March: Mulcair, Tory, Bill C-51 & more - The month on The Left Chapter in review

From "42-2: John Tory, Toronto City Council and the austerity consensus"

March was a busy month with 34 posts of various kinds on The Left Chapter.

Here are the top five posts, in terms of hits, for the month of March:



Top Posts

1) 42-2: John Tory, Toronto City Council and the austerity consensus:

"Remember how, during last year's municipal election in Toronto, supporters of Olivia Chow and progressive activists and organizations warned that John Tory, were he to be elected as Mayor of Toronto, would simply be a more effective version of Rob Ford?"

Read more! 

2) Keep the progressive announcements coming, Tom: An open letter to the Leader of the NDP (by Simon Dougherty) 

"Dear Tom,


It’s been great to hear you’ll pull Canadian troops from Iraq if elected. Also, having a Prime Minister who’ll take from the rich and give to the poor will be a great relief to Canadians struggling with record levels of inequality."

Read more!

3) Rabble's Karl Nerenberg is wrong: Repealing and amending Bill C-51 are not at all the same thing

"Writing on rabble.ca Karl Nerenberg makes an unconvincing case, in response to a piece I had written, that NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and his party's stance that states that they will "amend" or "change" Bill C-51 is basically the same as Elizabeth May's stance that she will "repeal" it."

Read more! 

4) Harper, Mulcair, May & Trudeau: They all support the "Tribute to Liberty"

"Lately we have been hearing some loud "protest" from New Democrat,  Liberal and Green partisans and hacks sharing articles and statements online critical of and denouncing the hideous and absurd memorial for the "victims of communism" the Harper government has planned for Ottawa.

There is a large irony to this."

Read More!

5) Is NDP MP Randall Garrison right that Tom Mulcair will repeal Bill C-51?

"As many are aware, there has been something of a controversy on the left as to whether or not the NDP is committed to fundamentally scrapping Bill C-51 as opposed to, as the Trudeau Liberals are, seeking to "improve" or change it through amendments."

Read More! 

As none of the food or Leftist Throwback Thursday blogs made the top five (though these two came very close), we also include links to the top two of those:

Egg and Cheese Oven Bake with Vegetables or Meat (or both!)

Laxer, Lewis and Watkins sitting in a tree!: Leftist Throwback Thursday

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!

Rabble's Karl Nerenberg is wrong: Repealing and amending Bill C-51 are not at all the same thing

Writing on rabble.ca Karl Nerenberg makes an unconvincing case, in response to a piece I had written, that NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and his party's stance that states that they will "amend" or "change" Bill C-51 is basically the same as Elizabeth May's stance that she will "repeal" it.

This is predicated on a variety of bourgeois parliamentary technicalities that both ignore many other objections I stated to the way Mulcair is supposedly "opposing" the bill and that seeks to claim that saying that one will amend legislation is not really different from saying that one will repeal it as doing so is technically an amendment! According to this logic Mulcair's stance is, therefore, not "wobbly" (Nerenberg's word).

Nonsense.

Parliamentarians, political parties, unions and organizations call for the repeal of legislation all the time and everyone knows that this means something different from calling for the amending of legislation. One could point to nearly endless examples of this, as anyone on the left knows.

For the benefit of those who, somehow, do not understand the difference, "repeal", according to The Free Dictionary means "to revoke or rescind, especially by the action of a legislature." Whereas "amend" means "to alter the wording of (a legal document, for example) so as to make more suitable or acceptable."

These are not the same thing. Obviously.

As rabble.ca's parliamentary reporter Nerenberg surely knows that when leaders and parties are fundamentally opposed to a specific piece of legislation they call for its repeal, as opposed to its amendment, so as to reflect the totality of this opposition.

Countless bills have been said to have been repealed in Canada's history, both federally and provincially. Simply google "Bills repealed in Canada" if you doubt this. Here is a handy link to a search I did.

This is why the Tories were said to have "repealed" the long-gun registry as opposed to amending it.

It is also why Justin Trudeau, in 2014, on CTV News said he would "repeal in its entirety" the Fair Elections Act. You can watch him do so in the video linked to.

Thomas Mulcair has, to date, not said this about Bill C-51. Why?

On the very pages of rabble itself Elizabeth May - who has actually taken the principled stance in the necessary firmness and language that the NDP backslides on - said "Of course, if I ever were Prime Minister, one of the first things I would do is to repeal this act."

Again, Mulcair, when directly asked on Global TV, did not say this about Bill C-51. Why not? If there is no difference between "amending" and "repealing", again, why not commit to repeal?

While I am sure Nerenberg's apologia for Mulcair will make the NDP hacks and faithful happy, and while it seems to be aimed at easing the misgivings of many progressives about Mulcair's clear equivocations and retreats, language actually matters.

Perhaps some need a reminder that, in the real world, calling for the repeal of legislation and calling for amendments to legislation are not, in fact, the same thing and it is completely ludicrous and bizarre to claim otherwise.