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

by Fraser Needham

As NDP strategists mull over the polls this weekend and try to figure out why their shift to the right of the Liberals on the issue of balanced budgets and deficit financing doesn’t seem to be playing out as they hoped in Ontario, they might be wise to take some time out and do a little research on the British Labour Party leadership election.

Early projections seem to indicate rogue left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn is poised to win the party’s leadership race on Sept. 12. Corbyn is not only left wing, if he wins the Labour leadership, he would be the party’s most left leader in more than three decades dating back to the early 1980’s when Labour was led by Michael Foot.

The longtime Labour politician has also remained unshakeable in his convictions of what he believes constitutes a truly social democratic society. Or, to put it more succinctly, Corbyn has never advocated tax cuts for the middle class as one way of achieving social democratic goals.

The Blairites are of course horrified but it doesn’t really matter what they think if the majority of the Labour Party membership is behind Corbyn which they appear to be. The British press is already speculating the MP from Islington -- who chooses to wear a suit and tie as little as possible and likes to speak his mind about his left convictions -- could pose a real problem for David Cameron and the Conservatives and actually become Prime Minister in the near future. Some journalists are accusing the Blairites of being stuck in the past and failing to see the on the ground appeal of a guy like Jeremy Corbyn to a significant constituency of voters.

Let’s shift over to the Canadian political scene for a moment.

Although the people running the Federal NDP and its provincial wings these days will never admit it publicly, they are strongly influenced by Third Way politics and the vision that Tony Blair very firmly stamped on the British Labour Party in the early 1990’s. Third Way politics basically says there is no way social democratic parties can get elected anymore on the types of platforms they ran on from the post World War Two period up until the early 1980’s. They believe all voters, including working class voters, have moved on from any opposition to capitalism, favour neoliberal ideology without question, do not believe an interventionist state in the economy can ever have a positive influence, are anti-labour and much more individualistic than they had been in the past.

So wherein lies the hope for social democratic parties as far as how the Third Way sees it? There is a "third way" that can be instituted which means social democratic parties have to far lower their expectations of the past by fully embracing the inequities of the free market, eliminating government intervention in the economy from the policy book, sometimes reducing income taxes and certainly never raising them, being firmly committed to balancing the budget, trying to appear as business friendly as possible and never, ever doing anything pro-labour.

If social democratic parties are willing to accept the cold and harsh realities that the general public has moved significantly to the right, they can then make themselves palatable to voters and actually win elections. What is their advantage over the right wing parties? They are a kinder, gentler form of neoliberal party than the mean spirited right. They seek not to destroy the state but to try to preserve it in the current harsh realities that we live in. Their goal is not to completely eliminate taxes but maybe just keep them where they are or reduce them slightly. These parties are also much more easily able to present themselves as more open minded and liberal parties on social issues than the right wing parties who are really neoconservative parties and believe in a much less socially liberal society.

The Third Way is the strategy New Labour ran and was elected in Britain on in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections. It was the platform that was used in Saskatchewan that saw four straight NDP governments elected from 1991 to 2003. It is also the strategy that has been used by the Manitoba NDP that is now in its fourth consecutive term after winning power in 1999. A lot of NDP strategists would probably argue that the short-lived Bob Rae NDP government in Ontario in the early 1990’s might have lasted longer had it been willing to accept Third Way strategies a little more fully or at least a lot sooner.

However, all of a sudden the Third Way strategy doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did. New Labour lost the 2010 British election and was soundly defeated in this spring’s election by the Conservatives. Many of its losses came at the expense of a much more left Scottish Nationalist Party.

In Saskatchewan, the NDP was soundly defeated by the right wing Saskatchewan Party in the 2007 election and then thoroughly routed by them again in the 2011 election – suffering the party’s worst electoral loss since its very early CCF days. The once formidable Saskatchewan NDP now sits rudderless and directionless in opposition with only a rump of nine seats. The party is not positioned to win the next election and it could be a number of years before they are competitive again. To give the Saskatchewan Party credit, they were forward thinking enough to shift slightly left after their surprising 2003 election loss – eliminating any public fears that they would privatize Crown corporations, generally maintaining existing government services and shedding the image of being nothing more than a neoconservative party trying to move the province to the hard right.

