Janice MacKinnon's new role in Alberta says a lot about the NDP's legacy of "fiscal responsibility". None of it good.

Janice MacKinnon is back. MacKinnon, who was the NDP's Finance Minister in Saskatchewan in the early 1990s, is now heading up a panel for the hard right government of Jason Kenney in Alberta that will provide him with advice on how to get the province out of its supposed “critical fiscal situation”.

This should cause great alarm in Alberta to anyone concerned about what is likely to be severe austerity budgets in the coming years.

MacKinnon, after all, presided over vicious and extreme cutbacks in 1993 in her home province. The Saskatchewan NDP government of Roy Romanow passed a budget that "closed 52 rural hospitals, ended the children’s dental plan and universal prescription drug program, and slashed funding to schools, hospitals, universities and local governments by anywhere from five to 13 per cent." Meanwhile "some business sectors like manufacturing and processing received tax reductions".

This budget was a dream for corporate interests. It emboldened right-wing narratives both in the province and across the country. After all conservatives and liberals could say that even the NDP had accepted that spending was "out of control" and that there was nothing to do but launch attacks on programs and people.

Now Kenney is using MacKinnon's history as a New Democrat to provide him some ideological cover and to allow him to claim that any advice for nasty cutbacks that the panel provides will somehow be "non-partisan".

Of course, as we have looked at before, the Notley Alberta NDP government did itself no favours in buying into neo-liberal narratives around "fiscal responsibility" and its total capitulation to the oil industry and sector and its demands.

But MacKinnon -- who has worked on gigs like this previously for Stephen Harper and the reactionary Pallister government in Manitoba -- takes this to a whole different NDP level.

So the next time that NDP apologists and and partisans point with pride to how the NDP is allegedly the most "fiscally responsible" party when in power -- falsely claiming this is a legacy that flows from Tommy Douglas -- you might want to remind them that it is a legacy that is actually much closer in time to MacKinnon and extreme austerity.

And that is nothing to be proud of.

What's Left? -- A CBC look at the NDP and the Waffle in 1969

This CBC documentary from 50 years ago at the dawn of the Waffle -- What's Left?  -- has been posted on You Tube and is a remarkable look back at the NDP of the time. Featuring figures like Tommy Douglas, Ed Broadbent, Stephen Lewis, Cy Gonick and Waffle leaders Mel Watkins, James Laxer and Krista Maeots, it takes us to an historic era and moment in Canada's social democratic and socialist movement.




(Original You Tube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRzNoaEw3xM&feature=share )

Tommy Douglas was never about "fiscal responsibility"

Tommy Douglas was not about "fiscal responsibility" and it is the NDP that is responsible for framing him that way. 

Now we see why that was a stupid idea.

For an excellent analysis of why the idea that Douglas was fixated on "fiscal responsibility" is simply false see Fraser Needham's 2015 piece The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

Among other things Needham notes: 

Douglas and Blakeney sought to make transformative changes to the capitalistic economy in order to level the playing field, bring stability to the Saskatchewan economy and finance social programs. Balanced budgets happened to be part of the process but were not the main goal in and of themselves. Neither Douglas nor Blakeney would ever have advocated balancing a budget regardless of the economic circumstances.
Balancing a budget regardless of the economic fallout is a more recent and right wing mantra. It falls into the belief that government should never intervene in the economy and government finances should be operated like an accounting ledger – surpluses should always be spent and deficits never incurred.

United Action Can Defeat War Measures Act - Communist Party of Canada 1970

Vintage Leftist Leaflet Project

See the end of this post for details on the project.

Leaflet: United Action Can Defeat War Measures Act - Communist Party of Canada 1970 

On October 16, 1970 the federal Trudeau government used the pretext of two kidnappings by the extremist Quebec nationalist group the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) (which supposedly constituted an "apprehended insurrection") to introduce the War Measures Act suspending the habeas corpus rights of Canadians and allowing police wide latitude to arrest people without the laying of charges. This was one of the most grotesque anti-democratic actions in modern Canadian history and was an enormous overreaction to the activities of fringe elements.

As Tommy Douglas said at the time, "The government, I submit, is using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut."

With the War Measures Act in place the Trudeau government rounded up hundreds of entirely innocent nationalist and leftist activists in Quebec, sought to deal a crippling blow to the emergent Parti Québécois and to interfere in the upcoming Montreal municipal elections.

While the introduction of the Act was very popular in the immediate climate of manufactured hysteria, there were a number of courageous Canadians (remembering that the Act allowed the arrest of anyone without the need of even a pretext of having actually committed a criminal act) who stood against it including 16 NDP MPs, many leftist activists across the country and much of the country's labour movement. They have been vindicated by history.

This circular and statement was released and distributed by the Communist Party of Canada in the days just after the War Measures Act was introduced. It outlines the groups resisting the act, the terrible and frightening consequences of it, as well as what the real targets and motives of the act were.

(Click on scans to enlarge)

When The Left Chapter began part of what I wanted to do on the blog was to show and highlight vintage public leftist election/political leaflets and booklets. While many of these have been offered with commentary to date, a very large collection of hundreds of them from several different sources remains and to preserve these often quite rare documents we will be posting them on a regular (almost daily) basis now often without or with minimal commentary so that people may have access to them as quickly as possible as an historical resource. 

While these will all be leaflets from a variety of different leftist viewpoints and countries, they are being posted as an historical/study resource and the views or opinions expressed in them do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog or blogger.

All of these posts (as well as posts made to date) will be listed on the page: Vintage Communist/Socialist Leaflets  (which is still being updated with past posts).

If you have any public, vintage leaflets or booklets you would like to contribute to this project please contact us via theleftchapter@outlook.com

Mouseland a Fable by Tommy Douglas -- The Comic

The great Tommy Douglas Canadian socialist parable 'Mouseland' told in comic format, 1979.

(Click on images to enlarge)

 

Source: Ontario Labour May / June 1979, by the Canadian Region of the UAW

See also: The True Triumph of Working People Comes Only With Socialism! - Communist Comics

Also, see more Vintage Communist and Socialist Leaflets on our vintage leaflet project page. 

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.

Not only did the Liberals win a majority, the party won every single seat in Atlantic Canada and the most seats in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. The Liberals also grabbed both seats in the Yukon and North West Territories and the party even picked up four new seats in Alberta.

