Because their editorial board has clearly lost their f*cking minds. Because if there is one thing Ontarians remember most when it comes to politics, it is the feeling they had on September 7, 1990. That, "holy shit! What have we done?!" feeling. The one they've never, ever, ever forgotten.
The Star? They've forgotten.
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23 comments:
Oh, get a grip. Your party is holed at the waterline and you know it. Come on over to the big orange raft! Swim for it! :)
So you can name those 100 ridings the dippers are going to win?
So you can name those 100 ridings the dippers are going to win?
Parkdale High Park. Go Peggy!
Probably not Peggy. But hey, It is at least a close one that the Dippers can win. I'll throw in Hamilton Centre and Toronto Danforth for you. I'll even give you Trinity Spadina if you like. Hamilton Mountain and Hamilton East Stoney Creek could be losses for Jack though. Same with Welland.
Harper is asking the Liberals to vote for him,the son o '''!!!
James,
I'm really curious as to what your point might be.
Is this something about how the Star is threatening the future of Canada by recklessly endorsing the incompetent NDP?
You see, you've thrown in a link to the ONDP's surprise victory in 1990. That's when they were led by now front-bench Liberal (and touted successor to Michael Ignatieff) Bob Rae.
So, um, ... the ONDP was a disaster, so disastrous that the Liberal Party has made their former leader one of their own leaders.
And this is all bad because the NDP is incompetent, because, ... um, ... you and a bunch of other lazy-minded group-thinkers say they are?
First of all, when it comes to politics, work, family, don't ever, ever, ever, call me lazy.
Second of all if you want to ask Bob a question, he's always around to answer one for you. Ask him how he felt when he looked at the list of elected NDP MPPS on September 7th.
Last time I checked, Bob Rae Never ever got to lead the Liberal Party of Canada. But, us lazy group minded fuckers might have missed that somewhere.
What's said is that if Jack Layton had knocked up then woman at the rub and tug Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke would have forced her to have the child.
http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/local/article/524868--pro-life-organization-endorses-burke
James,
Get a grip. Don't you ever, ever, ever, tell me to not call you lazy!
I don't want to ask Bob a question. I was asking YOU a question. I was asking you why you were pointing to the ONDP's 1990 victory as somehow being an ominous precedent for The Star to have forgotten when at the same time you have no problem with the fact that your Liberal Party has welcomed the leader of the disastrous ONDP onto their front bench.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't say that the ONDP were a bunch of fruit-cakes and then not notice that the fruit-cake-in-chief is now one of the top-ranked members of your own party's caucus.
By the way, not wanting to ask Bob a question extends to not caring what he thought of the list of elected NDP MPPs on September 7th.
Finally, let me clarify: By calling Rae a leader of the Liberal Party, I didn't mean "the" Leader. There are MPs who have powerful cabinet posts and who command many followers within the party. They are "leaders." I understand your confusion due to my wording.
I referred to you as engaging in lazy group-think, because all this stuff about the NDP's lack of experience is self-evident bullshit. The role of a politician is well within the abilities of any citizen of normal intelligence. There are advisors and experts and there is group discussion and debate. I think political animals get it into their heads that seniority and getting a free ride from the press lends a politician genuine gravity.
Glenn Greenwald has mortally wounded that cliche by pointing to the ignorance and failure of many self-appointed "serious" politicians and opinion-leaders.
I think my answer to you was way better than the alternative which would have been go fuck yourself. But hey. It's a free country. You have a right to insult whomever you want.
And who gives a shit wtf Glenn Greenwald has to say. Really. Like who really does.
Whoa! Check out the impulse control problems.
Libs will join harper, not layton, as most share his values.
"Libs will join harper, not layton, as most share his values."
Once the dust settles from this election we'll start to see that most of Harper's own caucus don't share his values.
bravo thwap. youve got it exactly right. Dismissing the NDP because of their provincial government in the 90s? if thats the best reason to vote for the liberals that we can come up with they are in big trouble. There are lots of traditional lib voters (like me) who only vote for them reluctantly, because there is no real alternative. Id put my support behind the NDP in a second if it made sense in my riding. Dismissing them and their policies is not going to help the liberals regain any kind of useful place in Canadian politics anytime soon.
Um. What I wrote was Ontarians have not forgotten. And, no, they won't back Jack in numbers that you see anywhere else in the country.
Of course. Does thwap live in Ontario?!
By the end of the NDP's term, it seemed as though everyone hated them -- unions, tax payers. The party has yet to recover from their time in office
Three Questions by Bob Rae goes into some of the problems faced by the NDP in 1990. Here's a quote from Orwell that Rae uses.
"The greatest disadvantages under which the left-wing movement suffers: that being a newcomer to the political scene & having built itself up from nothing, it had to create a following by telling lies. For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda."
Once in power, the NDP couldn't help but dissapoint. They made themselves out to be superior to other parties, but they got hit with the limits of government. (And to be fair, a recession.) Everything they did seemed to be the worst of all worlds -- not enough to please their former partners, enough to piss off people already suspicious of them.