The B.C. NDP was supposed to be a shoe-in for government in the 2013 election as a discredited Liberal government appeared to be on its way out. However, the party ran on a moderate centre-right platform and was soundly defeated. The Manitoba NDP is likely headed for defeat in the next provincial election. The Nova Scotia NDP was elected for the first time on a centre-left platform in 2009 but only lasted one term being defeated by Liberals in the 2013 election.

And perhaps the biggest screw up of them all – the Ontario NDP’s bizarre decision to trigger an election in the spring of 2014 and then run on a right wing populist platform. Right of, you guessed it, the Liberals this time around.

Every thing they did in the campaign seemed designed out of some sort of Mike Harris/Rob Ford handbook. The NDP railed out against government excess and tried to position itself as the party of small business. It lashed out at the Toronto “elites,” which was pretty much anyone who questioned their ethics or motives, and wondered why many unions in the province decided not to support them after the NDP was running a campaign that was in many ways hostile to labour. They accused the Liberals of running a fiscally irresponsible campaign when in reality the Liberal campaign was hardly fiscally ambitious at all. The party even decided to place a cover ad in the Toronto Sun of all newspapers – you know – to reach out to all their blue-collar right wing friends who read it.

And it all made such “common sense.” Except to voters of course who decided to re-elect the Liberals to a majority on election day and reward the NDP with a third place finish.

Now the Federal NDP strategists will tell you the party ran on a centre-right platform in the 2011 election winning more seats than it ever has and becoming the official opposition for the first time in the party’s history. However, if they were actually honest -- and in their current state of hubris they most likely wouldn’t be -- they would admit that the party’s good fortunes had much more to do with the strange circumstances of that particular election than anything that was in the NDP platform.

First, the Liberals hit what will be for them likely rock bottom running under a leader which is the worst the party has ever seen in its modern history in Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff wasn’t even able to hold his own Toronto seat.

Second, after almost 20 years of successful campaigns in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois completely imploded and bit the dust leaving a tremendous opportunity for another party to become dominant in the province. With the Liberals remaining largely discredited in Quebec since the sponsorship scandal and the Conservatives quickly wearing out their welcome after the 2006 election, the NDP was able to seize that opportunity and fill the gap.

Third, and most important, the NDP was very well served by their late leader Jack Layton who admirably decided to fight the campaign despite suffering the effects of a recent hip replacement and what later came to be known was terminal cancer. In his fourth campaign as party leader, Layton caught on like wildfire across the country but no more so than in Quebec where his meteoric increase in popularity there sealed the deal for the NDP in the province.

The point of all this is the NDP might actually want to try something that would be considered a little “radical” to those people running the party these days. Rather than always shifting right why not shift a little left? Maybe consider that working people might actually be a little bit fed up after 25 years of neoliberal policies and lies that have left them worse off than at any time since before the Second World War. That people may not be so easily tricked into the deficit hysteria as they were 20 years ago. That they even may be willing to pay a bit more in income taxes if this means better public services.

In general, why not just try and run on the values your party was founded on rather than someone else’s? You certainly would make your base happy and give your party members and campaign workers something to believe in again and you might just gain some votes and a little respect at the same time.

It also likely wouldn’t splatter as much egg on your face as promising to balance the budget heading into a looming recession.

Just a thought.

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: The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

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

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!

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

Stephen Harper has no plan to grow our economy and no plan to help the middle class, so he's spending your money trying to convince you that I'm not ready. 

Here's what I'm not ready for. 

I’m not ready to stand by as our economy slides into recession. Not ready to watch hard-working Canadians lose their jobs and fall further behind. And I’m certainly not ready to stand by while this government continues to ignore hard-working Canadians, when it should be offering a plan for economic growth. 

