Unite? Liberals,
Greens Are Not 'Progressive'
Why I'm not buying into an electoral
cooperation pact with New Democrats in next federal election.
Tuesday December
4, 2012
By Bill Tieleman
"The
reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that
is dead."
-
U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt 1901-1909
"Unite
the left! Have all progressive parties defeat Stephen Harper's evil
Conservatives" is the rallying cry of a coalition of increasingly angry
agitators.
But
my reply is simple: Unite progressives my posterior!
The
reality is that neither the federal Liberal nor Green parties are
"left" or "progressive" -- and certainly not a merger match
for the New Democratic Party.
And
despite calls for lowest common denominator politics to defeat Harper, there's
a fundamental problem even bigger than creating a cooperative voting coalition
for just one election.
It's
that the Anyone But Conservatives movement is based on removing voters' right
to choose the party of their own liking.
This
coercive and anti-democratic impulse is driven by the deluded desperation of Harper
haters.
That's
why it will never work.
But
it hasn't stopped federal Liberal leadership contender Joyce Murray, the
Vancouver-Quadra MP, from promoting the
idea last week of joint nominations for just the 2015 election,
followed by electoral system reform.
The
concept behind it is also flawed, because believing that all social democratic
NDP supporters would vote for a Liberal or Green candidate in their riding
requires an ideological leap of logic.
Murray
herself must be aware that many New Democrat voters wouldn't vote for her own
candidacy, based on her past record as a Gordon Campbell cabinet minister
responsible for cutting environmental protection in his first term as B.C.
premier.
Splinters
that splinter
And
even if the three parties came to an agreement, it's likely some supporters
would rebel and create other parties that matched their perspective. God forbid
that the separatist Bloc Quebecois remnants have anything to do with it either.
In
the case of the Liberals, we know that many of their voters would do exactly
the opposite of the desired effect: they would vote for the Harper
Conservatives rather than the NDP or Green candidate they were being asked to
endorse.
Some
Greens might do the same. After all, their previous national leader Jim Harris came from the
Conservatives and current leader Elizabeth May once worked for the
Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
Alice
Funke of Pundits' Guide has outlined the
faulty logic that was highlighted when recent NDP leadership
candidate and B.C. MP Nathan Cullen proposed joint
nomination meetings where members would "co-operate with
progressives across the political spectrum" to choose anti-Conservative
candidates.
Despite
Cullen's energetic campaign and the promotion of his
idea by online activist group Leadnow.ca and others, he finished
third and did not receive the mandate he wanted to pursue the concept.
In
fact, Leadnow.ca's new efforts to convince the Liberal Party to endorse
cooperation as it heads to an April leadership vote has only garnered 17,000
supporters to date.
Adjusting
to Justin
As
for the Liberals' compatibility in even a temporary electoral coalition, just
look at Liberal MP and dauphin Justin Trudeau's most recent pronouncements.
Trudeau supports
the Chinese state-owned CNOOC oil company's proposed takeover of Calgary-based
oil and gas producer Nexen because it's "good for Canada" -- without
addressing the sell out of our resources or the issue of a Communist
dictatorship increasingly owning big chunks of our economy.
Trudeau
also now says that while he voted against the Conservatives' elimination of the
long-gun registry, a Liberal government wouldn't even consider bringing back a
valuable tool to prevent gun violence that the Canadian Association of Chiefs
of Police wanted
kept in place.
"The
long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure and I'm not going to resuscitate
that," Trudeau said.
"There are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which is, has
been removed."
May's
contradictions
Then
there's Green Party leader Elizabeth May's constant contradictions on
ecological and progressive issues.
How
can any self-respecting Green look themselves in the environmental mirror after
their calculating candidate in the Victoria by-election last month opposed a
plant to treat the 130 million litres of raw sewage dumped into the Juan de
Fuca Strait daily?
“Local
scientists have cautioned us that the Strait of Juan de Fuca is a unique
environment. Its special currents deal with the human waste naturally,"
Donald Galloway says on his website,
adding that the plant is too expensive and doesn't deal with all contaminants.
The
Greens were so sensitive to their flip-flop that when local celebrity sewage
treatment activist James Skwarok -- who wears a brown costume to look like a
giant piece of feces called Mr. Floatie -- showed up at a party event where
David Suzuki appeared, Skwarok was flushed from
the room.
"I
was a bit bummed out," Skwarok told Canadian Press. "I was a bit
shocked, actually, that they weren't in favour of Victoria's sewage treatment
plan."
"I'm
dismayed that so many candidates are against treatment," he said. "We
spent the last five, six years carefully planning treatment for Victoria and we
have the money now, so it's time to do it. It's 2012. It's not 1850."
(Skwarok,
who retired his Mr. Floatie outfit after it appeared a treatment plant would
finally be built, calls his new campaign a "second movement.")
Liberal
candidate Paul Summerville also ran against the $783 million plant, saying:
"There's no net environmental benefit to the plan that's being
produced."
And
Trudeau backed him up on that dubious deduction.
"I
think we need to be worried about what the actual science says instead of what
the ideology is," Trudeau told
reporters.
Even
Conservative candidate Dale Gann reversed himself, despite his own government
offering to pay one-third of the costs, leaving only winning NDP candidate
Murray Rankin to support a decades overdue decision to stop pumping untreated
sewage via a long pipe out to sea -- something our American neighbours are
furious about.
So
much for the environmental commitment of Liberals and Greens.
Pro
rep repelled
And
what about the idea of a temporary cooperative coalition to vanquish the Tories
and implement a new voting system with some form of proportional representation
to ensure Harper's ilk can never again gain a majority?
(Disclosure:
I successfully opposed the Single
Transferable Vote proposal in both the 2005 and 2009 provincial election
referenda as president of NO BC STV.)
So
the goal of a "progressive" party cooperation pact to facilitate
changing the electoral system is hardly likely to garner national support.
None
of this is to say parties cannot cooperate on key issues.
For
example, the NDP, Liberals and Greens have all opposed the Enbridge Northern
Gateway Pipeline proposal, which is strongly backed by the Conservatives.
And
if voters want to make their own decisions in each riding as to which
anti-Conservative candidate has the best chance of defeating a sitting MP, go
to it -- convince enough people and it will be successful.
We've
seen several political organizations advocate, advertise and set up websites to
advise voters on exactly that -- albeit the results
have been very poor.
But
do not let anyone call themselves either progressive or democratic if they are
advocating a two-choice election in 2015 -- Conservative or their alternative
ABC mix.
What's even
worse than another Stephen Harper Conservative government is a country where
high-minded elites deprive voters of a full range of political parties in the
next election.
.
