merit but for continuing the white male hegemony that defines "merit" solely in terms of the privileged qualities that its male commentators see in the mirror.