I am ready to do what our opponents won’t: Ask the wealthiest 1% of Canadians to pay more tax so our middle class can pay less. And while they propose massive cuts and austerity, I’ll lead our country with a historic investment plan to strengthen the middle class, create jobs and grow our economy.

By now we have all likely heard one variation or another of this pitch being made by federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau -- a pitch that very directly seeks to outflank NDP leader Tom Mulcair from the "left" in progressive terms. This one was taken directly from a Liberal campaign email.

While Mulcair has made a fundamentally misguided, and likely untenable, balanced budget pledge, Trudeau has invoked the language and rhetoric of Occupy ("the 1%", "tax the rich") and sought to inspire with a plan that is interventionist and aims to create jobs and growth via stimulus -- something I suspect is far more appealing to many progressive voters than is Mulcair's rhetoric of austerity.

It will be made all the easier for Trudeau to portray himself as the "true progressive" now that Mulcair, grotesquely, has chosen to frame deficit stimulus spending as "immoral" -- even though both of the existing NDP provincial governments either have run deficits to maintain services, are running deficits, or in Alberta's case plan to do so also to stimulate the economy.

In Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci has announced an upcoming deficit stimulus plan very similar to the one proposed by Trudeau and using very similar fiscal and economic logic -- and this despite the fact that Alberta is starting from an already existing deficit:

Despite a deficit that will be the largest in two decades, and that the government has warned could grow to $6.5-billion, Finance Minister Joe Ceci says the province could borrow more to speed an economic recovery and create jobs. 

“Do we have the money? Yes. I think we would have the capacity to borrow some more for investments in infrastructure,” Mr. Ceci told The Globe and Mail on Friday. “We’re forecasting GDP to be on the growth side in 2016, so an investment in transit and other infrastructure would come at the time when it would bolster a brightening GDP. 

In fact, while there is a long way to go, there are some initial indications that Trudeau's pitch is working among the swing voters who actually matter -- progressive voters outside of Quebec (the NDP appears, for now, to be virtually certain to sweep Quebec again).

As the pollster EKOS put it:

Justin Trudeau has helped himself with his proposed deficit-funded infrastructure spending program. Thomas Mulcair, meanwhile, seems to be hurting himself with his promise of a balanced budget, suggesting that Canadians are leery of focusing on fiscal rectitude – rather than kick-starting the economy – when middle class workers have not seen a real wage increase in years. Furthermore, concerns with fiscal discipline are largely concentrated in the Conservative camp, which is largely unavailable to the NDP. At best, Mr. Mulcair may be making himself mildly less objectionable to those who won’t vote for him and ignoring the preferences of his available constituency. While we understand the importance of signalling fiscal prudence, the NDP may want to consider the potential fall-out more carefully.

The key point here being "concerns with fiscal discipline are largely concentrated in the Conservative camp, which is largely unavailable to the NDP" -- a point that NDP strategists of late simply do not seem to understand.

As Fraser Needham pointed out in a piece about the NDP's bizarre decision to campaign from the right, the party seems to be trying to mimic, in the critical NDP-Liberal battleground of Ontario, the tone of the disastrous ONDP campaign of 2014 that sought to appeal to a largely mythical "Rob Ford" swing voter and that resulted in helping to get the Kathleen Wynne Liberals reelected with a majority government in what unfolded as a strategic vote against the Hudak Conservatives.

That ONDP campaign failed for a reason. It alienated progressive voters by sounding very "populist" and right wing, while, in fact, not appealing to right-wingers who in Ontario (and elsewhere) are simply never going to vote NDP in anything close to meaningful numbers. The "Rob Ford" voter is largely fictional as his constituency was a mixture of actual conservatives and reactionaries and the disaffected who turned to or supported him not at all for his "policies" -- such as they were -- but for his grandiose personality and rhetoric. 

