Canadians need to demand an immediate end to criminal imperialist sanctions

Cuban medical team arrives in Belize to help fight the coronavirus outbreak

As the capitalist coronavirus crisis increasingly highlights the inability of the "advanced" capitalist countries to even take care of their own citizens adequately let alone engage in international solidarity actions, socialist Cuba has risen to the occasion.

Cuba has a long tradition of humanitarian internationalism and has sent doctors around the world for decades to help in times of crisis or to build public health infrastructure (see: "The miracle we are performing...could not be performed in a capitalist society" -- Cuban socialism's remarkable accomplishments despite the criminal, imperialist blockade). As the Cuba Solidarity Campaign noted in an open letter against the continuing criminal American blockade of the island:

The island’s altruistic response to the global emergency continues a long history of Cuban humanitarianism. In the last 56 years 400,000 Cuban health workers have responded to natural disasters and helped build health services in 164 nations. This includes sending medical brigades to Pakistan in the aftermath of the Kashmiri earthquake (2005), to Haiti to assist with the devastating cholera outbreak following the earthquake (2010), and to West Africa in the region’s fight against Ebola (2015). Cuba has also trained 35,613 health professionals from 138 countries at its Latin American Medical School since 1998.

Despite American attempts to slander these efforts, Cuba is pursuing them now and providing desperately needed medical aid in spite of the blockade. The letter noted some of these:

In recent days the island has sent highly skilled medical brigades to many countries including Italy, Grenada, Jamaica, Nicaragua and Venezuela to support foreign health services overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis.
On 18 March the Cuban government offered safe haven to passengers of the stricken British cruise ship MS Braemar allowing it to dock in Havana when many other countries had refused. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab publicly thanked Cuba for this assistance in a statement to the UK parliament.
It has also made its anti-viral drug Interferon Alpha B available to nations around the world to help in the treatment of patients infected with COVID-19.

In fact, over 45 countries have asked Cuba for Interferon to treat Covid-19. In addition to the above, Cuba is sending doctors to Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, and Argentina. Countries like Brazil, whose government expelled Cuban doctors from communities when fascist Bolsonaro took power, are asking for Cuban doctors to return.

Meanwhile, in contrast to this kind of humanitarian work the United States continues to impose cruel and sweeping economic sanctions not only against Cuba but also countries like Venezuela and Iran.

In the case of Venezuela the Americans are actually increasing the pressure with absurd criminal charges against some of the country's leaders including placing a $15 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro himself like out of some pathetic old John Wayne movie.

The World Peace Council outlined the barbarity of the situation in a statement on March 27:

This decision of the US-administration constitutes not only a further escalation in the provocations, coercive measures and interference against a sovereign country, it proves also the cynical and arrogant approach of the USA, which is using the critical times of the pandemic of COVID 19 worldwide, to impose new additional sanctions on the country and its people. The people of Venezuela are already suffering from the sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US imperialists and its allies from EU and the “Lima Group”, which do not allow the country to purchase medicine and other vital products since more than one year. It is the same forces who recognize a self-proclaimed puppet as their “chosen leader” against any legitimacy, logic and international law and it is the same forces which do not allow during the COVID 19 crisis the country to buy and provide technical equipment and health products for the National Health System in the international markets.

The Lima Group, of course, is essentially led by Canada.

The International Monetary Fund also refused a plea by the Venezuelan government for $5 billion in emergency relief

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quite rightly stated that American sanctions against Venezuela under these circumstances could result in an avoidable humanitarian catastrophe that would amount to a genocide.

There are mounting global calls to end or ease the sanctions to avoid the possible deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has spoken out. Talking about continued American efforts against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and other countries she noted:

The majority of these states have frail or weak health systems...obstacles to the import of vital medical supplies, including over-compliance with sanctions by banks, will create long-lasting harm to vulnerable communities. The populations in these countries are in no way responsible for the policies being targeted by sanctions, and to varying degrees have already been living in a precarious situation for prolonged periods.

Even in the empire itself some politicians are demanding a change of course.  Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for sanctions to be at least partially waived. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy penned a letter co-signed by 10 other Democrats in Congress also calling for this that read in part:

It hurts our nation’s security and our moral standing in the world when our sanctions policy results in innocent people dying. I am particularly concerned about the impact of sanctions on the COVID-19 response in Iran and Venezuela.

It is essential that pressure is put on the American administration to end the criminal sanctions before it is too late.

Canada has played a disgraceful role in trying to sanction and overthrow the democratically elected, legitimate government of Venezuela.

Despite this, and despite Canada's alleged opposition to the blockade of Cuba and many of the sanctions against Iran, there has not been a peep from the Trudeau government in recent days demanding even just a temporary suspension.

Nor has Canada's "social democratic" party, the NDP -- whose position on Venezuela is perhaps best described as incoherent support for American sock puppet stooge Guaido -- had anything officially to say.

The time is long overdue for all progressive Canadians to demand an end to the sanctions immediately. Continuing to impose them on countries during a global pandemic cannot be seen as anything other than a crime against humanity.

Canadians have to decide if they want their government to be complicit in it.

Trudeau dodges, Horgan and Singh contort on Wet'suwet'en, the RCMP and UNDRIP

On the same day NDP leader Jagmeet Singh revealed that he was open to Canada footing the security bill for Royal castaways Harry and Meghan, he also came a little more out of the shadows in de facto support of fellow NDPer and BC Premier John Horgan's colonialist line on Wet'suwet'en and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Singh has tried to deflect any blame for the standoff from Horgan and his social democratic swamp of deepening hypocrisy by expressing "concern" over the actions of the RCMP which he paints as the fault of the federal Trudeau government.


Hence, as we have pointed out before, the farce of tweets like this one:

First, Singh himself, unlike the federal Green Party, is not actually yet calling for the RCMP to withdraw from Wet'suwet'en territory. He has only said they “should be careful,” and, as we all know, that is sure to make the RCMP think twice before acting.

Further, Singh is now echoing the misleading  propaganda of folks like Horgan and Trudeau that tries to divide and conquer with rhetoric of how "“the vast majority” of elected First Nations officials and communities along the proposed route support the project" as if that somehow overrides the concerns and opposition of the Hereditary Chiefs who do not. This is an old and ugly tactic.

It is difficult to reconcile this with Singh's role as federal NDP Indigenous affairs critic, especially given ongoing protests such as the temporary occupation of the office for the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources on Wednesday and the statement of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) that unequivocally noted that the "Wet’suwet’en Jurisdiction and Governance Must be Upheld". 

Horgan has made his commitment to pushing the project through very clear. He was profoundly dismissive of the Hereditary Chiefs in his comments on Monday saying "I'm not going to drop everything I'm doing to come running when someone is saying they need to speak with me...I'm not being disrespectful, I'm just saying be realistic here" as if the chiefs are somehow cranks or lobbyists demanding unreasonable attention from the imperial overlord.

