Public Address | Cafe | Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP

Steve Barnes

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:38:12 +1300

A veritable pile….

An ostentatious one at that...

Rosemary McDonald

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 15:17:45 +1300

But hey… There goes the neighbourhood…

A veritable pile....

Russell Brown

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 14:39:04 +1300

*obviously, given the number of political wonks here, I’ll shortly be taken to school with a detailed analysis of the results of the Swedish Federal elections of 2003 or whatever.

I didn't want to say ...

Rich of Observationz

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:42:13 +1300

and a distant cousin of Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist.

Steve Barnes

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:26:42 +1300

I am surprised nobody has mentioned this…
Trudeau is the eldest son of former Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau.
A new political dynasty?.
The first Trudeau to arrive in Canada was Etienne Trudeau (1641–1712), a carpenter and home builder, in 1659.
Good roots, similar…

chris

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 12:31:04 +1300

“people don’t vote for tax raises”

Contextualisng: raising taxes for 1% to pay for tax breaks for the middle class may not be so much about the hike as the breaks. It’s not comparable to say Labour’s proposed 2014 CGT where, unless you bothered to wade through their website, there…

Craig Ranapia

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 10:38:16 +1300

So a whole bunch of my best friends are lefty Canadians. What they want is 'shot of Stephen Harper'. I've never heard any of them mention the opposition parties.

It never hurts if your opponents are about as palatable as a pork sausage in a kosher deli, but it also…

David Hood

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 09:30:02 +1300

So instead we grasp for things that aren’t there, extrapolating and shoe-horning into our own world.

While I tend to agree with that, in terms of shoe-horning the Canadian landslide does give a very easy answer to the next time someone says "people don't vote for tax raises"

Kumara Republic

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:28:36 +1300

But there’s one lesson at least: FPP is a joke. Not that we need to be taught.

Justin Trudeau has thought out loud of electoral reform.

Rich Lock

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 20:41:01 +1300

So a whole bunch of my best friends are lefty Canadians. What they want is 'shot of Stephen Harper'.

Exactly. The elephant in the room that must never, ever be mentioned by political strategists is that governments lose elections at least as much and almost certainly more than oppositions win…

martinb

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:19:59 +1300

Still, however much of a silver fox Corbyn is, there are a few noticeable differences to Trudeau yeh?

Russell Brown

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 18:22:32 +1300

Yeah – whatever NDP did it doesn’t seem to have worked at all. I’m getting the impression it’s their voters moving to the Liberals that have been the biggest swing.
Sorry Rob, it’s not working to script.

The Ottawa Citizen report tends to agree:

But the concerns NDP strategists had…

Rob Stowell

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 17:10:29 +1300

And even 'tea partiers' are supporting Sanders
(It's not just castigating the banks – it's the sort of 'nationalism' that says no to the TPPA, no to war-mongering, and instead proposes to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure in the US – creating US jobs and rebuilding decrepit public…

Rob Stowell

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 17:04:23 +1300

Maybe the tide is changing?
Trudeau, who has re-energized the Liberal Party since its devastating electoral losses four years ago, promises to raise taxes on the rich and run deficits for three years to boost government spending.
Liberals Win Resounding Victory in Canadian Elections

Rob Stowell

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:50:51 +1300

Yeah – whatever NDP did it doesn't seem to have worked at all. I'm getting the impression it's their voters moving to the Liberals that have been the biggest swing.
Sorry Rob, it's not working to script.
Watching things in the US is interesting. Sanders may not be winning, but…

simon g

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:24:48 +1300

I think the main lesson from Canada is that there aren't many lessons from Canada.

This happens all the time – local factors are of internal interest, and explain the election results well, but they can't apply to the rest of us. Plus, we don't really care (sorry Canada!). So…

David Hood

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:01:23 +1300

Landslide to the liberals, with what looks like a clear majority. Compared to seats held in the last election the Conservatives will have about 60% of the seats they had, NDP will have about 35% of the seats they had. If this was, as Rob suggested a month ago, the…

David Hood

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 18:57:19 +1300

So how has the NDP claim the middle been going? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34431009

TracyMac

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 17:01:31 +1300

Not to mention working families trotted out daily by Labor on this side of the pond while they were still in.

So, if you can't work, fuck off? If you're not living in a family unit (I don't), ditto?

