To All You Dippers Who Claim the Greens are Right-Wing

Relax.  You're just going through a bout of separation anxiety for deserting your post and abandoning the Left. You want to be Latter Day Liberals, you've gotta suck it up and learn to get over these pangs of conscience.  It's all part of the process of becoming the very thing that, for so many decades, you reviled.

Now, about those rightwing Greens.  Well this sounds really neoliberal. Elizabeth May would like to make an announcement of a new Green Party policy she calls the the Guaranteed Liveable Income, or GLI.

Our plan will ensure no Canadian’s income falls below what is necessary for health, life, and dignity.

Providing our most at-risk citizens with the resources they need to make ends meet greatly reduces the burden on our emergency and social services, saving our system money, and empowering all citizens to overcome periods of hardship.

Together, we can end poverty in Canada. 

The GLI provides reassurance for families struggling to make ends meet, a vital helping hand for stay-at-home parents, stability for the thousands of Canadians who can only find part-time work, and much needed support for those looking to complete their education and launch a successful career.

Cue La Marseillese and let's storm the Bastille of neoliberalism.  Or, if that's too progressive for you just vote for Tommy Angry Beard.  Hmm.  I wonder what Tony Blair would look like with facial hair?

Harper's Ace in the Hole for Election Victory in 2015? - Thomas Mulcair

Coming from anyone but Murray Dobbin, this might have New Democrats up in arms, howling with indignation.  The decidedly progressive journalist, contributor to The Tyee and Rabble, diagnoses just what the Mulcair NDP could be about to inflict on Canada - the end of our progressive hopes.

Unless something changes, come election time there will be two battles: the Harper Conservatives will be running to win, and the NDP and Liberals will be fighting their own private war. It is a recipe for disaster for the country.

The conversations that lead the NDP to this apparent abandonment of the country's best interests clearly take place strictly within the confines of the party bureaucracy. Because if the party's brainiacs actually talked to its supporters, members and progressive Canadians in general, it would know just how terrified people are of the prospect of another Harper majority.

The divide between the NDP leadership's thinking and the political sentiment of its potential supporters has never been greater. This disturbing disconnect suggests that unlike the majority of Canadians who are almost paralyzed by fear and loathing regarding the future of their country, those who run the NDP simply aren't driven by the same fear. Effectively, they care more about their party than they do about their country. It begs the question of whether a progressive party can even make a legitimate claim to the title if the people who run it actually care less about their country than the average citizen does.

Of course the same and worse can be said of the Liberals but nothing more can be expected of them. They are a party of big business, committed to the (ever-worsening) status quo with a long history of appealing to Canadians progressive instincts during elections while dutifully serving the interests of the economic elite.

...These are decidedly not normal times. For the first time in our history we actually have a government that is committed to dismantling the best aspects of our country.

That cries out for an extraordinary response. And if the NDP can't propose an accord of some kind based on principle (let's see if the Liberals have the jam to refuse) then why not do it based on opportunism? It would hardly be a departure given its myriad compromises over the years (and its opportunistic defeat of the Liberals in 2006, handing Harper power). Oddly, the NDP claims to want power yet demonstrates with its intransigence on co-operation with the Liberals that it is not actually serious.

It is obvious to all progressive Canadians that if either the Liberals or the Conservatives win a majority the country is in deep trouble. The Liberals will not commit themselves to reversing all the damage done by Harper. They are interested in power for the sake of it and would happily administer the status quo inherited from the Conservatives.

Dobbin's remarks raise an important, albeit tangential question.  Is there any room for progressives within the Liberal tent as it stands today?  If there is, I can't see it.  In my view, Liberal progressivism is a hollow affectation.  That Liberal Party is a thing of the past and there's neither the interest or will to resurrect it.  Today's Liberal Party under Justin is not the Liberal Party of Pierre. It's a diminished thing, dried up and technocratic.

What I'd like to see is a Liberal-NDP coalition just strong enough to bring in some form of proportional representation.  One term, that's all we would need. After that they can go at each other hammer and tong while the rest of us can bring the Green Party to a position of effective influence.

They've Already Shown You Their True Colours. And You'll Vote for Them, Why?

My party has only one voice in Parliament but it's a voice against which all the rest are to be measured and, when you do that, you get to see them clearly for what they are, their true colours.

In today's Toronto Star, columnist Tom Walkom calls out Mulcair and Trudeau for what they are - spineless opportunists for whom serving themselves will always trump serving Canada.


So far, the only opposition MP with enough guts to critique the content of the Conservative government’s new anti-terror bill is Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

She said Monday in the Commons that it would turn CSIS into a “secret police force.”

She also asked if the bill’s remarkably broad definition of crimes against the security of Canada included anti-pipeline protests (and got no answer).