Of course, were they actually industry lobbyists Horgan probably would meet with them, though the $10,000 dinner fee getting a one-on-one with him for resource industry corporate talking heads that was the price tag back in 2016 is not the option it once was.

Horgan also tried to say that his government's alleged commitment to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) does not apply in this case since it was "meant to be forward looking, not backward looking" as the CBC paraphrased it, meaning projects that violate it that have already been approved must barrel ahead.

"There is no negotiating to be done," he claimed. 

Perhaps sensing that this is not playing terribly well with significant sections of the NDP's voting base, Horgan did soften this stance somewhat when later on Monday he "sent a letter to Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Nam’oks on Monday, saying he would like to send the province’s minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation" for talks in his stead.

The NDP leadership both federally and in BC should be concerned with the federal Green Party being far stronger in its support for both the rights of the Hereditary Chiefs and the principles of UNDRIP.

In a press release Green Party MP Paul Manly said:

The fact that the RCMP have been sent in shows that this is a political failure on the part of the provincial and federal governments. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs provided alternative routes to Coastal GasLink that would have been acceptable to them as a pipeline corridor. Coastal GasLink decided that it did not want to take those acceptable options and instead insisted on a route that drives the pipeline through ecologically pristine and culturally important areas...
...Greens call on B.C. Premier Horgan to meet with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs as quickly as possible. We also want the B.C. government to address this situation through the lens of UNDRIP. Since UNDRIP was brought in to address historic injustice, how can it be ignored in order to allow this injustice to persist? The Wet'sowet'en hereditary chiefs have jurisdiction over their traditional territories, and they clearly have not given their consent.

Green Party Parliamentary Leader Elizabeth May stated further that “British Columbia recently enacted new legislation in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This situation undermines the constitutional role played by the hereditary chiefs."

Prime Minister Trudeau, of course, is very happy to leave the ball entirely in Horgan's court stating “It’s a provincial project and provincial processes. It is being well taken care of by the provincial government.” This is mildly clever, if typically disingenuous.

Still, despite all of Horgan's attempts to claim matters as somehow out of his hands due to the "rule of law", it is a provincial project that would never have gone ahead without the NDP offering up billions of dollars in tax and other incentives and issuing all the necessary permits. The NDP provided all of these incentives despite also turning around and telling BC teachers that their "demands for (a) pay increase don’t square with balanced budget".

Meanwhile the RCMP, having set up roadblocks, now also "admits it’s deploying “air assets” to monitor Indigenous land defenders". Matters are coming to a head and if history is any guide the RCMP, when it acts, will do so with great violence, threats, arrests and brutality. Future progressives will likely not judge Trudeau, Horgan or Singh too kindly unless they take steps now to force a change of course.

NDP partisans have long sought to portray the Green Party as little more than "conservatives with composters". Whatever the accuracy of that moniker, Singh and Horgan had best watch out as they are increasingly -- along with the best past efforts of former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley -- making the NDP look like the corporate apologists the Liberals are, only with dusty old copies of the Regina Manifesto hidden in a desk drawer somewhere.

Further Readings: 

Horgan, Trudeau and Singh show once more "progressive" rhetoric about reconciliation is a sham

Open Letter to Jagmeet Singh regarding Trans Mountain, Site C and Coastal GasLink

Extremist Conservative fundraising email shows the depth of their commitment to Apartheid Israel

In a surprising move the Trudeau government unexpectedly voted in favour of a motion in support of Palestinian self-determination at the United Nations on November 19. This was widely seen as a repudiation of the recent outrageous move by the Trump administration to unilaterally declare that Israeli settlements are not illegal under international law when they very clearly are. 

While the vote was a positive development it did not really signal a fundamental shift in Canada's policies in the region. As noted in the Globe and Mail:

Thomas Juneau, a Middle East expert at the University of Ottawa, said the vote is “more symbolic than anything else.”
“Are we going to see a substantive change in the substance of Canadian policy towards Israel and Palestinians? I doubt it. I think our policy will broadly remain consistent,” said Mr. Juneau, adding that he will be watching to see how Canada votes in the future to determine whether there is a shift in policy, or a one-off.
Michael Lynk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, said by voting in favour of the resolution recognizing right to self-determination, Canada is “simply acknowledging long-standing international consensus and long-standing international law on the issue of Palestine.”
Mr. Lynk, who is also an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, said Canada did not vote in favour or a handful of other resolutions on the issue. He said that Canada is running for a seat on the UN Security Council and has likely realized its in a “weak” position on this issue.

It is just a slight adjustment to try to pretend to support Canada's alleged commitment to a "two state" solution. The CBC reported:

"We are extremely pleased that the Liberal government has voted in support of Palestinian self-determination at the UN," said CJPME's [Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East] Miranda Gallo. "This is a long overdue step and is entirely consistent with the government's support for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. In fact, Canada could not support a 'two state' solution if it did not support the creation of a Palestinian state."
Noting that "the Liberal government has changed its position as compared to previous years," Gallo added: "This may be a slap on the wrist to the Trump government to communicate that, given Pompeo's outlandish statement in support of illegal Israeli colonies, Canada feels the U.S. is failing to provide fair leadership on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As the CBC also noted this simply brought Canada back in line with its historically somewhat more balanced stance:

In 2003, Canada voted yes to 13 of the 16 resolutions on Israel and abstained on three. In 2004, it recorded its first two "No" votes, alongside the U.S. and Israel, and supported only 12 resolutions. After Stephen Harper came to power in 2006, the "No" and abstention votes gradually increased.
After Harper won a majority government in 2011, Canada voted "No" on 14 of the 16 resolutions, abstaining on another. From that point onward, the only "Yes" vote before today was on a non-controversial motion calling for assistance for Palestinians displaced by conflict.
Trudeau's Liberal government has maintained the voting pattern it inherited from the Harper government — until now. 

 The Conservatives certainly don't see it that way though.

In an hysterical, over-the-top fundraising email they sent out on December 2, they paint it as a nefarious rejection of Israel that aligns Canada with North Korea.

The email, which had the subject line "Justin Trudeau’s emboldened anti-Israel stance" sought to open the wallets of donors with the following drivel:

This is disgraceful nonsense on multiple levels.

The implication is that supporting the resolution was somehow an extremist position internationally when it is anything but. While North Korea may have been one of several sponsors of the resolution -- that also included Egypt and, of course, the Palestinians (shocking) -- in all 163 countries voted for it with only 5 countries, including the United States and Israel, voting against. There were nine abstentions.

In other words, on this issue, it is the United States and a handful of countries with far right governments or that it has somehow bullied that are the actual extremists.

Aside from simply being inane, par for the course right wing lying where the message gets rather more unsettling is in its attempt to paint this as being due to the Liberal Party somehow having a problem with antisemitism and antisemitic candidates or members.