In fact Ford's polices were largely irrelevant to this second group of voters and as a result their voting decisions and directions outside of municipal politics were going to be all over the map. This can be demonstrated by the results in the various heartlands of "Ford Nation". All of Etobicoke, York and Scarborough were swept by the Liberals in the provincial election, and swept despite the very vocal calls by the Ford brothers at the time to toss the Liberals out of office!

Wynne, though she has predictably governed more to the right, campaigned from the left and directly and successfully sought to appeal to NDP-Liberal swing voters (the only swing voters who actually matter to the NDP in vote rich Ontario) while the ONDP tried to appeal to a group of "swing voters" that simply did not exist -- and did so in very reactionary terms.

Trudeau is doing what Wynne did while Mulcair echoes ONDP leader Andrea Horwath. Trudeau is clearly targeting the soft progressive vote that the NDP is either taking for granted or do not think they need.

Is this cynical on Trudeau's part? When he brings out austerity hatchet man Paul Martin, who launched the austerity era in Canadian federal politics, and when he praises Martin's disastrous and reactionary deep cuts to transfer payments in the 90's (while saying that he would not do anything similar) it certainly seems cynical.

But it is also clever. With Mulcair almost inexplicably -- given that it was his principled stance on Bill C-51 that shifted him from third to first place in national polls while Trudeau's pandering stance cost him dearly -- adopting a very cautious and even rhetorically reactionary approach, this was the hand that Trudeau had left to play. The Liberals exist to win, and if portraying Mulcair as a right wing austerity wolf in progressive sheep's clothing is the way to win, that is what they will do.

Trudeau can only take this approach and make this appeal to progressive swing voters, though, as it is at least in part true.

Mulcair and his strategists, and they alone, have made this possible and allowed him to be able to do this by taking a series of positions and adopting a tone that are both right-wing and wrong-headed and that will be perceived as such by the very voters that Mulcair needs and that were swinging his way.

There is still plenty of time for Mulcair and the NDP to avoid the trap they so clearly seem to be walking into. The soft progressive constituency that is willing to go either NDP or Liberal to both stop Harper and get what they hope will be progressive governance is still very much up for grabs.

But if the NDP continues down this track federally, there is a very real probability that the result in Ontario will be what came of the strikingly similar campaign strategies of Andrea Horwath and Olivia Chow that sought bizarrely to appeal to right-wing voters and that both failed miserably.

And without winning in most of the key ridings in Ontario no progressive party, Liberal or New Democrat, stands any chance of becoming government.

Mulcair and his strategists seem to need to be reminded of this.

See also: The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

See also: Game Over -- Turns out Mulcair is simply wrong about even today's NDP and deficits

The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

by Fraser Needham


Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like the NDP had a pretty good shot at winning the 2015 election and forming its first national government.


While a majority government is most likely out of the cards for any of the three main parties, there were strong reasons to believe the NDP could win a minority government and be supported by enough Liberal seats to stay in power for at least a few years.

After an initial bump in the polls under new leader Justin Trudeau, the Liberals had stumbled for most of this year. Trudeau has not performed strongly in the House of Commons and his bizarre notion of creating a politically independent Senate that still remains appointed by the prime minister is just plain goofy. Further, Liberal support of the Harper government’s draconian Bill C-51 which is an all out assault on civil liberties, is a major political error for a party that purports itself to be an adherent of human rights.

On the contrary, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is no doubt intelligent and well versed on the issues of the day. He has performed strongly in the House and time and again taken apart the Harper government on the Senate scandal, Bill C-51 and the Syrian and Iraq military missions. The NDP gained a lot of points for its principled stand against the Conservatives’ highly flawed anti-terrorism legislation, its proposal of Senate abolition is a reasonable one and call for an affordable national childcare program long overdue. The last decade of Conservative abuse of power has created a very strong anti-Harper coalition and the NDP had positioned itself strongly over the Liberals to take advantage of the majority of this coalition.

This was all until the election campaign actually began.