Now that experts have had a chance to plow through the omnibus bill, other critics are surfacing.

In a statement released Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association asked the most trenchant question: Why are these extraordinary new security powers needed?

“There are still no answers as to why our existing laws and powers didn’t work — or if they didn’t work,” CCLA executive director Sukanya Pillay wrote.

She also pointed out that criminalizing something as vague as the advocacy of terrorism could have a chilling effect on academics and journalists.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has gone even further, saying that Bill C-51 would create “an unprecedented expansion of powers that will harm innocent Canadians and not increase public safety.”

In a release, it said it is alarmed by proposals that would expand the amount of time a terror suspect can be jailed without charge and that would allow judges to impose stringent conditions — including house arrest — on people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Stripping a person’s liberty where no crime is committed or suspected runs counter to our “most basic principles of fundamental justice,” the B.C. association wrote.

But none of this stopped the Liberals or New Democrats from supporting Harper's odious bill.  Walkom cuts to the chase.

Why are Canada’s usually obstreperous opposition parties so meek? Alas, they are afraid — afraid that if they criticize the substance of Bill C-51, Harper will paint them as soft on terror.

Yes, they're afraid.  Mulcair and Trudeau had to choose whether to stand up for Canada and oppose this egregious assault on our democratic freedom or buckle to Harper's will out of fear.  If they're this spineless in opposition you can be certain they'll be worms if they ever get power.

It was precisely this political malignancy that The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote of just a few days ago.


We are told at every election to hold our noses, forget the deficiencies and betrayals and vote Labour yet again, for fear of something worse. And there will, of course, always be something worse. So at what point should we vote for what we want rather than keep choosing between two versions of market fundamentalism? Sometime this century? Or in the next?

Perhaps there was a time when this counsel of despair made sense. No longer. The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Trudeau and Mulcair just wiped their boots on you.  This country has no need of their kind or their parties.

h/t Lorne, Politics and its Discontents

Could Greece Become the Salvation of Western Democracy?

Greece is revered as the nation that gave mankind democracy.  Could it now become the nation that restored democracy to mankind?

Around the world, democracy has taken a pounding from the fist of neoliberalism.  Market fundamentalism and democracy are simply incompatible over time.  Neoliberalism promotes illiberal democracy, ultimately leading to political capture and the rise of plutocracy as the populace is steadily reduced economically and politically, their power quietly transferred to a select minority.

The Guardian's George Monbiot writes that we're witnessing "the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus."  This he sees in the triumph of the Syriza movement in the recent Greek elections.

The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Foreign Policy's Philippe LeGrain agrees with Monbiot and foresees Syriza's win spreading to Spain and beyond.

"Yes we can" may be a stale slogan in Obama's America but in crisis-hit Spain it is the rallying cry of a year-old radical-left party that is taking the country by storm. In a show of strength, more than 100,000 supporters of Podemos (the party’s name means “We Can” in Spanish) filled the streets of Madrid on Jan. 31 to protest against austerity, crushing debts, and the country’s corrupt political system — and demand change. The demonstrators don’t represent a fringe group, either. Podemos is leading in the polls, ahead of both the mainstream center-left and center-right parties in elections that will be held by the end of the year.

The election of a radical-left Syriza-led government in Greece on Jan. 25 has electrified European politics. After years of being told that there is no alternative to bowing to German demands for crushing austerity and wage cuts, the plucky Greeks have dared to stand up to Angela Merkel’s government in Berlin — and other Europeans have stood up and noticed. While the immediate focus is on the showdown between the new Greek government and eurozone authorities over demands for debt relief — and the (unlikely) possibility that Greece could end up ejected from the currency union — Athenian defiance is already having wider political repercussions.

...Debtor-country governments that have obediently complied with the German diktat — notably, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland — suddenly feel very exposed politically. Governments that have mounted a mild challenge to Merkel (think France and Italy) are in a delicate position: They spy an opportunity to advance their own agenda, while fearing that they may be outflanked by those with a more radical one. And not without reason; anti-establishment parties of various stripes have the wind in their sails.

Whenever voters throw out a government, as they have done in nearly every election since the crisis began in 2008, officials from Berlin, Brussels, and Frankfurt — whom they did not elect and cannot hold to account — loudly insist that the incoming administration must stick to the failed policies of the outgoing one. Since voting for establishment parties of the center-left or center-right makes little difference, it’s hardly surprising that voters are seeking a genuine alternative. And for the moment this exists only on the extremes.