We have seen this game before with the relentless slandering of leftist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

While Trudeau is certainly no leftist and unlike Corbyn has no commitment whatsoever to the justice of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, it is very disturbing to see the continued use of this line of attack by supporters of Israel and the right. The equation of opposition to the actions of Israel with antisemitism is not simply wrong but dangerous in that it plays into the very antisemitic tropes that it allegedly opposes.

Conflating Israel with Jews broadly and internationally is, in fact, antisemitic as is the use of support of Israel by Canadian conservatives to pander to the Evangelical Christian community whose embrace of it is based solely on a demented belief that its existence heralds the coming of the apocalypse and rapture.

Whether being used against Corbyn or the milquetoast opportunist Trudeau these tactics and lies must be resolutely opposed.

Coalitions, Rewriting Constitutional History, NDP Spike or Surge and more -- The Left Chapter Canadian Election Round-up Week Six

This is the sixth and last of our weekly election round-ups of developments -- as well as the inane, bizarre, humorous and unusually facile -- in the great show that is mainstream bourgeois politics during the election of 2019.


The fifth was: NDP Spikes, Bloc Surges, May and Scheer Stall -- The Left Chapter Canadian Election Round-up Week Five

See also our The Left Chapter election editorial from this week with endorsements: Voting Communist, Tactical Voting and Conscientious Abstention -- Leftist Strategy in the 2019 Election

To coalition or not to coalition? 

The NDP, its leadership and its partisans, love to tell us over and again that there really is no difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Except, that is, when it comes to minority parliaments and coalition time, because then they seem to know full well that there is a difference.

With the polls indicating that a minority parliament is very likely, and with Jagmeet Singh and the NDP in a position to possibly hold the balance of power, both Singh and Justin Trudeau have been musing in various ways about hitching their parliamentary futures together to provide sunshine, lollipops and "progressive" government.

Needless to say, Andrew Scheer is unimpressed.

Looking to rally the troops Scheer has been warning that an NDP-Liberal coalition would be far more interesting and radical than I can assure you it actually would be. He has also been trying to rewrite parliamentary history and tradition to claim that the party with the most seats gets to try to form a government when this is not the case as anyone who ever took a public school civics course knows. The former Prime Minister of the previous House gets the first attempt to govern.

But even this absurdity does not go far enough for Scheer in trying to de-legitimize how the Canadian parliament works. The Conservatives are also suggesting in fundraising emails that if the NDP and Liberals governed together despite Scheer winning more seats it would amount to a de facto coup.

Seriously.

Of course, this is total idiocy. A minority parliament is the "democratic will of Canadians" in the parliamentary/electoral sense. Presumably Scheer is looking for something to get the base all angry about when the Governor General turns to Trudeau first in the event no one gets a majority.

Could it be that Scheer wants a distraction? 

It seems Andrew Scheer is doing his best to make the argument for strategic voting Trudeau wants. Another part of the reason the Conservatives want to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any NDP - Liberal collaboration is that they really have no natural partners to work with in a minority situation. They will either have to hope to govern bill by bill or come to rest on the backing of the Bloc Quebecois in many cases should the Bloc do as well Monday as it seems it might.

Is there an NDP "surge"?

There is no doubt that a combination of the Trudeau brownface scandal, a mediocre Liberal campaign and poor Green campaign, and a better outing by Singh than many anticipated led to a spike in support for the NDP in the wake of the debates. The party went from as low as 12 - 13% going in to around 18 - 19% now. This has likely staved off what looked like a possible annihilation election for them.

Keen to boost the "surging Singh" narrative various reactionaries like the Toronto Sun's reprehensible Tarek Fatah, the vile Brian Lilley and Lorrie Goldstein, and the conservative "pollster" Nick Kouvalis  penned articles suddenly pushing the NDP for rather obvious strategic reasons. Rather shamefully a number of NDP partisans online shared these.

But is the surge real? Insofar as it lifted the party back to being a player in the election again, yes. But it does seem to have stalled now and neither the Liberals nor the Bloc are collapsing as in 2011 so it would not appear any kind of Orange Crush is coming.

Election night will show to what extent their campaign turned the tide.

Jordan Boswell should be dumped by the NDP

Love me I'm a Liberal 

Other notable articles:

Disgraceful dog-whistling: Conservative Candidate Warns Voters Trudeau Might Name Jagmeet Singh His ‘Foreign’ Affairs Minister

Four Green nominees in Quebec made Islamophobic comments, party says

The biggest winner in Canada's election is the military

Dude, where’s my bus? How the election failed public transit

Group looks to help anti-abortion advocates get jobs working for new MPs

NDP targets Greens with misleading claims

10 Questions for Andrew Taylor – Communist

Federal Election 2019: Toronto-Danforth candidate Ivan Byard, Communist Party, answers our questions

Voting Communist, Tactical Voting and Conscientious Abstention -- Leftist Strategy in the 2019 Election

With less than a week to go until election day in Canada, anti-capitalist leftists are in the challenging position yet again that no anti-capitalist candidate -- either an independent or affiliated to a political party -- is going to get elected next Monday.

While there are partisans, and perhaps even a candidate or two, of the NDP who claim it is anti-capitalist this cannot be taken at all seriously given the party's program and history both in office provincially and opposition federally.

Keeping these limitations in mind we need to take a look at what strategy and tactics left socialists and communists can and should adopt, in our opinion, depending on factors such as where they live and what they are trying to accomplish by their involvement in the electoral process.

Vote Communist in 31 ridings and other individual endorsements

In the 31 ridings in this election that do have a Communist Party of Canada candidate they deserve our vote and support. The Communists and their leader Elizabeth Rowley have run an excellent, principled campaign on a comprehensive, irrefutably anti-capitalist platform. We have looked at this before in the posts "People & Nature Before Profit!" -- Communist Party releases its federal election platform leaflet and "The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism." -- Communist Party campaign launches in Toronto.

Voting Communist sends a clear, direct message to the mainstream "progressive" parties rejecting their bankrupt platforms that do not go nearly far enough in tackling fundamental issues facing us such as grotesque levels of inequality and the threat posed by the climate emergency.

If you are in a riding with an independent or non-Communist party candidate who is also running on an explicitly anti-capitalist platform we would advocate a vote for them as well.

There are also a handful of individual candidates for the mainstream parties with a compelling enough narrative to deserve consideration.

Mumilaaq Qaqqaq (NDP) running in Nunavut would add an exciting and necessary voice to parliament. Sending Rudy Turtle (NDP), Chief of the Ontario Grassy Narrows First Nation, to Ottawa from Kenora would be a call for politicians to move beyond the hollow rhetoric of reconciliation and towards actually doing something to deal with the ongoing, brutal consequences of government colonialism, racism and indifference towards Indigenous peoples. Early on in this campaign the bullies at B'nai Brith tried to get the NDP to dump Miranda Gallo, who is running in Saint-Laurent, due to her activism on behalf of Palestinians. Electing her would be a rejection of the new McCarthyism that some have sought to impose around Israeli Apartheid.