One would have thought the NDP strategy for the campaign would be one that makes their leader look open and accessible as a means of the public getting to know him and contrasting him to Harper. This could have been followed by a few more well thought out and moderately social democratic policy proposals to supplement the childcare plan. The overall plan should have been to try to position Mulcair and the NDP as genuine and with the best interests of all Canadians in mind with solid and defensible policy proposals that would move Canada moderately to the left. This was the strategy that was used under Jack Layton in 2011 and worked very well. It would also have positioned the party extremely well to take advantage of the soft liberal voters in the urban areas of Ontario that will determine the outcome of this election.

However, what is the campaign that the NDP has actually run thus far?

The party has decided to run a closed, scripted and for the most part right wing populist campaign since the election began. Mulcair sometimes will talk to the media but other times he won’t such as at the party’s campaign launch. Like Harper, he is choosing to attend some debates but not others. And again, like Harper, the NDP leader can’t be bothered to attend a debate on women’s issues but you better believe he will be there full force to discuss foreign policy at the right wing think tank Munk debates. The policy proposals are mostly little more than gimmicks that can easily be torn apart upon further inspection. Remind you of anyone?

Yes -- exactly -- this is the type of campaign Stephen Harper and the Conservatives like to run.

The NDP has tried to hide behind various curtains in order to justify this strange campaign strategy it is currently running on. The latest and most amusing one is that the absolute commitment to balance the first budget, as we head into an economic recession and with no knowledge of the current state of government finances-- which are likely bad -- is what Tommy Douglas would have done.

So what are the real reasons behind the NDP running a largely right wing populist campaign?

The strategy is largely based around a move to appeal to the elusive Ontario Rob Ford "swing voter".

You know, the middle aged white guy who wears a baseball cap, drinks Tim Horton’s coffee and likes Don Cherry. He lives in the suburbs and absolutely despises the Toronto “elites.” He likes to think of himself as a blue collar, hardworking type of guy. The Rob Ford voter really doesn’t care for government much at all but he pays his bills and balances his cheque book every month and believes the government should too. For the last nine years, the Rob Ford voter has voted for Stephen Harper but this time around he is very angry at the Conservatives – all the Senate scandals, poor treatment of the war veterans, the continued running of deficits, etc.

So the NDP strategy is one where they run a tightly scripted, controlled and hopefully error free campaign. Who cares about all the debates? Most voters don’t watch them anyway, except for maybe the Toronto elites, and these are not our target swing voters regardless. So, put out a few right wing populist planks to appeal to the angry Rob Ford voters and count that your base stays by holding its nose and voting NDP, as it has always done, on election day.

What about the soft liberal voters who are basically the same people as the so-called”Toronto “elites?” Well, they will certainly be horrified and see the right wing gimmicky appeals for what they are but the NDP hopes a number of these voters will see Mulcair as far more competent and prime ministerial than Trudeau and still the best option for defeating Harper. However, the NDP strategists will likely admit another group of them will probably decide to stick with the Liberals, though they probably would have done this either way.

Heck, even Mulcair’s strange adoration for Margaret Thatcher may pick up a few points with the Rob Ford voters as no doubt a number of them admire the Iron Lady. So, the NDP strategists likely weren’t too worried when this transgression, from when Mulcair was a Quebec Liberal politician, leaked out a few weeks back.

So you get all the gimmicky and mainly right wing populist policy proposals the NDP has put forward in this campaign. The NDP will fight climate change but support the oilsands at the same time. The party will put in a very minor corporate tax increase but refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy. They will raise the federal minimum wage even though this will affect almost no minimum wage workers. The NDP will balance its first budget in the midst of a recession even though they know this to be an absolute lie – whatever party is elected on Oct. 19, they will have to run a deficit in order to prevent the economy from sinking into a further recession.

What about the childcare plan? Well, you know, it will come at some point in the future but we can’t tell you exactly when. You have to understand it took the Saskatchewan CCF 20 years to bring in Medicare.