In spite of coming from behind and ending close to a decade of Conservative government rule in Ottawa, no one is much surprised at the convincing Liberal victory. Unless, of course, you are NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, his inner circle, or a diehard NDP partisan.

Going into this campaign, everyone knew Stephen Harper and the Conservatives would be in tight to win a fourth mandate. The Harper government was lucky enough to win two minority governments, let alone a majority government, and time was running out on the most right wing government in Canadian history. Stephen Harper had managed to stay in government by abusing the powers of office, seeking to divide Canadians on various wedge issues to his advantage and moving about 30 per cent of the electorate over to his neoconservative values.

Nevertheless, the other 70 per cent of the electorate had become tired of the Conservatives partisan games, racism, divisiveness, secretiveness, lies and war mongering. In short, there was a sizeable anti-Harper coalition in the electorate when the campaign began and it would be looking to place its vote with either the Liberals or NDP.

And, when the campaign began, the NDP had a slight lead in the polls over the other two parties for a couple of reasons.

Thomas Mulcair had performed well in the House of Commons hammering the Harper government on such issues as the Mike Duffy Senate scandal. In contrast, Justin Trudeau was often not in the House and when he was the Liberal Leader was ineffective.

The NDP also took a very principled stand against the Harper government’s flawed and highly undemocratic Bill C-51 anti-terrorism legislation while for some strange reason Trudeau decided to support it.

The new Liberal Leader had made other gaffes too, such as deciding one day that all Liberal appointed senators would from here on in be non-partisan and independent. No one believed this and particularly not the Liberal appointed senators. At other times, Trudeau looked shaky and nervous with the media.

Maybe he was “just not ready” after all.

At the beginning of this campaign the NDP had an opportunity to win the election and form its first federal government. But that’s all it was, an opportunity, not a sure thing.

However, it is clear that Mulcair and his inner circle viewed winning the election as a sure thing as long as the NDP didn’t commit any major gaffes on the campaign trail. So the strategy was to play it safe and conduct a front runner campaign, limit media access, say as little as possible, run on a center-right platform so as not to “scare” anyone and take it for granted their base would support the party no matter what. Over the course of the eleven-week election campaign, voters would naturally see how much more prime ministerial Tom Mulcair was than Justin Trudeau and the anti-Harper coalition would automatically unite behind the NDP on election day pushing the party through to victory.

And this is precisely how Mulcair and company proceeded to blow the best chance the Federal NDP has ever had to form government.

If the NDP were going to have a chance at winning the election, the party needed to be bold not cautious, to stake out its ground on issues of historical advantage such as innovative social programming and to convince voters they would be a good government. Running the front-runner campaign always becomes the losing campaign because it allows your opponents to paint you to their benefit and makes voters suspicious that you are trying to hide something by being evasive.

All votes must be earned and not taken for granted. Assuming that your base is not fluid and will always stick behind you is also a mistake. These are the types of bad decisions that happen when arrogance rules the day and there was no shortage of hubris in the 2015 NDP election strategy.

From day one, the NDP ran a poor campaign.

This started with Mulcair refusing to take any media questions at the NDP campaign launch. Why would the party do this? Mulcair’s handlers were clearly taking a page out of the Harper playbook of limiting media access. Yet Harper is the guy you are trying to beat and that everyone is tired of. Why emulate the Conservatives? In particular, reporters find it extremely annoying when a party is trying to act like it has already won the election when it hasn’t. It is the height of arrogance.

The NDP continued to limit media access throughout the campaign. Media scrums were often cut short and sometimes Mulcair didn’t take any questions at all. Then it came out that the NDP Leader dodged Globe and Mail reporter Jeffrey Simpson for as many as eight weeks for a profile piece he was trying to do. In the end, Simpson got so frustrated that he wrote the piece without interviewing Mulcair.

It has since come out that the NDP tried to contact Simpson at the last minute to set up an interview and he refused saying it was too close to deadline and the story was done. Ethically, Simpson should have conducted the interview and added Mulcair’s comments into the story. However, there is no doubt he was thoroughly annoyed at these arrogant twits around Mulcair dodging him for two months and had had enough. The point is, why was the NDP, of all times, going out of its way to alienate reporters in the middle of an election campaign? Remember, respect and trust has to be earned.

The second major mistake the NDP campaign made was choosing to work against the party leader’s attributes and not with them. Thomas Mulcair is an attack dog politician. This is who he is and the type of politician he has been all his life. It is what has brought him success. However, because the NDP wizards that spend 90 per cent of their time on the Hill heard that a few reporters in the press gallery found Mulcair a bit too acerbic when he dealt with the media, all of a sudden “Angry Tom” had to go.

Hence the bearded teddy bear appeared on the campaign trail flashing wooden and fake smiles at the cameras every opportunity he got. The phoniness of it all was painful to watch and you actually felt sorry for Mulcair that his handlers were forcing him to keep up this idiocy. The media saw through it and voters did too. The only people who didn’t see through it were his handlers because they kept getting him to do it.

The third and most fatal mistake the Mulcair team made in the campaign was the “we will balance every single budget, come hell or high water, boom time or recession” pledge. Obviously the Liberal strategists had been doing some research on the issue of balanced budgets and were more aware of the current reality -- as opposed to the dunderheads around the NDP leader.

First, Canada has a very healthy debt to GDP ratio so selling bonds at reasonable interest rates is not a problem. This, of course, was not the case in the early 1990’s. Second, world interest rates are at record lows so running reasonable deficits is not costly or harmful to the long-term health of the economy. Third, Canada has very good economic growth forecasts. Fourth, someone may have wanted to remind the NDP that the previous Conservative government had just run seven consecutive deficits and no one batted an eye.

The Liberal campaign strategists knew all of this very well and also knew the economy needed some stimulus and infrastructure investment. Hence, they pledged to run a few deficits if elected to fund an infrastructure program before balancing the budget by the end of the first term.

At this point, in late August, the NDP campaign strategists should have taken a deep breath and seriously thought about how they would respond to the Liberal's deficit pledge. The most prudent response would have been to emphasize that the two most important things the party wanted to do was bring in an affordable childcare program and a universal pharmacare program. If this meant running a few deficits, so be it. At the same time, even if the NDP ran a few deficits, the party could have said it was confident it could balance the budget by the end of the term while keeping these as the key priorities.