Strategic and tactical voting versus conscientious abstention

What to do in ridings where there is no Communist or anti-capitalist candidate?

While the Liberals certainly always try to scare you into it, there is no serious leftist case to be made for strategic voting for Trudeau to stop the Conservatives. The Liberal party is a profoundly cynical, ugly, imperialist Bay St party that, while better than the Conservatives in many important and significant ways, is totally undeserving of support. The Trudeau government has reflected this cynicism while in power. There can be no greater symbol of why Trudeau and his government must be rejected entirely than the odious twin pillars of it, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of Finance Bill Morneau. In no riding in the country should the Liberal get a left vote.

Tactical voting for the Greens or New Democrats in ridings where they have a chance of defeating the Conservative candidate specifically (as opposed to each other or the Liberal) is something to consider.

However, outside of practical riding by riding concerns about stopping Scheer neither of these parties deserves actual support from a leftist perspective and voting for them is an implicit indication of some type of support.

 The Greens and the NDP are not that different from each other in any real sense, their platforms are deeply and profoundly flawed and hypocritical to such an extent that you can count on their partisans to distort them to make them appear better, and neither party is opposed to either capitalism or the global western imperialist order in any meaningful way at all. In an age of desperate inequality, unrestrained western interventionism and an existential environmental threat posed by global capitalism, this is not a minor point.

Those on the left who still insist that somehow we must support the NDP due to its "historic" ties to labour or the working-class are engaging in a fiction that may once have had some meaning but is more and more silly and out-of-touch with objective circumstances now with each passing year.

In fact it is both depressing and informative that so many on the left have found one excuse or another to feign enthusiasm for Jagmeet Singh and his lackluster campaign that has benefited only by comparison with the tired Trudeau and the even more lackluster campaign this time out by Elizabeth May.

Any objective look would show that advocating for the NDP or pretending its platform is somehow "leftist" is simply getting on board with another dead end like those in 2015, 2011, 2008, 2006, 2004 and on and on and on.

The party has tried, rather unconvincingly, to slightly mimic the tone of Bernie Sanders (himself a deeply flawed candidate) and the NDP has proven record of never doing what it says it is going to when or if it wins anything. It is worth remembering how the party shifted dramatically rightward under Jack Layton -- an allegedly "leftist" leader -- especially after "winning" opposition.

Ironically, despite the supposed NDP partisan contempt of the Liberals and insistence that they are no different from the Conservatives, the main goal of the NDP now seems to be to win enough seats to make a deal with Trudeau!

In a riding where the Greens or the NDP have no chance of winning or where the Conservatives pose no threat why reward their liberalism, inherent imperialism and fundamental embrace of capitalism? What will this achieve in advancing the cause of working people and socialism? Nothing.

In fact, leftists continuing to waste their energies on the NDP (or now the Greens) despite decades of evidence in and out of power that this is a totally bankrupt dead end can only be seen as tremendously futile and counter-productive. A kind of crutch and excuse to which many return that prevents the emergence of a serious mass anti-capitalist alternative.

And just because the Liberals are genuinely awful and the Greens are only aspiring to be as milquetoast as the NDP has been does not make Andrea Horwath disciple Singh anymore interesting or "leftist".

In a riding where there is no Communist or anti-capitalist candidate, where the Greens or NDP have no chance, where it is a Liberal - Conservative race or where the Conservatives pose no threat we would suggest considering a conscientious, principled abstention and rejection of the sham of mainstream politics by either staying home or by spoiling your ballot.

Conservatives go dangerously full tin foil hat with email alleging impending mass voter fraud

The federal Conservatives have gone full tin foil hat in their latest email attempt to terrify their voting base with conspiracy nonsense.

In a fundraising missive that literally begins with the outrageous framing "The Liberals are bringing back voter fraud", Stephen McCreary, the "Digital Director" of the party, claims that potentially re-allowing Voter ID cards as one of the things that can be used to vote could be "more than enough to swing an election in their favour."

The full email (which I received tonight at 7:02 pm) is pictured here:

Of course, this is all complete nonsense.

What has happened is that in 2016 Elections Canada -- an entirely non-partisan governmental agency -- recommended green-lighting the use of Voter ID cards as one of the forms of proof of identity that you could provide in order to vote, though it would never be the sole one. You would still have to provide at least one further proof of identity.

The Liberals have agreed to do this and have introduced a bill to this effect. Entirely correctly Liberal MP Andy Fillmore, parliamentary secretary to the minister of democratic institutions, stated that "the main challenge for our electoral democracy is not voter fraud but voter participation." I think there are far deeper reasons that people stay home on election day than not being able to use this card, but there is no doubt that allowing easier access to voting, which is always vilified and opposed by the right, is more fair and democratic as it is primarily people living in poverty, the racialized and the marginalized who have issues around identification.

As the Conservatives feel that these are folks who are less likely to vote for them they are more inclined to create obstacles to voting that will not be obstacles at all to middle-class, upper-middle class or wealthy voters.

The scaremongering of the email is ludicrous.

Even if you assume that all of the "facts" presented here are true, the "errors" are just as likely to be sent (proportionally) to people inclined to vote for the Conservatives, the NDP or Greens as they are to be sent to potential Liberal voters.

Additionally, as already noted, the Voter ID cards will not be allowed to be used without further corroborating documentation and proof.

The idea that the Liberals or anyone else could somehow mobilize all of the people who received a card in error or with an error (though they would have no idea who or where these people are), manage to coordinate them showing up on election day with fake or misleading backup proof of residence and convince them all to vote Liberal is absurd to the point of making Fox News look rational.

It is transparently idiotic.

Yet it plays not only to the increasingly outlandish conspiracy narratives of the right, it also hauls out the anti-immigrant dog-whistle.

"AND, they even get mailed out to non-citizens!"

The horror.

This is followed up with an all-caps emphasis on "LEGAL VOTERS". No subtlety there!

Is there any evidence that hordes of non-citizens will be incorrectly receiving Voter ID cards that they will then use, en masse, to illegally vote Liberal to derail the chances of right-thinking "real" Canadians electing a proper Conservative government?

No. There is none whatsoever. This notion only exists in the minds of right-wingers who somehow feel besieged and threatened by the "other".

This is what makes narratives and emails like this from the Conservatives so dangerous. It is not that the Liberals are the target or that one should fetishize the act of voting. It is that they are transparently attempting to inflame fictional fears about immigrants and voters from marginalized and racialized communities in ways that play to the ugliest, most bigoted threads becoming ever more prevalent within mainstream right wing discourse and thinking.

See also: Stop sharing the false -- and racist -- Ontario niqab driver's licence meme

See also: Stop sharing the refugees vs. seniors internet myths!

End Game -- The Ontario Election and Doug Ford

In the end it was not even close.