Yeah, I get appealing to the core subscriber base; the part…

Keith Locke

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 09:41:08 +1300

Rob, the only example you give of a "centrist" NDP policy is lowering business taxes. The government supporting innovation is a left policy, not a centrist one, as you claim. The government helping to get more manufacturing jobs is favouring the working class, not the "middle class", as you claim.…

Tom Semmens

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 21:19:54 +1300

Rob's unrepentant Blairism continues to believe in the tooth fairy – that the ideological state apparatuses of neoliberal capitalism will give the left a fair suck of the sav if we just get the tone right, if we are just a bit reasonable, if we just carefully tailor the appeal…

B Jones

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 20:18:15 +1300

"Hard-working" could signal a different sort of other, though – those who are wealthy enough not to need a proper job. It depends on the context of course – if you use the term when you're talking about exploitative businesses it means something very different than when you're talking about…

Kumara Republic

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 23:02:30 +1200

I’ve been mulling over this. I didn’t like it when Shearer, then Cunliffe and now Little started mouthing “hard-working New Zealanders”. This post has finally made me realise why that ghastly expression is used.

It's somehow related to 'Aussie battler' rhetoric. John Howard milked it for all it was worth.

Cecelia

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 20:47:21 +1200

Kumara Republic

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 19:06:06 +1200

I’m with Corbyn, Sanders and the Pope. We need systemic change and bugger the centre.

A lot of us would agree. But some incredibly strong forces would be needed to pull it off – and a lot of these forces are too big to be done through the political system.…

Rob Stowell

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 18:20:36 +1200

We need systemic change and bugger the centre.

I'm hoping enough of us will get on this train :)

Rosemary McDonald

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 16:13:13 +1200

bugger the centre.

Arguably, the centre is already buggered...bring on the change!

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo.

Cecelia

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 14:30:15 +1200

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/pope-francis-bernie-sanders-and-the-moral-imperative-of-systemic-change.html

I'm with Corbyn, Sanders and the Pope. We need systemic change and bugger the centre.

Joe Wylie

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 09:09:37 +1200

Certainly the long term outcome of the Brash effort has been bad for the racist right, who no longer have a powerful political advocate.

Brash always dissembled when pressed to substantiate the racist implications of the Orewa speech. Hardly surprising once it was revealed that Michael Bassett was the author.…

B Jones

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 08:56:44 +1200

They might have been trying to do something similar, but it's not the same for them. You need something populist but convincingly left-flavoured – it looks insincere if it's not been part of your recent political history. Labour would need to cannibalise the Greens in the same way that Brash…

Kumara Republic

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 01:24:40 +1200

I’m curious as to whether this theory applies as well to the right. Don Brash was no centrist, yet he was at least partially successful in kicking the early 2000s National Party out of electoral doldrums, and while he didn’t quite get over the line, he did enough damage to…

Ben Austin

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 01:08:04 +1200

Ahh yes, Canada, the other country that had a viable Social Credit movement

linger

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 21:19:38 +1200

But then, he was taking enough drugs to overcome all need for sleep...

(yeh, I suspect Rich was actually being a little facetious.)

Ieuan

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 21:10:00 +1200

Are you kidding? Toronto mayoral politics alone are awesome. Rob Ford doesn't even make the top five.

B Jones

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:39:56 +1200

I'm curious as to whether this theory applies as well to the right. Don Brash was no centrist, yet he was at least partially successful in kicking the early 2000s National Party out of electoral doldrums, and while he didn't quite get over the line, he did enough damage to…

Rob Stowell

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:11:30 +1200

enact stridently left policy on other issues that matter to the left.
Because poverty is something only the strident could possibly bother their little heads with?
Clever politics isn’t quite so patronising towards its base :)

Emma Hart

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:07:03 +1200

The Canadian left may not get everything it wants, but it will get a lot of things it wants. That’s what victory looks like in a modern democracy.

So a whole bunch of my best friends are lefty Canadians. What they want is 'shot of Stephen Harper'. I've never heard…

Kumara Republic

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:55:29 +1200

The choice of Other doesn't matter, it's about giving people someone to hate, fear and require the government to protect them from.

On the other side of the fence, Shock Doctrinists are an obvious target. But they tend to have the sort of fat chequebooks at their disposal – and…

David Hood

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:11:52 +1200

So then, on this basis, would you say that if they do lose they are using the wrong tactics? Or is it that if they do lose their policies were too close to Corbyn's (the only major difference in the 4 points that I can see is Corbyn called on…

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 13:33:32 +1200

But besides:
optimistic self-images about “hard work” is textbook political strategy, employed by left and right parties alike

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 13:25:02 +1200

Canadian politics. If you could combine that with data-based political analysis, you could market it as a cure for insomnia.

Public Address

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 13:25:02 +1200

Discussion from blog post.