However, as we all know, this is not what happened. In the NDP’s obsession to outflank the Liberals on the right, the party’s response to the Liberal deficit pledge was, again, that it would balance each and every budget if elected to office. And there is no doubt Mulcair’s team made this pledge before they had costed the platform.

So from here on in, Mulcair struggled to answer how he would balance budgets without significantly raising taxes or scrapping the party’s social program pledges. And, not surprisingly, he never really had an answer.

And soon key social programs like affordable childcare and universal pharmacare began to fall by the way side. If it was the difference between balancing the budget or not, these social programs would not happen until the end of the first term. Or maybe the end of the second term. Or maybe not at all.

Mulcair and the NDP strategists began doing lots of whining about how Tommy Douglas balanced all budgets when he was Saskatchewan premier and they were just following his lead. The only thing they forgot to mention is that Tommy Douglas never ran a campaign with the key focus being balancing budgets.

If he had, the CCF would have never been elected in Saskatchewan. Douglas won elections by promising to bring in public auto insurance, rural electrification, a trade union act, a human rights act, preventing farm foreclosures and many other social programs – all of which the CCF delivered on in short order. Sure, Medicare was not implemented until 1962 but this was after a lot of other things had already been accomplished.

The key point is Mulcair’s team forgot the wise and important adage that political parties need to fight campaigns on their own ground in order to be successful. The NDP’s ground is innovative social programming. This is the area where the party has thrived and gained the respect of Canadians. Fiscal prudence is the ground of the Conservatives and Liberals but never the NDP.

Provincial NDP governments have been very good at managing finances but nobody cares and the party will never get credit for it. Just like the Conservatives will never get credit for innovations in Medicare. This is not their ground; it is the NDP’s ground.

Once the NDP was fighting the campaign on fiscal prudence and balancing budgets, they were losing and the party never recovered. It was the turning point of the campaign and why the party slid so badly in the polls in Ontario after the pledge.

After this, the media and most of the public stopped taking Mulcair’s NDP seriously. They were no longer credible. And the anti-Harper coalition began to coalesce around Trudeau and the Liberals who were running a very solid retail campaign. From here on in it was a two party fight between the Liberals and the Conservatives and the NDP was assured third place. In other words, Mulcair was dead in the water by the end of August and the polls showed this as the Liberals continued to gain momentum.

Liberal momentum continued to grow in all provinces before really taking effect in the last two weeks of the campaign as the anti-Harper coalition stampeded over to the party. Knowing they were in trouble and that efforts to make the ballot question about the Harper government’s good management of the economy (false, of course) had failed, in a last and desperate move to hold on to power the Conservatives tried to shift the election to divisive issues such the niqab, reluctance to take in Syrian refugees and the "barbaric practices" tip line.

None of this had any effect on the NDP campaign. The NDP was already out of it and all but irrelevant. What it did do is shore up some of Harper’s base but at the same time it ensured even more voters were going to come out and vote Liberal to oust the government.

There are a good number of NDP apologists who fail to realize all the mistakes the party made in the campaign prior to when niqab became an issue and who say Mulcair’s principled stand on the issue was why the party lost so many seats in Quebec.

This is utter nonsense. Those voters for whom the niqab was a serious issue voted for both the Bloc Quebecois and Conservatives and both parties saw some very minor gains. However, the real story in Quebec, as in the rest of the country, was the tremendous growth of the Liberals. As in all other parts of the country, by late September, the anti-Harper coalition in Quebec had lined up solidly behind the Liberals and abandoned the NDP.

They did this in spite of past misgivings about the Trudeau name and the Liberal sponsorship scandal. The key issue in Quebec, as most other parts of the country, was ousting Harper and voters in this province were no different than those in other provinces in realizing the NDP was “just not ready.” And for NDP apologists to say the sole reason the NDP lost seats in Quebec was because of Mulcair’s stance on the niqab is a joke. In particular because Trudeau came out harder against the Harper government on the niqab than did Mulcair.

We are now closing in on a week since the Liberal election victory and not surprisingly the other parties are already moving on. Stephen Harper has stepped down as Conservative leader and the party is making plans to choose an interim leader and then organize a leadership convention. A number of Conservative MPs, past and present, are speaking frankly that the party had become too negative under Harper and it needs to change if the Conservatives are to expand their base. Gilles Duceppe has also stepped down as Bloc Quebecois Leader as this party looks to rebuild, if that is even possible. It is business as usual in the Green Party and don’t expect much to change there as Elizabeth May is more than happy to have the party be largely irrelevant as long as she continues to get some media attention.

However, talking about the main parties, it is only in the NDP where there is no indication of a change in course. As was the case during the campaign, those in the inner circle continue to blame everyone else for the party’s failures.

When the NDP campaign began to crumble, they first blamed the mainstream media for giving overly favourable coverage to Trudeau. When each and every polling company showed big time momentum for the Liberals compared to an epic slide for the NDP, they screamed all the pollsters were wrong and the NDP was much stronger than indicated.

And, when the NDP got solidly thumped on election day, the partisans now blame the voters for being naive and being duped by the Liberals as some sort of alternative to the Conservatives when the NDP is the only “real” alternative. This again is, of course, nonsense as the NDP very happily ran a campaign to the right of the Liberals and the Justin Trudeau Liberals are very different from the Stephen Harper Conservatives.

For those in the NDP, the bottom line is never to look in the mirror even in times of total failure.

And perhaps what is most alarming is that Thomas Mulcair is now musing about staying on as party leader for an indefinite period of time. Why? Because his superior oratory skills in Parliament are supposedly needed to hold the new Liberal government to account. The same skills that gained the NDP absolutely zero on the campaign trail. Does anyone really believe that none of the remaining MPs could step in and perform the role of a third party leader on an interim basis?

The NDP just ran one of the most disastrous campaigns in Canadian history. Dropping from first to third in polling and shedding 51 seats in the process. And, to those leading the party, it is as if none of it ever happened.

If Mulcair and his cronies won’t step down, the caucus should show them the door. But there are no indications at present that this will happen either. This likely says a lot about the weakness of current NDP elected representatives.

In either the Conservatives or Liberals, such incompetence, ineptitude and failure would not be tolerated. But not in the NDP, where delusion always seems to rule the day.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: Doubling down on disaster

See also: Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to

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The 2015 Federal Election on The Left Chapter in review -- A round-up

During the course of this unusually long federal election campaign The Left Chapter saw 34 posts that were directly related to it.