The polls were wrong again though they were wrong in favour of the ONDP. While many showed a race that was neck-and-neck going into yesterday, the Conservatives ended up winning 40.49% of the vote to the ONDP's 33.57%. The Liberals garnered but 19.59%.

This led to a massive Ford majority government. The ONDP are now the Official Opposition -- a role they have greatly coveted -- while the Liberals did not win enough seats to get party status in the commons. The Greens broke through winning their first seat ever with party leader Mike Schreiner triumphing in Guelph.

42% of voters stayed home.

That should tell us something about how people broadly feel about the "options" on offer and it is a fact that would likely have benefited the left if we actually had one.

You can try to sell shit as Shinola all you want. Doesn't mean the people are going to believe or buy into it.

The question is if the program on offer from the ONDP (never mind the totally spent Liberals) was so "inspiring" why did it motivate all too few people to vote for it?

While voter turnout increased from 2014 by almost 7% to a still sad 58%, the combined total vote of the ONDP and Liberals DECREASED by just over 9% (from a combined 62.4% to a combined 53.16%). The Green vote remained almost identical (4.6% as opposed to 4.84%).

That means that almost all of the new voters showing up voted Ford and Conservative.

All through the election there were clear signs that the ONDP was only being considered by some voters not because they wanted to embrace the ONDP's slightly, kinda in some places, more "left" than the Liberals platform but because they wanted to stop both Wynne and Ford. One poll showed 46% of those leaning NDP were doing so for this reason alone.

This type of negative motivation is often not enough for people to end up going to the polling station when push comes to shove. Though this will take time, the need to build a clear alternative to the status quo parties that can eventually grow to the point where people will not feel they are "wasting" their vote by supporting it has never been clearer.

After last night's results in Ontario activist Gabriel Haythornthwaite's incisive look to the future for the left is an even more important read: Ontario’s 2018 Election: Pessimism Today, Strategic Organizing Tomorrow.

The wages of liberalism in the US was Trump. While Ford is not a Trump, the wages of liberalism, in either the NDP or Liberal version, have proven to be the same kind of force of disillusion here too.

Amidst all of this there are a couple of points that also stand out:

1) While they may have "won" opposition status the NDP and its partisans will regret having supported the 'strategic voting' nonsense line that has been used to keep the left down for decades. Once you have affirmed that the Liberals were right all along when they said "stopping something that is worse is more important than voting for what you believe in or actually want" it is very hard to go back.

As we saw in the 2015 federal election -- where the NDP was also going in as opposition and with far more seats than the Liberals as it will be in 2022 here -- the way voters shift between the "lesser evil" options is based on broad trends as opposed to deep analysis and with the right leader the Liberals will have no problem in bouncing back against the milquetoast ONDP should the circumstances allow.

You can't bury the Liberal Party by promising that you will be a mildly better version of them and by embracing their cynical and defeatist electoral 'strategic' narratives.

2) The ability of the media and both the Conservatives and the Liberals to portray the NDP as "extremists" is in no small part due to the NDP's own efforts to eschew socialism and embrace reactionary, neo-liberal narratives about 'fiscal responsibility'.

To say there was nothing remotely "extreme" about the ONDP's platform would be putting it mildly. But the counter to this is not to actually affirm the narratives that the right has managed to make mainstream that any radical vision of transforming society is somehow 'scary'. By promising up and down that you do not have one and can trusted to efficiently take over the managing of the capitalist state seamlessly and with no reason for Bay St. to be worried, a party reinforces the validity of the idea that people should fear a left agenda.

Bay St. is going to try to bury any even mildly progressive reforms -- just look at the attacks Wynne faced with the minimum wage and new labour laws as well as what happened with the Rae government between 1990-1995 -- let alone an actually radical one.

We cannot counter this by capitulating to Bay St's narratives, but only by confronting them point-by-point and ceaselessly working to push the overall political discourse to the left. Leftists have done this before, including in Canada, and they can certainly do it again.

3) The ONDP knows now it can dangle a platform that is only marginally to the "left" of the Liberals and get great applause and largely uncritical support from many left activists. For example (as I have noted before) the Pharmacare plank was farcically limited in its scope, though it did at least somewhat embrace the principle of universality. The terrible childcare plan and the means-tested dental care plan did not even do that. Yet all were hailed by many former critics of the party as something to celebrate and be excited about.

While there was a leftist argument to be made for supporting the ONDP on election day in spite of its limitations due to the alternatives, those who tried to portray this last platform as a significant shift to the left or as a truly transformative or social democratic one have emboldened greatly the party's right and its strategists.

Now that Horwath and the ONDP are the opposition, we can surely anticipate that they will work to make themselves seen as the responsible "government in waiting" as the party did federally from 2011 to 2015. They can do so safe in the knowledge that half-baked, neo-liberal, means-tested  program proposals will be lauded by many as being something they are not.

There are going to be very difficult days ahead as Ford first seeks to stop and dismantle some of what was achieved in the final year of the Wynne government and then turns to gutting social programs and to deep austerity under the guise of "efficiency".

These days will be made harder if the left allows its efforts to resist to be dissipated by politicians and leaders beholden to narrow electoral methods and opportunistic careerist goals. Building further mass alternatives of left activism and resistance to Ford outside of and independent of this is now of immediate critical importance.

Vote Communist in twelve ridings and other thoughts for election day in Ontario

With the election a mere two days off the standard calls for strategic voting are reaching a fever pitch though, as always, they are not really calls for strategic voting at all and this time they favour the New Democrats instead of the usual beneficiaries, the Liberals.

I will return to the question of strategic voting in a moment, but there is a party that has put forth an unapologetically radical, anti-capitalist platform that deserves support in the twelve ridings in which they are running candidates, the Communist Party.


The Communist Party platform embraces real public ownership models, a $20 an hour minimum wage, fare free transit, justice for Indigenous people, a leftist tax reform model, actually effective legal limits and penalties for pollution and emissions as opposed to the market driven cap-and-trade and carbon tax models, ending public funding for Catholic schools, and much more.

You can read their full platform at Our Program: A People's Alternative for Ontario, can see their full election leaflet on our post Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism" and can watch the speech by their leader Dave McKee at their campaign launch at the end of this post.

Their candidates are:

I hope people will give consideration to a vote that sends a serious message of opposition not just to this-or-that aspect of modern capitalism and neo-liberalism, but that rejects the entire system and all of its evils completely. I feel that the dedicated activists the Communists are running are all head-and-shoulders above any other electoral option right now.

Just one of the CP memes with points from their excellent platform

Of course, the Communists are running in only 12 ridings. What about the other 112? And what about the certain cries that even where the Communists are running every vote should be directed to the NDP and "stopping Ford"?

Needless to say, actual "strategic voting" does not work that way which is why it really never plays out in practice. There is no case, even this election, where an across the board vote for one party in every riding is a vote to stop the right wing alternative or where doing so in every riding is necessary.