So, aside from the absolutely unethical and morally bankrupt premise of a “supposedly” social democratic party playing a right wing populist game which only further reduces public expectations of government in a desperate attempt to gain a few votes, there is another reason why this flawed strategy won’t work (some NDP partisans actually believe that the right wing populist strategy, while perhaps morally questionable, is justified by the real goal of getting elected so they can then institute some real social democratic policies that were too dangerous to talk about in the campaign. Keep dreaming folks!).

The reason this strategy won’t work is because the Rob Ford voter is more or less a myth. What is not a myth is there is a significantly large swath of blue collar voters – unionized and non-unionized – who have historically always voted Conservative and they are not going to change now regardless of what the NDP says or does. This problem has constantly plagued the party since its inception in 1961.

At the same time, the very real soft liberal Ontario voters, who had been drifting over to the NDP in the months leading up to the campaign, are now drifting back over to the Liberals as a result of the party’s recent campaign strategy and are more willing to overlook Trudeau’s Bill C-51 screw up.

As a matter of fact, a slightly different form of this campaign strategy was tried in last year’s Ontario election by the ONDP and it resulted in a third place finish and the re-election of a majority Liberal government. So, one really has to wonder why the party is trying to execute it again.

Meanwhile, with each passing day, Trudeau is gaining more confidence out on the campaign trail running a far more accessible and open campaign than Mulcair is. He is not stumbling so far as some of the NDP and Conservative strategists hoped he would. And although there are certainly times when Trudeau puts his foot in his mouth, he does have the family legacy behind him and a lot more charisma than the other two leaders.

Say what you will, but he does seem kind of genuine. Something Mulcair does not every time he speaks out of both sides of his mouth or breaks into one too many fake and wooden smiles for the cameras.

It is still early in the campaign and there are sure to be many more twists and turns. However, if the current narratives hold it could result in two scenarios very unfavourable to the NDP. If the anti-Harper vote splits fairly evenly between the NDP and Liberals by Trudeau running a far better campaign than expected and the NDP running a far worse one, the Conservatives get re-elected with a minority. Or, if the Liberals are able to pick up enough traction over this very long campaign as Trudeau continues to improve, the Liberals could get in with a minority government. In either scenario, Thomas Mulcair is the odd man out on Oct. 19.

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: Death of a delusion: The ONDP's internal fictions and the Sudbury by-election loss

See also: The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

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!

I.A.T.S.E. Toronto union art show @ Gallery 1313 highlights member talent

From now until September 13th the art of the very talented members of the Toronto film and stage worker's union I.A.T.S.E. Local 873 is on display at Gallery 1313 in a show called "Open Camera"



Gallery 1313 is "an artist run centre exhibiting contemporary Canadian art" on Queen St. W. in the west-end neighbourhood of Parkdale.



It is a very interesting gallery space, consisting of three interconnected rooms in a former police station.

The show is timed to correspond with the Toronto International Film Festival to highlight the important role these workers play in creating the films and television we all enjoy.

As the gallery description puts it:

OFF CAMERA a group exhibition of art works by members of I.A.T.S.E. Local 873 . These artists who work in film will be displaying a variety of works including painting , video , photography and mixed media . This exhibition happening prior to and during TIFF is by people who work behind the scenes to make films look good and happen.

The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, 1 pm-6 pm. Details about the gallery can be found at the end of this post.

I went to the opening of this show last night with my partner Natalie, who is an IATSE permit and who has a piece in the show, "The Family".

The opening was well attended and lively, and the art of these union sisters and brothers is diverse, vibrant and fascinating. As the official description implied the art is not only diverse stylistically, but also in format.




These are some photos from the opening -- be sure to check the show out!

(Click on images to enlarge)

An audio-visual piece

Natalie's piece "The Family"

Information on Gallery 1313:

Aylan Kurdi's death is Canada's shame

Sometimes images and events are so horrible and heartbreaking that words almost fail.

We have all, by now, heard of or seen the terribly distressing photos of a small, lifeless 3 year old boy washed ashore, dead, after drowning as his family sought to escape the horrors of Syria's civil war.