These ranged from a look at the Liberal's "unicorn and fairy dust" fiscal plan, to the dangerous emergence of dog-whistle, racist politics, to views on why not voting is not the unconscionable option so many present it as.

But, when it came to what Left Chapter readers read the most, all of the top posts were related to the NDP and the, to us, mystifying campaign they ran.

As we head into the last weekend before the vote, here are the top five directly election related posts, in terms of hits, on The Left Chapter since the writ dropped:

1) 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! 

2) 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!

3) Morgan Wheeldon, Israel and the triumph of neo-conservative dogma

It would seem that, as with climate change, any serious discussion or criticism of Israel is now essentially forbidden in mainstream politics in Canada -- including within the NDP.

On the heels of backtracking on a perfectly reasonable and, in fact, scientifically factual comment made by star candidate Linda McQuaig about the oilsands, the NDP has now, quite literally, erased the candidacy of Morgan Wheeldon in  Nova Scotia over comments he made critical of Israel's attacks on the Palestinians.

Read More! 

4) Mulcair doubles-down on the NDP's right shift by defending Thatcherism

This week is the week where I think it can officially be said that the NDP leadership "jumped the shark" from any pretense at ties with its roots as a social democratic labour party to a straight-up and very open embrace of Blairite centrism and neo-liberal "progressiveism.

Read More!

5) The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

By Fraser Needham

The 2015 Canadian federal election took another strange turn this week.


NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair committed that his first budget as prime minister would be a balanced one. This seems somewhat strange as Canada appears to be headed into a recession and if the current Conservative government has struggled to maintain services in recent years without running deficits, in what have been stronger economic times, the only way a new government could balance the budget in a weaker economy would be through substantial cuts. The minor revenues gained by an NDP government canceling income splitting for high-income earners and a modest corporate tax increase would not be enough to maintain current spending levels in an economic downturn, let alone meet other campaign commitments such as a national childcare plan.

Read More!

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Raising Monuments -- How Corbyn may yet turn the tide

by A.M.

What is it that they say about an old dog?

Growing up in the context of neo-liberalism, I have sadly become accustomed to the quiet, unspoken despair that is its calling card. The menial, insultingly low-paying work. The slashing and burning of public services and spaces. The frequent and fruitless attempts to secure a better future for one's self by pushing others down. We have all been forced into these soul-destroying roles, only to watch as schools, hospitals and libraries are destroyed at the behest of private interests. It is not every day, then, that I find myself energized and hopeful for the future – in a real way; a tangible way.

By now, you’ve likely read about Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory in the British Labour Party’s leadership race. In the space of three months, the socialist candidate went from 100-to-1 odds to lead the party that was once at the helm of some of the greatest social programs in history – nationalized railways and electrical grids, the NHS, and so on. Labour has (or had) long since abandoned any sort of meaningful social goals, instead choosing to kowtow to the neo-liberal consensus that still grips much of the world. Corbyn cuts a figure not unlike that of Bernie Sanders. Both are older, gruff political outsiders. Both are outspoken (albeit greatly imperfect, especially in the case of Sanders) in the cause of justice for the most marginalized among us. And both have surged to unprecedented success in their respective nations. Corbyn, however, has won a real, meaningful victory in his assumption of the Labour leadership.

And what is that victory? First, and most obviously, we can say with certainty that “socialism” is not the dirty, unspeakable idea that so many Sunday-morning talking heads assume it to be. Americans, Brits and Canadians alike; all are relatively well-acquainted with and friendly to the idea and practice of socialism. Corbyn has put to rest, beyond any reasonable doubt, that human beings naturally crave austerity, racism, destruction of the commons, and so on. He has put the lie to the “common sense” doctrine of competition, marketization and institutionalized selfishness.

Corbyn has also presented some very concrete and clear proposals for building the new society. He has pledged to work towards the re-nationalization of railways, electrical grids and the NHS. He has spoken of opening the UK’s doors to refugees, from Syria and around the world. He has even talked – the horror! - of consulting women’s groups on instituting female-only trains on public transit. The most striking part of so much of Corrbyn’s so-called “radical leftism” (and he is radical, at least as compared to mainstream British politicians) is that it is all so utterly rational, and quite frankly, a little obvious. Who in their right mind, outside of the political establishment, doesn’t want to abolish tuition fees; house and the feed the poor; protect the oldest and youngest among us?

It would seem that Corbyn represents a very obvious and unmistakeable break with the past – in the Labour party, British politics generally and, perhaps, political narratives the world over.

What might this mean in the Canadian context? As I write this, I am masochistically re-watching a video of NDP leader Tom Mulcair praising Margaret Thatcher. It is sad, and frankly a little Twilight Zone-esque, when the leader of what was once Canada’s rough equivalent to the British Labour Party – a proud and principled party, the ”conscience of Parliament,” as it were – proudly affirms his support for the most successful and vicious right-wing politician in history. And at a time when her home country, Britain, is finally in the process of purging her legacy!

Strange times, indeed.

As a Canadian socialist, I am often consumed with thoughts of the old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF, with its corny fight song and comics, which ran the single most successful socialist government in North American history. The CCF, which rejected the politics of inertia, refusing to accept what was then a very racist and almost insurmountably oppressive time for working Canadians. The CCF, which kept the dream of universal healthcare alive for three decades, finally achieving the passage of the Canada Health Act. The CCF with its pledge to eliminate capitalism and establish a truly co-operative society.

Not known for biting his tongue, Tommy Douglas remarked of the House of Commons, “So this is Parliament? Pardon me, I thought this was a kindergarten!” Though he was utilizing his typical Prairie humour, his point was deadly serious. As the world burns, the purveyors of power sit on their hands. They do nothing and scream about how “nothing could be done.” The most powerful among us, more clearly than ever, are not on our side. While I am not one to worship the powerful (even Tommy Douglas), I cannot help but see a little of the so-called “Prairie Giant” in the new Labour leader.

At the very least, perhaps his victory can inspire us to build new monuments. A better world is just around the corner, comrades and friends. It won’t be easy, and it will not happen overnight. The weapons of the greatest armies; the money of the wealthiest citizens; the machinery of state and media – it will be arrayed against us, as it always has. But perhaps we can find a better way forward. Perhaps there is hope. Real, lasting, meaningful hope. It seems that the old dogs might be the ones teaching us some new tricks!