Sometimes, as in Greece and Spain, the insurgents are on the radical left. In Ireland, which is not due to vote until next year, Sinn Féin, a left-wing party that was formerly the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, has a narrow lead in the polls. In other cases, the upstarts are on the far-right. In France, Marine Le Pen’s racist National Front is out in front,winning by-elections and pulling ahead in polls for the 2017 presidential election. In Italy, where reformist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi remains popular, all three main opposition parties — the far-right Northern League, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia — are now anti-euro.

Meanwhile, The Tyee's Crawford Killian ponders whether Canada's politically disaffected could provide the core for our own version of Syrzia or Podemos.

Radical or not, Syriza and Podemos pose a powerful challenge to the narrow centre-right spectrum of acceptable thought. That could encourage some of our cautious Liberals and New Democrats to try out some ideas that are radical only by comparison with the dull orthodoxy of Stephen Harper. If they do, they might find that many Canadians are way ahead of them -- including the two out of five who didn't even bother to vote in the last election.

I agree.  The Liberals and the New Democrats too easily threw in the towel to embrace market fundamentalism and an unhealthy degree of neoliberalism as though these were inevitabilities.  In their unseemly quest for power (NDP) and redemption (LPC) both have abandoned the progressive Left.  They might both do well to lift their eyes, take a look around, and mend their ways.

There's Only One Position and It's Filled

Call him what you like, Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness, the Baron of Bland, today's Corporate Canada has its administrator in chief and we call him Stephen J. Harper.

Here's a secret:  the Liberals and New Democrats want Harper's job.  They want one of their guys to become the next C.E.O. of Corporate Canada.   They want Harper out.   They're not trying to dismantle the corporation.

I read a lot of nonsense about what the "left" should be doing or how the "progressive" parties should be doing this or that.   And each time I see those references I ask myself, "what 'left'" or "what 'progressives'?"

There was a time when most everything on the other side of the Conservatives could be considered left or at least slightly centre-left.   Then Harper showed up with his prime directive to shift Canada's political centre far to the right and fix it there.   And, with a great deal of help from people with names like Ignatieff and Layton, that's exactly what he's done.

Harper said we wouldn't recognize Canada when he was done with it and it turns out he was right.   He was so right that now it's also nearly impossible to recognize the Liberals and, even more so, the New Democrats for what they used to be.   Harper can be justly proud for beating the socialist stuffing right out of the New Democrats, sending them running for cover as Latter-Day-Liberals.  Sorry Dippers but you've been royally Tony Blaired.

Isn't it odd that the Canadian people don't much care for Steve Harper as a person.   They certainly don't trust him.   But that doesn't matter, does it?   They think that, overall, he's running the country more or less okay.  

The Canadian people think he's a somewhat competent administrator and that's what prime ministership has become today, administration.   And who can blame the Canadian people for seeing it that way when the opposition parties are looking to fill that same job?

So what are we reduced to?  We're waiting patiently for Steve Harper to screw up so badly that enough voters will turn up at the polls to turf him out.   That could be a while because Steve has shown us his greatest talent - engineering election wins out of thin air.   His campaign strategy has always been the same - "That guy,  are you serious?"

But there may be another way, one that doesn't depend on Steve Harper falling down a flight of stairs.   That's to do the one thing he can't.   That's to become genuinely progressive again.      And the neat thing is, once we restore progressivism to the heart of our politics, we can generate powerful policy platforms and present a vision that speaks to the concerns of Canadians, that resonates deeply with the voting public.   If that means leaving the security blanket of corporatism, and it does, then the country and our people are far better off for it.

If you're still not convinced, look at it this way.   Progressivism is the key to the future of the Canadian people as we, and the rest of the world, meet the challenges that this century has in store for us.  It is the glue that holds together and nurtures the strongest, broadest and most vibrant middle class, the very cohesiveness without which we are in for a very rough time very soon.  It's time for a bit of housecleaning on the left.

Why the Fear?

Why do the Liberals and NDP still act as though there was something remotely controversial about anthropogenic global warming or the threat to our society from growing inequality of incomes, wealth and opportunity?

These are two enormous threats to the Canadian people, today and for generations to come, and both require progressive solutions.

As a major, per capita emitter, Canada is among the handful of nations under the greatest moral duty to act to arrest climate change.   We are full members in a select club of major emitters who have an obligation to lead the world in decarbonizing our economies and our societies.   Yet there doesn't appear to be even one of those currently in party leadership positions or vying for a leadership spot who will stand on the principle of what Canada, already a well-deserved pariah state, must do.

And then there's the social cancer that threatens to consume our middle class, inequality.   It seems to be conventional political wisdom that Canada's economy is so integrated with America's that attacking inequality is too dangerous, fraught with enormous consequences for the Canadian economy. 