Regardless, the underlying premises of "strategic voting" -- that activists "have no choice" but to remain in or support parties like the NDP due to the self-fulfilling logic that there is no alternative to it -- are a major part of what have led to the imprisonment of the electoral energies and vision of many leftists within an opportunistic party run by third-way careerists. These premises can be rejected and should be rejected.

They will have to be rejected at some point if we ever want to see the emergence of a genuinely leftist mass party outside of Quebec with Québec solidaire.

Given its nature and composition the Liberal Party should not be considered as an electoral alternative to the right, "strategic" or otherwise, in virtually any context and certainly not in this one. No Liberal anywhere in the province deserves a vote on Thursday.

With the dynamic of this election having led to the collapse of Liberal support in much of Ontario they are no longer seen by basically anyone as the strategic bourgeois 'progressive' option to stop a Conservative victory. Even the Toronto Star has endorsed the NDP as they did the federal NDP under similar conditions in 2011.

It is an easy enough transition for them to make as there is little of fundamental significance that separates the two parties anymore when it comes to their programs.

Now it is the New Democrats and their partisans who get to push the call for a strategic vote and to denounce in apocalyptic terms anyone who resists it. I hope the irony of this is not lost on people given that New Democrat partisans in Ontario, federally and in some other provinces have historically rejected such calls outright as generally they would have meant the obliteration of the NDP.

It is not even in the short-term interest of the left to embrace strategic voting calls as such. Every election they are made, every election the alternative is framed as catastrophic, etc. If the calls to vote for Trudeau to stop Harper or to vote for Wynne to stop Hudak were rejected by leftists there is no inherent reason to embrace the call to vote Horwath to stop Ford other than a lingering nostalgia for when the NDP was actually, at least to a degree, a socialist party.

Although meant for a different, American context one of the issues with calls for strategic voting is summed up well by this quote from a recent article in Liberation:

Unfortunately, the “lesser of two evils” argument ends up contributing to the very problem that it aims to address. By channeling people into a political system that is by its very construction anti-democratic, this argument corrodes any effort to build a powerful, militant people’s movement.

While many people and activists who I respect have said that they feel this incarnation of the Horwath led ONDP is somehow profoundly different from the previous ones, I do not at all share this analysis.

I have written at greater length as to why in articles such as Rehabilitating Andrea Horwath's leadership and the danger of a short political memory and Vote NDP to stop Ford...but don't try to sell it as supporting a leftist agenda. The ONDP yet again is acting as a brake on the aspirations of leftists and has even led many to laud and embrace terribly short-sighted proposals such as the ONDP's childcare and dental care plans that dangerously reject what was once a bedrock left principle of universality. Introducing means-tested social programs with varying payment levels is a repudiation of even social democratic principle and once entrenched such programs are very difficult to make universal while very easy to make less inclusive.

Having said that, there are no easy answers as a Ford victory would be terrible on any number of levels with very real, negative consequences for people that are not at all abstract. Neither are the consequences of continuing to support opportunistic 'progressive' parties that often end up sowing disillusion and 'austerity with a human face' abstract.

Which is why my final advice for this election remains:

Vote NDP to stop Ford if that makes sense for you in whatever community you are in.
But don't try to pretend this is a vote for anything other than a liberal platform from a party that will govern in exactly the way such a platform implies.

Bogus versus real 'scandals', the difficult road to an NDP majority and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Three

With eight days to go until election day the polls, on balance, show a statistical dead heat between the Conservatives and the NDP in Ontario. Wynne's Liberal government seems all but certain to lose the June 7 vote -- in fact, they face the very real prospect of decimation -- while the NDP appears to have held their position in the minds of voters as the progressive alternative to the dangerous Ford agenda.

With the NDP in this position -- and even ahead of the Conservatives in some surveys -- various media outlets have hurled a series of micro-"scandals" their way that, for the most part, are totally absurd and reek of desperation.

Of greater concern for those who want to see Ford lose, though, is that if the NDP and Conservatives are really neck-and-neck, both with levels of support in the high 30s, the path to a Ford majority is far clearer and more likely than the path to a Horwath one.

In this, the third of our weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

Should Horwath be walking away with this?

While the ONDP has risen rather dramatically in the polls since the writ dropped, there is ample evidence that had they been running on a platform that was more inspiring and was not simply a tiny smidgen to the "left" of the Liberal one they could very well be walking away with this election right now.

For example, as Supriya Dwivedi noted on Global: 

A new poll by Ipsos conducted exclusively for Global News has found that a significant number of NDP voters, 46 per cent, are voting for the NDP in order to keep another party out of power. In other words, the NDP is benefitting from the unpopularity of the other two options, and seeming like the least bad option.

We have noted this dynamic at play in the past as well.

The difficult path to an NDP victory

Some polls have the NDP slightly ahead, while others have them slightly behind the Conservatives. Another poll has the NDP more significantly ahead. For reasons that will become clear shortly, folks wanting to see Ford stopped had best hope that this last one is the closest to the truth.

According to the CBC's poll tracker the NDP sits at 36.2% while the Conservatives are at 35.7%. Yet despite this the CBC projects a 70% likelihood of a Ford majority if these numbers are accurate.

Why?

Éric Grenier's excellent article, What the 1990 election can - and can't - tell us about the Ontario NDP's chances today, which is worth reading in full, outlines this very well:

Despite the relatively close margin between the PCs and the NDP in the polls, the Poll Tracker still heavily favours the PCs to win a majority government.
This is because the PC vote is more efficient — the party has a better base of support and is ahead in the Greater Toronto Area, where nearly half the seats in the province are located.
The projections suggest that for the New Democrats to win even a slim majority, they may need a lead of three to five points over the PCs provincewide.
In 1990, however, the New Democrats won a comfortable majority — nearly 40 seats ahead of Peterson's Liberals — despite beating the Liberals in the popular vote by only five per cent.
One of the factors contributing to the NDP's 1990 majority win (something even Rae at the time didn't see coming) was the presence of two small right-wing parties.
The Family Coalition and the Confederation of Regions (COR) parties combined for nearly five per cent of the vote provincewide in 1990. In 11 ridings, the combined vote of the Family Coalition and the COR was greater than the margin between the losing PC and winning NDP candidates.
Had enough of these votes gone to the PCs instead, the NDP would have fallen just short of a majority. The split on the right made the NDP's vote more efficient than it otherwise would have been.
Though there are several smaller right-of-centre parties running in this election, none are expected to have the same kind of impact. If they did, the NDP's chances of winning a majority government in 2018 would be better.

The disturbing reality is that Ford could win a substantial majority with a vote as low as 35-37% while the ONDP is very unlikely to.

Ludicrous NDP "scandals" while the Conservatives face real ones

Various right-wing media outlets across the province, most notably the Toronto Sun, have been seeming to try to derail the NDP's momentum with a variety of absurd micro-"scandals" that are so silly they reek of desperation.