Let’s get to work.

A.M. is a writer in Toronto. 

See also: As "Third Way" politics suffers a huge defeat in the UK, in Canada it has now triumphed

See also: It appears the NDP strategists are stuck in the 90’s – again

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As "Third Way" politics suffers a huge defeat in the UK, in Canada it has now triumphed

"Inequality isn't natural. Poverty isn't inevitable. Things can - and will - change." - Jeremy Corbyn

In a stunning rebuke to and repudiation of a generation of the Labour Party's leadership and its "Third Way" strategy by the party's membership, unrepentant socialist and radical Jeremy Corbyn has won the top job with a rather convincing 59% of the vote.

In the end his campaign, which at first was widely written off as a sideshow, has swept to victory and changed the political game in the United Kingdom totally.

As Adam Bienkov put it today:

As a result the Labour party is now irrevocably changed. It is no exaggeration to describe today's outcome as a revolution. The era of Blair and Brown and their followers is now well and truly over. New Labour is not just dead, but cremated and blown before the wind.

Meanwhile across the pond here in Canada the "Third Way" strategy and approach has, on the other hand, triumphed entirely. We are witnessing an election where the Liberals are actually seeking to portray themselves as to the progressive "left" of the NDP, while the NDP seeks to frame itself as fiscally responsible with right-wing narratives about "balanced budgets" that they then ludicrously attempt to claim are somehow a continuation of the spirit and politics of Tommy Douglas!

Hence today on CBC Radio we are treated to the farcical political moment that sees former Saskatchewan NDP Finance Minister Janice Mackinnon trying to celebrate and justify the total bankruptcy of the NDP campaign while Bob Rae celebrates and defends the Liberal "left shift", such as it is.

The utter emptiness of the tone of this "debate" and the very fact that it can happen at all reveals the trouble at the heart of the social democratic narrative in Canada -- that being that it has ceased to exist as a narrative in this election, and on our political landscape, at all.

The differences ideologically between the two parties have lost any meaning in a context where a radio discussion like this is even possible.

The terrible irony is that New Democrats have to turn to simply saying that the Liberals "cannot be trusted" as opposed to contrasting their own more left policies, when seeking to continue to claim that they are the "sole progressive choice".

New Democrats are, in fact, 100% correct that Trudeau is making a cynical and calculated move by supposedly shifting left, that the Liberals will, when it works for them, campaign left and then govern right. that the Liberals are promising things again that they have promised before but then delivered austerity instead. and that Trudeau's stream of progressive announcements is a political tactic and seems disingenuous.

They are correct to note that historically the Liberals have tried any number of variations of this -- but the critical difference that they do not note is that the Liberals have never before been able to do this on a federal level when the NDP had almost entirely abandoned the left political terrain.

This is the reason the Liberal "left shift" may very well work despite all of these arguments. Mulcair has shifted the tone and much of the content of the NDP campaign with such overtly reactionary nonsense that they have literally opened up this space for the Liberals themselves. It is the NDP's Third Way thinking and strategy that has allowed Trudeau to reframe the election, to revive what was a failing campaign and to show such a recent and clear rise in the polls.

They have allowed Trudeau to seem to be bearing the anti-austerity torch as absurd as that is and despite the fact that the Liberals are an inherently Third Way party.

One could, of course, also point out that there is no reason to think that Mulcair, after running from the right, will suddenly govern as a leftist. In fact, all of the evidence of recent NDP provincial regimes run by centrist NDP leaders, like those of Nova Scotia and Manitoba, would indicate the opposite.

The present Liberal reversal of fortune may not last. as there is a long way to go, but if the NDP stays on this strategic course there is every reason to suspect it will.

More broadly, however, the past history of Liberal opportunism and cynicism does not in any way, shape or form justify the cynicism and opportunism of the NDP in the "here-and-now", whether that opportunism and cynicism ultimately works or not.

And calling out the Liberals as not really being on the "left" as if there is some great leftist platform on offer from the NDP is simply a transparent joke.

While it took the NDP many years to transition to a fully Blairite party in imitation of its sister party in the UK, one can only hope the road back to the left takes considerably less time than it did for Labour.

See also: It appears the NDP strategists are stuck in the 90’s – again

See also: Playing the progressive card -- Trudeau's cynical, but clever, "left shift"

August: Margaret Thatcher, Morgan Wheeldon, Tom Mulcair, Tommy Douglas & more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

August on The Left Chapter saw 25 posts of various types.

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

1) Mulcair doubles-down on the NDP's right shift by defending Thatcherism

This week is the week where I think it can officially be said that the NDP leadership "jumped the shark" from any pretense at ties with its roots as a social democratic labour party to a straight-up and very open embrace of Blairite centrism and neo-liberal "progressiveism".

Read more! 

2) Morgan Wheeldon, Israel and the triumph of neo-conservative dogma

It would seem that, as with climate change, any serious discussion or criticism of Israel is now essentially forbidden in mainstream politics in Canada -- including within the NDP.

Read more! 

3) The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

By Fraser Needham

The 2015 Canadian federal election took another strange turn this week.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair committed that his first budget as prime minister would be a balanced one. This seems somewhat strange as Canada appears to be headed into a recession and if the current Conservative government has struggled to maintain services in recent years without running deficits, in what have been stronger economic times, the only way a new government could balance the budget in a weaker economy would be through substantial cuts. The minor revenues gained by an NDP government canceling income splitting for high-income earners and a modest corporate tax increase would not be enough to maintain current spending levels in an economic downturn, let alone meet other campaign commitments such as a national childcare plan.

Read more!

4) Deficit spending and the very odd week in Canadian social democracy

This has been an interesting week in the history of Canadian social democracy.

After Mulcair decided to double-down on comments he made praising Margaret Thatcher last week, we began this week with NDP advisers musing to Lawrence Martin in Canada's business tribune, the Globe and Mail, about trying to outflank the Harper Tories from the militarist side on defense spending by stating that they may yet be going to propose a whole lot more of it! As Martin relates it:

Read more!

5) Defeating the Harper Conservatives -- The peace movement and the federal election

by Dave McKee, Canadian Peace Congress President

The 2015 federal election is a critical opportunity for the people of Canada to defeat the Harper Conservative government and its reactionary, pro-war agenda. It is important that the peace movements in Canada begin work now to play a strong role in shaping the public policy debate.