These photos have finally jarred many out of their complacency and de facto or actual indifference to the staggering levels of suffering and desperation that are the reality of this refugee crisis.

Human suffering. The suffering of real, actual people.

The suffering of children, innocent of any role in the deadly and violent brutalities of "adults". The tiny and saddest victims of the clashes of ideologies and extremisms, but also of the lies that are all these lines in the sand we have built to arbitrarily separate us from each other that we call borders.

Now, as it turns out, the child on that beach,, whose name was Aylan, could have been safely in Canada:

Aylan's aunt, who lives in the Vancouver area, had sought to get Canadian refugee status for her relatives in the Syrian town of Kobani, which was devastated by battles between ISIS and Kurdish fighters, legislator Fin Donnelly told The Canadian Press. Donnelly submitted the application on the family's behalf. 

Canadian immigration authorities first rejected the application, in part because of the family's lack of exit visas to ease their passage out of Turkey and their lack of internationally recognized refugee status, the aunt, Teema Kurdi, told the newspaper the Ottawa Citizen. It said she is a hair stylist who moved to Canada more than 20 years ago.

Teema Kurdi said the family her brother Abdullah, his wife Rehan and their two boys, 3-year-old Aylan and 5-year-old Galip embarked on the perilous boat journey only after their bid to move to Canada was rejected. 

"I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbors who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn't get them out, and that is why they went in the boat," she told the Citizen.

For years Canada has tightened the rules and made it harder-and-harder for refugees and asylum seekers, as well as those seeking to immigrate generally, to come to our country. Aylan and his five year old brother are the direct human consequence of this.

Of course the fighting in Syria drove them out, and absolutely the policies of the European Union also led to them being on that boat. There are many levels of human ugliness that contributed to this horrific outcome.

But, the fact remains that Canada had turned them away.

Now, grotesquely, Canada has finally offered the distraught father of the boys the citizenship that would have saved them. After having lost his wife and children he has declined.

And now, after stalling and denying the facts for months in the media right up until yesterday, the Minister of Immigration, Chris Alexander, has suspended his election campaigning and is in meetings to belatedly "act" on the crisis. Alexander who had been apparently made directly aware of this specific family's plight by an NDP MP.

And, of course, there will promises and pledges and statements.

But this is all too late for those little boys and for the countless other stories of death and suffering that we have not heard of.

Our elected government, our public officials, our border regulations have meant that while we can only hope public outrage and mobilization will now save future Aylans who seek refuge in our vast and wealthy country, it is too late for him.

Whatever contributions he might have one day made to Canada and the world, whatever dreams, possibilities or paths he might have pursued, are forever erased.

A caller to a radio call-in show on the CBC today that was devoted to the issue, after noting that his family of poor labourers that came to Canada when he was also three would likely not have been allowed in under the new rules, said "Shame on Minister Alexander and shame on us all."

And he is right.

Shame on the Conservative government, yes, but also shame on us all.

Update: Aylan's aunt has now apparently clarified that his family had not yet applied for citizenship or refugee status directly in Canada (though she had for his brother and his family had been rejected on the specious grounds stated above) as she could not afford to make more than one application, and the Canadian government has denied offering the father citizenship in the wake of the tragedy. Chris Alexander was, however, approached about the family by NDP MP Donnelly, and the fact of how Canada has made refugee claims harder and the reality of its disgracefully inadequate response to the Syrian refugee crisis remains. 

Art: The Family

The Family - Acrylic on Canvas by Natalie Lochwin

(Click on image to enlarge.)

(Prints of Natalie's art are available, email theleftchapter@outlook.com for details)

Natalie & other members of IATSE have some of their artwork, including this piece, in an upcoming show in Toronto:

"Main Gallery , Process Gallery and Cell Gallery : OFF CAMERA a group exhibition of art works by members of I.A.T.S.E. Local 873 . These artists who work in film will be displaying a variety of works including painting , video , photography and mixed media . This exhibition happening prior to and during TIFF is by people who work behind the scenes to make films look good and happen."

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.

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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:

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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.

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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