Examples include digging up an allegedly shared meme on Facebook implying that an NDP candidate is sympathetic to Nazism when she very clearly is not, and finding a photo of an NDP candidate holding a sign at a rally a decade ago that read "Fuck the Police" -- a sentiment which many people, especially in marginalized and racialized communities have had every reason to express over the years, though Horwath and her candidate, of course, disavowed it. 

These alleged "gotcha" moments are isolated and either from many years ago or taken out of context and mean quite a bit less than, say, The Ford family’s history with drug dealing as outlined in a Globe and Mail expose in 2013 or a Conservative candidate saying "I think if someone wants to open a business and only hire people of one race...I think they should have that right" as recently as 2015.

Meanwhile, right now during the election an "Ontario PC Candidate Shares Theory Linking Schools and Hospitals to Secret ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy" while another "Carleton PC candidate says she doesn't believe climate change is man-made".

Further, of course, we saw the "Liberals claim Ford participated in 'bogus' membership sales, intimidated a PC nominee", which is a very serious allegation. This led to the farce of "Doug Ford dodges journalists before fleeing Brantford event through the back door".

I think to an objective observer it is perfectly clear which are the "scandals" actually worth paying attention to.

Buck a beer

You know a campaign is both very concerned and reaching low when:

The tweet and meme was met, rightly, with considerable derision.

Doug Ford releases detailed platform

Crickets.

Dumbest move of the election award

Memo to anyone, from any party, running anywhere, ever...this is something you should never do:

Liberal candidate crashes NDP Leader Andrea Horwath campaign event in Etobicoke

Further news/articles of interest about the campaign:

Letter from the Co-Chairs of the Danforth Jewish Circle, Multifaith Committee about NDP candidate Tasleem Raiz

This White Nationalist Says Doug Ford is Sending Him Anti-Immigrant ‘Dog Whistle’ Messages

Horwath announces three weeks of paid vacation for full-time workers

Ontario election path to victory runs through the 905

See also: Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

While not the total fiasco out of the gate that was Tim Hudak's rapid derailment of the Conservative campaign in 2014, the scent of scandal and promises and pledges that simply don't add up seem to be putting a dent in what appeared to be an insurmountable Ford lead.


The anti-Ford vote, however, is not coalescing around the Liberals and Wynne but rather around Andrea Horwath and the New Democrats, exposing the bankruptcy of the government's re-election strategy.

As the NDP rises though so too do the attacks on them that are being made from predictable angles aimed at weaknesses of the NDP's own making.

In this, the second of our weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

407 Scandal

There is a deep historical irony that it would be the 407 toll highway -- handed to the private sector for a relative song by Mike Harris in the 90s in one of the worst privatization deals in the history of the country -- that is causing the Conservatives to go off message and stumble just when they looked to be certain to form government again for the first time in 15 years.

Having based their campaign in no small part around the need to clean up alleged Liberal corruption, the dangers of doing so become apparent when scandal begins to hover over your own party and campaign as well.

In this case Ford and the Tories have come under scrutiny after a Brampton candidate was forced to resign due to the alleged inappropriate use of personal data gleaned from 407 users for political purposes. The question is how widespread this was and if other Conservative candidates used the data as well. Police and the province's privacy commissioner have launched investigations.

You can read more about it via these articles:

Police and privacy commission join investigation into Hwy. 407 customer data theft

PC Leader Doug Ford hammered over alleged data theft; police probe urged

Ford faces tough questions as NDP asks for probe into ex-PC candidate's alleged role in data breach

Ontario elections watchdog reviewing PC candidate campaigns

Doug Ford and other PC figures pictured with man at the centre of growing data-theft scandal

For Doug Ford math seems to be hard

When it comes to explaining how he plans to deal with the loss of billions of dollars in government revenues due to his proposed tax cuts of various kinds without slashing public sector jobs and social programs, Doug Ford simply does not have an answer.

Presumably Ford thought he could just coast along like his brother Rob did with pseudo-populist rhetorical nonsense about "gravy trains" and "efficiencies" but it seems Ontarians are paying a little more attention to reality than Torontonians did during the 2010 municipal election.

His so-called "middle class" tax cut -- which unsurprisingly appears to mostly benefit the wealthy -- will cost the province $2.6 billion.

His plans to cut gas taxes and scrap cap-and-trade will lead to the loss of at least $3.2 billion.

Then there is the corporate tax cut. That would see another $1.4 billion vanish. 

How is he going to make up for this lost revenue without a vicious austerity agenda? Who knows?

Ford, of course, has not been willing to seriously answer questions about this from day one. He began the campaign by acting like a defensive bully replying pathetically with “Very simple. You haven’t done it. I’ve done it. That’s the difference. Next question” to CBC reporter Robyn Bresnahan's totally legitimate question about how he could cut as much spending as he claims he can without cutting jobs.

He has been doing the smoke and mirrors deflection routine ever since.

It looks like it may have stopped working.

Related articles:

Doug Ford declines requests to explain his 'nonsense' $469 million estimate

For Ford fact and policy free is the way to go

NDP rises to new heights in polls

The NDP is quickly gaining on the Conservatives according to many recent polls. The CBC poll tracking data has them at 33.4% compared to the Tories at 38%. The Liberals remain mired in the doldrums at 23.1%.

One poll by Ipsos Reid and Global actually had the NDP one point ahead of the Conservatives with 37% support.

This allows the NDP to attempt to position themselves as the strategic, safe progressive alternative to the Conservatives, a strategy that is not without its risks as I touched upon last week.

But Horwath certainly looks to be benefiting from a series of possibly fatal self-inflicted wounds by her opponents and is perhaps becoming the default option for many who find they have nowhere else to go.

Not a bad place to be at this stage.

The public may simply be too tired of the Liberals to consider them, and with another party promising to deliver essentially the same programs -- in some cases in a more robust way, in others differing either slightly or slightly for the worse -- without the same faces and the history, it could be their time is up.

While I do not share his overall ideological perspective Adam Radwanski in the Globe and Mail had a pretty good take on why Horwath may be able fend off the attacks on her by her opponents in his piece:  Why the usual questions about the Ontario NDP’s competence are being set aside

Horwath's 'fiscal responsibility' nonsense comes back to haunt

Speaking of self-inflicted wounds, one that Horwath has brought upon herself is the recent questioning of the NDP's math and budgetary plans due to what was a $1.4 billion annual error in the party's platform.

That being the platform that the NDP and Horwath repeatedly have sought to portray as fully costed and fiscally responsible, displaying a long-held and terribly self-defeating desire by mildly social democratic parties to appear as sound and reliable managers of the bourgeois state.