Read more!

The number one food post for the month was Slow Cooker Beef & Mushroom Chili.

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 July!: July: Xenophobes, Olivia Chow, Eve Adams, Naheed Nenshi & more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

We have a platform? No way!...and other follies from week four of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

This is the fourth installment of our weekly election round-up of the inane, bizarre, humorous and unusually facile in the great show that is mainstream bourgeois politics in the EPIC election of 2015.

1) We have a platform? And you read it?

Elizabeth May and the Greens, it seems, were somehow unaware that they had a platform with a number of rather misogynist parts in it related to domestic violence and divorce! When they found out "Julian Morelli, the party’s communications director, said he’s thankful the problems were brought to light. "It’s fair to say those specific areas are under review, big time,”"

Good to hear. But next time you folks might want to read your platform BEFORE putting it out there.

Because that is just one of those things that parties generally do.

2) Members? We have no members. Prove it.

What happens when you have a membership that is under the illusion that its leaders care what it thinks and that has, you know, gone through the motions of passing dozens of resolutions democratically at these funny things they hold called conventions, and that were then all bundled together into something called the NDP's policy book that was then put up on the party's website but that may have stuff in it that might not be what you want people to see because all you want them to see is what the Great Leader decides will be the ONLY THINGS ANYONE IS SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT come election time?

Well you simply make those polices disappear. See how easy that is?

No policy book...no problem.

There never was a policy book, was there Winston? 

3) When I become Prime Minister there will be no more mice! 


Vote for the cat everyone:

A new candidate is sticking his whiskers into the political ring, with the hope of becoming Canada’s next prime minister.
Earl Grey, the leader of the Tuxedo Party of Canada, is a cat, but that’s not stopping him from running for office.

This might interfere with Tommy Douglas' Mouseland however!

4) You are kidding right?

So if you are a Liberal cynic and hypocrite, who do you haul out of the crypt to promote your newly minted anti-austerity platform? Paul Martin of course!

You know...the same guy who ushered in the austerity era itself as Finance Minister.

Makes sense to me.

5) He came to me as a vision...a vision that appeared in my Earth Origins Organic Spread.

Ok...so look...I know this is not Canadian politics. But it is DONALD TRUMP appearing as a vision in Missouri in someone's Earth Origins Organic Spread, people! Enough said.

Thus ends our fourth look at the Grand Farce. See you next week!

Got any suggestions for next week's round-up...send them to theleftchapter@outlook.com or post them to our Facebook page! 

See also: Lying pieces of shit and other follies from week three of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

See also: Near, far, wherever you are, the Canadian economy does go on...and other follies from week two of the 2015 election -- A Left Chapter round-up

The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

By Fraser Needham

The 2015 Canadian federal election took another strange turn this week.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair committed that his first budget as prime minister would be a balanced one. This seems somewhat strange as Canada appears to be headed into a recession and if the current Conservative government has struggled to maintain services in recent years without running deficits, in what have been stronger economic times, the only way a new government could balance the budget in a weaker economy would be through substantial cuts. The minor revenues gained by an NDP government canceling income splitting for high-income earners and a modest corporate tax increase would not be enough to maintain current spending levels in an economic downturn, let alone meet other campaign commitments such as a national childcare plan.

For their part, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals have committed to a modest plan of running $10 billion deficits for three years before balancing the budget in 2019-2020. Deficit spending would be used to address the infrastructure deficit and create jobs and economic stimulus. The Liberals quite rightly point out that with interest rates being at historic lows, now is a particularly good time for a government to borrow as a means of stabilizing a slumping economy.

With the NDP committed to balancing the next budget, regardless of the consequences, and the Liberals open to running deficits, a number of media analysts have accurately characterized the Mulcair NDP of trying to outflank the Liberals on the right. However, “not so” scream a number of diehard NDP supporters. Balanced budgets are not a right wing mantra and have long been in the tradition of the CCF/NDP governments, they contend. As examples, they cite the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP governments of Tommy Douglas and Allan Blakeney who governed under successive balanced budgets.

To put it politely, this is a highly creative and selective version of the truth. Here are the facts.

When Tommy Douglas and the CCF were first elected in 1944, it was on the heels of a number of Liberal deficit budgets. However, it is not surprising the Liberals were running deficits after Saskatchewan had been one of the provinces worst hit by the Great Depression followed by a wartime economy. In fact, it was the inability of the Liberals to use government as a positive force to prevent farm foreclosures and maintain grain prices that marked the end of 34 years of Liberal rule and the beginning of the CCF era.

The post-war CCFers were committed Keynesians. This means they believed government could be used as a positive force to stabilize the economy. Thus, in good economic times government should save surplus revenues and in bad times a government may need to run a deficit in order to stimulate the economy. Budgets need not be balanced every year but over a period of years according to the economic cycle.

Therefore, the Saskatchewan CCF came to power promising increased social programs for all people, greater economic stability and a more progressive tax system. Part of bringing greater stability to the economy meant a commitment to nationalization of parts of the economy including auto insurance, electricity and some resource industries. Nationalization of electricity and auto insurance not only allowed the government to provide affordable levels of service to all people in a small and largely rural province, it also allowed the government to take in revenues that could be used to pay for other social programs.

So, the CCF governments of Tommy Douglas and Woodrow Lloyd were good fiscal managers but they also benefited from the post-war boom of the late 1940’s and 1950’s as well as increased revenues from progressive taxation and nationalization. As such, they were able to balance every single budget from 1944 to 1964.

Saskatchewan did not see deficits again until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s under the Ross Thatcher Liberals. The deficits were not so much due to Liberal mismanagement but more the result of a downturn in the farm economy coupled with a reduction in production by American-owned potash companies to maintain prices.

Allan Blakeney and the NDP were elected in 1971 on a platform of bringing greater stabilization to the economy through further nationalization of resource industries. After the newly elected government was unable to reach an agreement with the potash industry in terms of production levels, they nationalized this industry. They also proceeded to nationalize the uranium, oil and gas industries.

As a result of the massive increase in revenues due to nationalization of these key resource industries, the NDP had more than enough money to balance every single budget from 1971 to 1982 and finance a number of social programs. Further, the government was able to put about $1 billion away in savings.