As for candidates -- the Action democratique du Quebec had the same problem as the NDP did in 1990. They had people elected that they didn't necessarily want, one was a guy with a criminal record. (Is there anyone rooting for the NDP candidate in Quebec who doesn't appear to speak french to win? Any of the candidates who've gone on vacation during this election? The anonymous guy running in my riding -- we've got Jack Layton posters here and I'm out in Mississauga?). Dumont, the leader of the ADQ, was mocked as running a kindergarten class. The media saw the group as being unprofessional. Next election, the ADQ went from 41 members to 7.
One of the problems of a fast rise is the potential for an equally fast fall.
Of course, if the NDP team is strong and can hit the ground running, you don't have to worry about this.
sharonapple88,
I read Rae's Three Questions. I thought it was weak.
I'm from Ontario. I thought Rae was wrong to have gone after welfare cheats and to have re-opened negotiated contracts.
One of the better accounts of Rae's government is Thomas Walkom's Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP.
At one point Walkom shows that for all Rae's betrayal of unions and anti-poverty activists, the financial savings for his government were negligible. The big factor was the recession and Martin's reneging on federal funding commitments.
The tragedy is that Rae, being a leftist, wasn't allowed (like bush II, Cheney, Harris, Flaherty, harper, etc.,) to say "Deficits don't matter."
The inexperience and incompetence so decried by stephen harper and Mr. Curran here, was really not all that significant. It's been harped upon by the usual suspects because it's the default setting, to say that the right-wing is competent and the left-wing is flaky, whatever the evidence.
One of the better accounts of Rae's government is Thomas Walkom's Rae Days: The Rise and Follies of the NDP.
Sounds like an interesting book.
Another good one written in the middle of the NDP's government, is Giving Away A Miracle: Lost Dreams, Broken Promises, and the Ontario NDP, which seems to echo what was noted in Three Questions.
"The victory of Bob Rae's NDP in the 1990 Ontario provincial election was totally unexpected, particularly by the New Democrats themselves. The party had an opposition mentality and was good at criticizing governments in the legislature but when it came to office had no polices, no agenda, for governing Ontario. This book attempts to explain why, once in power, the party disillusioned almost everyone, friend and foe alike.
"Ehring and Roberts are long-time NDP members who had been very active in the party. Their NDP background and critical approach give the book much greater value than one written by outsiders. Because their expectations were so high, they suffered a deeper disappointment than those who disliked the NDP to start with."
As for Martin's cuts being responsible for the NDP's decline -- their popularity seemed to decline in 1991-1993, before the Liberals were in power (they hit a low of 6% during the federal election in 1993), and they made a slight recovery in 1993-1994, when the Liberals were in power. (No surprise, the NDP's decline parallel the recession. Maybe if the NDP had noted the federal policies that hurt Ontario, like Quebec politicians tend to, and made it a provincial-federal fight... Oh well, we'll never know.)
The inexperience and incompetence so decried by stephen harper and Mr. Curran here, was really not all that significant. It's been harped upon by the usual suspects because it's the default setting, to say that the right-wing is competent and the left-wing is flaky, whatever the evidence.
The left-wing isn't flaky, and the NDP have a number of good candidates. The problem they have are the same ones the ADQ, a right-wing group, faced when they went from 6 to 41 -- placeholder candidates getting elected.
Thomas Walkom, the writer of Rae Days, even noted that there's a problem with the NDP's candidates, the lack of depth is the same one Bob Rae faced in 1990. Walkom seemed obsessed by the NDP candidate in Don Valley. A lot of papers are playing this game, including the Montreal Gazette.
Anyway, I hope the NDP candidates are on their toes when it comes to their material, or else the Conservatives will eat them alive during Question Period. John Baird seems to live for moments like these.
Sorry, something odd's going on with my account. I'm sharonapple88. :P
miracle/sharonapple88,
I've also read Giving Away a Miracle. It was written and released while Rae was still in power, and while it's good, it couldn't be comprehensive.
They're harsher on Rae for not sticking to his social-democrat guns than Walkom is.
And I'll agree about one thing: The ONDP gov't did appear comically inept at times. But aside from appearances, they didn't do too bad a job compared with harris, and now McGuinty.
Rae was premier up to 1995. There were two-terms of Tory and Liberal majorities and now Ontario is a have-not province. Somehow the signficance of Conservative-Liberal failure doesn't resonate as much as the NDP's.
They're harsher on Rae for not sticking to his social-democrat guns than Walkom is.
You can't please everyone, but you'd think your allies would be more forgiving at times. Turning their backs on Rae and the NDP just lead to something a lot worse -- the Commonsense Revolution. (A good book on this time is "A Hard Turn Right"
Rae was premier up to 1995. There were two-terms of Tory and Liberal majorities and now Ontario is a have-not province. Somehow the signficance of Conservative-Liberal failure doesn't resonate as much as the NDP's.
I think expectations were just higher with the NDP. They got over 50% support at the start of their government -- that's pretty broad support in a country with multiple parties. I don't think the Tories or the Liberals had as much hope and enthusiams about the start of their governments.
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