When you propose a fairly milquetoast, liberal platform that is so similar to the actual Liberal platform that you need a combination of a terrible Conservative leader and a titanically unpopular Premier to get your chance, it is easy to get tripped up by such minutiae. Especially given that it is the NDP themselves who have elevated it to importance with their fetishistic obsession with such neo-liberal policy detail that always proves to be fiction anyway.

Fortunately for them the public could be ready at this particular moment in time to get behind a liberal policy agenda without the Liberals as stated above. If a shift like that is occurring, these voters will likely not care about the error, especially given that Ford throws fictional numbers around daily as well as the long Liberal history of outlandish spending scandals and debacles.

Dave McKee's speech from the Communist Party launch

Ontario's Communist Party leader Dave McKee gave a terrific speech that touched on a number of important points when they launched their campaign in Toronto May 12. I reported on that launch already, but the speech has now been posted and it is definitely worth a listen.




Further news/article of interest about the campaign:

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

Horwath’s NDP would ‘adjust’ Ontario cap and trade to fight climate-warming pollution

Ontario parties are ducking the issue of public auto insurance

Ontario NDP leader wouldn't introduce corner store sale of beer and wine

Ontario election campaign brings focus on nearly 2 million people living in poverty

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

The provincial election campaign in Ontario is now a week old and with only three weeks to go until election day the desire to "change" who is arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic appears to be strong enough that the tired Liberal regime's fate may well be sealed.

Momentum has swung, at least for now, to Andrea Horwath's New Democrats as the primary alternative to the looming Doug Ford catastrophe, though not so much due to any great enthusiasm on the part of Ontario voters but rather due to the paucity of choices.

In this, the first of what will be weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

Fully 74 per cent of voters wish they had a different choice

A poll taken as the writ dropped found profoundly deep voter dissatisfaction with the various mainstream "choices" on offer. Almost three-quarters of those questioned said they wished "there was another option other than Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, PC Leader Doug Ford and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath."

This same poll also found that while it was true that Horwath was the most "popular" leader (or perhaps least unpopular) this was not based on any great embrace of her leadership by the public:

Pollster Darrell Bricker said while Horwath has an advantage on the favourability front, it’s more “neutral” since the other two have fairly high negative favourability.
“Andrea Horwath comes up better because she’s less disagreeable, not because she’s so much more likeable,” Bricker explained.

I looked at what this poll meant and its broader implications in the piece: Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

The NDP surges 

The polls all seem to agree that the NDP is surging right out of the gate. With Kathleen Wynne remaining deeply unpopular -- out of all proportion to the actual popularity of the government's recent polices and budget going into the election -- Andrea Horwath and crew seem to be shaping up as the progressive alternative to Ford in the minds of voters.

The CBC poll tracker shows the NDP up by around 3.5 points to 30.6% while the Liberals are down by 1.2% to 23.7%.

Upward trends very early in a campaign can be a double-edged sword as they leave plenty of time for opponents and the natural evolution of events to bring these numbers back down. There are countless examples of opposition parties going into elections much stronger than they finished them, the Tom Mulcair led federal NDP in 2014 being a case in point.

But there at least two reasons that NDP partisans can hope that the trend in this case may have staying power.

The first is the aforementioned general dislike for Wynne and the sense that her government should be sent packing. There comes a point -- as happened with the Rae government in 1995 -- where, as Globe and Mail analyst Adam Radwanski put it "If voters aren’t willing to buy what Wynne’s Liberals are selling, none of their advantages matter."  He further noted, when referring to Wynne's slick new ads "All the production values in the world can only go so far if voters just don’t want to hear from you any more."

How low could Wynne and the Liberals drop in the polls? Very low indeed. And a great deal more of their vote is likely to go to the NDP than the Conservatives.

Which brings us to the second reason for optimism among New Democrats, which is that it is rather easy to make the transition between them for centrists and mild progressives in this context as there so little that separates the two parties ideologically.

It is akin to dropping Coke in favour of Coke Zero.

While in most cases this would hurt the NDP -- and has time and again including in Ontario in the 2014 election -- here it allows them to transition to being a new and nonthreatening liberal party for voters scared of Ford but tired of Wynne's baggage.

As Thomas Walkom put it in the Star "Experts can parse the differences between the Liberal and NDP child care or pharmacare promises. But I suspect most voters see the two party platforms as near-identical."

Various NDP partisans may have deluded themselves otherwise, but I suspect Walkom is right.

Of course, the other side to that is that should Wynne somehow regain her footing or numbers start to trend back her way, the transition back to the Liberals from the NDP would be just as effortless.

Either way, with the Conservatives remaining steady at above 40% support the two parties are right now vying for who would be the official opposition to a massive Ford majority unless they can bring that support level down.

Doug Ford says he prefers the "market" to rent control

If you thought the housing market with soaring rents and low availability could not possibly get worse for tenants in Toronto, you would be wrong.

If Doug Ford gets elected they will get much worse.


Hydro board raises

Despite the fact that they only have their positions thanks to Wynne's short-sighted and deeply unpopular decision to privatize the bulk of Hydro One, the dim bulbs running the show there seem determined to tank her government.

How else to interpret the news that in the lead-up to an election where hydro rates are a central issue the part-time members of the utility's board of directors gave themselves a big raise?

Article: Hydro One's part-time board members gave themselves $25K raises

Of course, while Doug Ford pontificates about replacing these clueless rich people with his own group of clueless rich people, Andrea Horwath is correct in saying that the only long-term solution to hydro issues in the province is to bring Hydro One back into public hands.

That it will then be run in a fundamentally more democratic or egalitarian way under an NDP government, however, seems unlikely to say the least.

Green Party

The Green Party launched its campaign in Toronto running on a fairly progressive platform that you can read on their website. The prospects that there is room for a third mildly progressive party to gain traction in an election like this one would appear bleak.

What is clear though is that the media and the other parties are doing their best to make sure they remain that way with the Greens being shut out from the debates.

Party leader Mike Schreiner confidently predicted "We are going to make history and we are going to elect Ontario's first Green MPPs". Regardless of whether or not that would be a good thing, at this point it would not seem to be in the cards.

Two major parties run candidate slates that are over 50% women 

In an historic development two of the major parties running candidates province wide have slates that are comprised of over 50% women.  

The NDP lead the pack at 56% while the Greens followed closely at 52%.

Communist Party launch

While we are in an election where "change", as Ontario Communist Party leader Dave McKee put it,  really amounts to putting a new "jockey on the same old horse", the Communists launched their campaign on a platform that offers a genuine, unequivocally anti-capitalist vision.

I attended their campaign launch in Toronto and you can read about it at: Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism"

Further news/articles of interest about the campaign:

Another debate, another Doug Ford comment about Kathleen Wynne's smile

Avalanche of detail overwhelms Kathleen Wynne's message

No longer polling third, Horwath and the NDP are fending off attacks from both sides

NDP's Horwath has 'no interest' in coalition with Liberals

See also: Doug Ford wants you to subsidize the poverty wages of corporations