The point of all of this is to demonstrate that the Mulcair NDP is not similar to the Douglas CCF and Blakeney NDP in any way, shape or form. To try to equate the two is intellectually dishonest. Douglas and Blakeney sought to make transformative changes to the capitalistic economy in order to level the playing field, bring stability to the Saskatchewan economy and finance social programs. Balanced budgets happened to be part of the process but were not the main goal in and of themselves. Neither Douglas nor Blakeney would ever have advocated balancing a budget regardless of the economic circumstances.

Balancing a budget regardless of the economic fallout is a more recent and right wing mantra. It falls into the belief that government should never intervene in the economy and government finances should be operated like an accounting ledger – surpluses should always be spent and deficits never incurred.

The Mulcair NDP is not committing to transforming the capitalist economy at all through either progressive taxation or nationalization. However, without even knowing the true state of government finances or how severe the economic downturn may be, they have committed to balancing the budget. This is completely irresponsible and is only in the legacy of the Mulcair NDP and no one else.

The statement is a vain attempt to appear fiscally responsible to the right wing press and at the same time hope that this same press attacks the Liberals for actually admitting a deficit(s) may be likely. Faced with a cut to services and running a deficit, it is likely an NDP government would choose the latter so why be so dishonest in an election campaign?

It is clear that the NDP wants to cash in on the anti-Harper vote in this campaign as a means of forming government. However, making ridiculous policy statements such as balancing the budget in the midst of a recession only makes anti-Harper voters not take the NDP seriously and look elsewhere. If the NDP wants to replace the Conservatives, it is not just enough to be anti-Harper, they have to be credible.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: Deficit spending and the very odd week in Canadian social democracy

See also: Mulcair doubles-down on the NDP's right shift by defending Thatcherism

Joe Higgins speaks in Toronto 2011 - with Tommy Douglas' Mouseland! Leftist TBT

Four years ago today, the great Irish Socialist leader Joe Higgins traveled to Toronto to speak at the founding meeting of the Socialist Party of Ontario, an attempt to create a real left electoral alternative in the province.



Joe addressed those assembled to talk about the devastation in Europe and Ireland caused by austerity politics, the failure of the traditional social democratic and labour parties to oppose these politics and on the need for new left parties in Canada and beyond, as well as on the fundamental bankruptcy of the NDP.

We share this speech, which still remains powerfully true today, as well as, as a bonus, a video of Joe introducing the famous socialist parable, Mouseland, written by Tommy Douglas.




After the convention, Joe and a group of us also went to enjoy some of Toronto's best chicken wings at a working class bar in Etobicoke! You can read an account of this trip here: Going for Toronto's best chicken wings with Irish Socialist leader Joe Higgins

Love in the time of Bill C-51

Submitted by A.M.

Last night, as part of our weekly tradition, my Dad and I yelled at each other about politics. The topic at hand was Bill C-51, the recent legislation put forward by Stephen Harper in an effort to “combat terrorism,” which you surely recognize as a euphemism for “destroying freedom of expression and human dignity.” Canadians of all political stripes (including many with whom I mightily disagree on other issues) have expressed their intense distaste for the bill. The arguments for opposing the bill have been well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t really speak here about the nuts and bolts of C-51. In the spirit of the oh-so-clever title of this piece, I would rather say a few words about its emotional impact.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien tells Winston, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” These words, sadly, are coming to pass on an industrial scale. We live in a culture where certain human rights are more alienable than others. To be safe, we cannot be free – and vice versa. We live in a culture where teenagers can be incarcerated over mere accusations and wait years for due process. I’m speaking, of course, of recently released (former) Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr. After spending over a decade in various prison cells, Khadr is finally a free man. Stephen Harper, true to form, has reacted by ramping up his thinly-veiled, dog-whistle attacks on Khadr and the entire Muslim community.

It’s all “our way of life” this and “convicted terrorist” that.  For men like Stephen Harper (and past Liberal Prime Ministers and any number of other Canadian politicians) it is not enough to lock up a young man on trumped-up charges. It is not enough for these same men to enrich their friends in the prison- and military-industrial complexes with fat contracts and kickbacks built on the blood and suffering of human beings. None of this is ever enough. The few who do manage to escape their imprisonment are to be humiliated and sacrificed on the twin altars of private profit and political orthodoxy.

Bill C-51, at its core, is an article of hatred. It is a piece of legislation based in a profound distrust and loathing of the human being. We are not the empathetic creatures that built the NHS in Britain out of the ravages of the Second World War (and Medicare here in Canada). We are not the intelligent people who created modern telecommunications. We are not the autonomous beings who question authority and join in collective action with others to make a better world. To Stephen Harper and his cohorts, we are none of these things. We are livestock to be corralled, cornered and controlled.

As Daisy Fitzroy puts it in BioShock Infinite, “If they could bed you down in straw, they would bed you down in straw.”

So what are we to do? As I wrote above, I am writing this piece fresh off of a disagreement with my father about C-51. His advice to my brother who was asking about the bill (as we were Skyping him at the time) was to "watch what you write and say online. Just assume they’re tracking you.”

I assumed years ago that they were tracking me, but this sad fact has never and will never change the things I write or say. Freedom of speech and solidarity have cost so much to so many people – people who never had the white, male, middle-class privilege that I do. First Nations activists would be the very first people targeted under C-51, as it amounts to a de facto criminalization of civil disobedience and the blocking of Canadian industry. Assuming I simply keep my mouth shut, I can continue to benefit from the violence that is enacted every day against our First Peoples. I can not and will not do this. It is morally incumbent on all of us – and most especially the privileged – to speak out and resist.

Silence is complicity.

I’m reminded at this time of the October Crisis. It seemed then, to Canadians from coast to coast, that the very idea and existence of Canada were under siege by the FLQ. Prime Minister Trudeau’s response was to invoke the War Measures Act, a horrific piece of legislation that stripped Canadians of their civil liberties. The lone voice of reason in Parliament at the time was the great socialist leader Tommy Douglas.

Today, we have no Tommy Douglas (at least not in the mainstream). We have to settle for the boring neo-liberal that is Tom Mulcair who, to his great credit, has promised to repeal C-51 in its entirety should the NDP win a majority in this year’s election. I’m not a New Democrat, and haven’t been for some time, but they have my vote because of C-51. They should have yours, too.