Are we really doomed to fly wingman to America as it spins out of control?   In several respects America is on its way down and on its way out.   It has become the corporatist state sans pareil, the most powerful permanent warfare state perhaps since Rome and a boiling cauldron of spreading inequality and ascendant oligarchy.   Must we tie ourselves to that?   Can we not imagine something better for our people than what they would inflict on theirs?   Are we really that fearful of a better future?

There was a time when the New Democrats would be demanding these very things for the Canadian people.   There was a time when they would be standing and loudly shaming the government of the day for this sort of thing.   Now they stand mute, silenced, seeking to become what they for so long reviled.   The duct tape across their mouths is their own.

Murray Dobbins Urges New Dems to Save Their Souls

The Tyee's Murray Dobbins says the New Dems are heading in the wrong direction and only the Libs and Tories will benefit from it.  Dobbins says Mulcair has it all wrong.

A couple of polls showing the federal NDP losing support to the Liberals pose some pretty fundamental questions for the party and its small 'l' liberal leader Thomas Mulcair. Does the party follow the narrow political path of the two big business parties or does it reinvent itself as a movement party and tap into the deep dissatisfaction of Canadians about the state of politics and governance in this country?

...Thomas Mulcair and the NDP decided ...to listen to the polls showing the Liberals (read Justin "He doesn't really want the job" Trudeau) gaining ground at their expense. The result? A complete about-face on so-called "free trade" deals. Instead of highlighting three incredibly destructive investment agreements currently in the news they panicked -- ending their commitment to get out of NAFTA, calling on the WTO to re-launch global trade talks and urging Harper to sign deals with India, Brazil and South Africa.
Here was a chance for the NDP to stake out ground that distinguished them from all other parties. Mulcair (who unfortunately does support "free trade") could have used these deals (FIPA, CETA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership) to lambast their potential destructive impact on the country and argue against more such agreements. None of them have anything to do with trade -- they are all about corporate rights, just like NAFTA and the WTO. 

...That Mulcair would back off the NDP's historic position on these odious corporate rights deals demonstrates how vulnerable the party is to feeling obliged to move in the direction of being a second Liberal Party. Ironically, it is their historic 100 plus seats that has made them more cautious (reminiscent of their increased caution in 1988 when they were running second in the polls). But the more they back off from who they are, the more people will go to the real thing. And it's not mostly about policies, it's mostly about trust. Harper has managed to create a new political and government culture in which the default position of most citizens is distrust. If Mulcair wants Canadians to trust the NDP he has to take the party forward and not backward.

...The NDP's future success depends on increasing people's expectations of what is possible -- not further decreasing them.

Dobbins has nailed it on Mulcair's balding head.   Just as Ignatieff dragged the Liberals to a place where there was nothing for them, so too is Mulcair, even if he is carrying on Jack Layton's plan.   This obsessively centrist political compression is toxic for the New Democrats.   If Canadians want a liberal party, as Dobbins puts it, they'll go for the real thing, not the Layton/Mulcair Latter Day Liberals.

When Leaders Lose Touch with Reality

It's becoming a recurring theme - top political leaders seriously out of touch with reality. They simply lack the courage to go beyond their established comfort zones and that translates into the enormous disaffection of the voting public with their political leadership.

What party able to wield political clout (sorry Greens) has anything remotely approaching an effective policy to combat global warming? Here's a hint: if they support the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands, their eco-chants are just so much greenwash. Imagine our own Canada refusing to become a leader in the fight to save mankind, our civilization and our planet from environmental catastrophe. It's positively mind boggling.

Across the pond, Britain's former chief scientist, Sir David King, has attacked politicians and industry experts for having "their heads in the sand" over the reality of declining oil supplies. From The Guardian:

...King said governments, including the UK's, were too eager to believe the optimistic predictions of economists who tell them that "oil will be squeezed out of the ground pretty much forever".

King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, is now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford.

He said: "That's what governments want to hear and that's what they do hear, and I think the British government as much as many others."

...He said oil demand would overtake production capacity as soon as 2015, which would drive up the price further.

...While transport is seen as the most difficult sector to decarbonise, action needs to be taken immediately to keep people and goods moving while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, he said.

"I can't overemphasise the importance of persuading governments to focus attention on what's going to be a very significant issue as we move into the next decade.

"It is down to government to steer us towards a defossilised economy using the regulatory and financial incentives available.

If you're not convinced Canada's political leadership is out of touch with reality, read Marsden's book, "Stupid to The Last Drop." It's a telling look at Alberta's looming environmental catastrophe at the hands of Big Oil and an indictment of the political leadership, provincial and federal, doing Big Oil's bidding. Once read, you'll be under no illusions about those who proclaim themselves fit to guide our country. Canada, like every other industrialized nation, needs to be working toward decarbonizing our economy and our society even as our political leadership reveal themselves to be devout Fossil Fuellers.