So what’s love got to do with it? As I stated above, it’s imperative that we see Bill C-51 for what is: an article of profound human loathing. Recognizing this, we must then find ways to resist. We could start by changing our attitudes. Our culture feeds on hatred and despair, and feeds it back to us in turn. Our most popular forms of entertainment are pornography and violent movies and video games. So many of our celebrities are dim-witted, culturally illiterate buffoons whose primary function seems to be to distract people from living authentic, intelligent, engaged lives. We revel in the ritual humiliation of reality television and ambush comedy. We might benefit from taking a long, hard look at ourselves. We won’t always like what we see, but that’s not the point. By recognizing ourselves and our own potential, we would then be better equipped to see our fellow human beings not as livestock to be ruled over, but as partners and friends. Truly, I am my brother’s and sister’s keeper.

I don’t know what Canada will look like in ten years. Perhaps it will be a socialist paradise. Perhaps, instead, it will be a living nightmare -- a police state, through and through. I do fear for the future; for the world in which my children will live. But I know, from looking at the long arc of human history, that power never rests solely with men like Stephen Harper. There is great strength and courage among the rabble – the wretched of the Earth.

“Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.” – Tommy Douglas

A.M. is a writer in Toronto.

Keep the progressive announcements coming, Tom: An open letter to the Leader of the NDP

An Open Letter 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.

These progressive announcements are important pieces of the “compelling new alternative” Jack Layton left for New Democrats to build. As you roll out more announcements in the months before the election, Canadians will “give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives -- and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together.”

People are listening and ready to build the alternatives; hopeful alternatives that overcome Harper’s politics of fear. Clear alternatives that cut through Trudeau’s mixed-messaging.

Offering clear alternatives to Harper’s war measures and hopeful alternatives to his austerity measures has the Conservatives stalling, the Liberals slipping, and the NDP surging. But there’s still a long way to go before the election; ample time to give a careful hearing to more alternatives and make them even better. Let’s build on the momentum.

Keep the progressive announcements coming, Tom.

Like that $15/day childcare plan to be phased in over eight years -- let’s go even further and make Quebec's $7/day the Canadian standard immediately. Then, let’s phase in a free and universal program like other countries around the world.

Like that $15/h minimum wage pledge -- let’s make it universal upon election, not just for a small number of federal workers in 2019. American cities like Seattle and Portland are showing $15/h can be achieved right now. Australia passed that threshold five years ago and is on track to hit $19/h in 2019. While strong minimum wages are being put in place, let’s secure living wages with a Guaranteed Annual Income program, like the successful "Mincome" experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba.

Like closing tax loopholes on CEOs  -- recovering $700 million is a good start. Let’s recover another $31 billion by uniting against austerity with Quebec’s second wave of the “Maple Spring.” The World Bank, IMF and OECD admit that inequality is killing growth. Let’s implement a comprehensive set of progressive tax reforms as outlined by Linda McQuaig, the Broadbent Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Uruguay has utilized progressive taxes to achieve the greatest income equality in a region that has seen 16 of 18 countries successfully reduce inequality.

Like the urban agenda you introduced in Toronto and Vancouver -- let’s make clear commitments to affordable housing and start moving towards free public transit. Many medium-sized cities across Europe and the Americas have made the transition, already. Cities as large as Paris have experimented with the idea.

Like your rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline and all your talk about “sustainable development” -- let’s reject the Energy East pipeline and develop a transition plan to 100% renewable energy by 2035 as Canadian researchers have shown is possible. Costa Rica has already been powering itself on 100% renewable energy for the last 75 days.

Like your promise to establish a national inquiry into Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women -- let’s build on that by honouring Treaty, respecting Aboriginal sovereignty, working in solidarity with Idle No More, and developing people-to-people partnerships as Canada was supposed to be doing from the start. Consider allotted seats for Aboriginal representation, as is done in New Zealand.

Like that promise to bring in Proportional Representation -- let’s join President Obama in advocating the idea of mandatory voting. Democracy is the NDP’s middle name, and many democracies, from Australia to Greece, already have compulsory voting.

Like your opposition to Bill C-51 -- let’s fully repeal it once in power. Repealing attacks on civil liberties is better than amending attacks on civil liberties. Tommy Douglas unequivocally opposed Pierre Trudeau's War Measures Act, and the same must be done with Harper’s ‘Secret Police’ Bill.

Like your promise to return the retirement age to 65 from 67 -- while we’re making sure Canadians can access the pensions they have earned, let’s make sure they can also access education and prescription drugs when they need them. A universal pharmacare program would save Canada billions. With savings like that we could abolish tuition like Germany and over a dozen other OECD countries.

All of these things have already been accomplished in some place at some time.

Another world is more than possible -- it’s actual. Don't let them tell you it can’t be done!

People will try to tell you that you have no choice but to vote for more of the same. More wars. More oil pipelines. More breaks for mining companies. More small business tax cuts. More corporate ‘free’ trade deals. But you do have a choice, Tom. It’s time to keep the focus where it belongs -- on helping Canadians with living wages, affordable homes, universal childcare and pharmacare, free tuition, public transit, a clean environment, a fair electoral system, the protection of civil liberties, the rejection of austerity, and justice for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.

C'mon, Tom—together, we can do this.



Simon Dougherty is a former NDP candidate from Scarborough, Ontario. The son of Irish and Slovenian immigrants, he worked in trades and senior care like his parents, and then in education before graduating from York University. Simon has also done work in community organizing and videography. He is currently conducting doctoral research at ACU’s Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia.

Photo via wikimedia commons

The Socialist Christian League - Leftist Throwback Thursday

(Click on image to enlarge)

In an era when Christian politics, especially in North America, is so often identified with the right and the evangelical movement, it is easy to forget how significant a force Christian socialism has been in the history of socialism, exemplified by such figures as Tommy Douglas 

Here we see an outline of the "Basis" for the Socialist Christian League of the United Kingdom in the 1950's as well as its membership application. In part it says that the League "rejects the present Capitalist disorder as fundamentally anti-Christian and strives for the creation of an international Socialist order".

Sentiments like these can be seen more recently, as for example when Venezuelan Socialist leader Hugo Chavez said " Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ—who I think was the first socialist—only socialism can really create a genuine society."

The Socialist Christian League ultimately merged with another group to become the Christian Socialist Movement. The thinker most closely associated with it is R.H. Tawney.