Does the DNC Have An Alliance With Canada's Liberals?

[displacedyankeedem]

Think about the GOTV efforts something like this might reap:

Canadian Liberals to US Swing States

Toronto--->Western Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio
Montreal---->New Hampshire
Windsor/Sarnia/London, Ont----->Michigan(Lower Peninsula) and Ohio
Winnepeg,MB------>Minnesota
Vancouver, BC---->Washington State and Oregon

US DNC to Canada
New York---->Toronto and the 905
Vermont, NH, and Mass---->Ottawa/Hull, ON and Eastern Ontario
Michigan and Ohio---->SE Ontario
Minnesota, Wisconsin--->Manitoba
Washington and Oregon----->Lower British Columbia

Thank goodness that American Freeperville(Montana,Idaho and the Dakotas and Wyoming) borders Canadian Freeperville (Ralph Klein's Lovely Alberta)

[Robbien]

1. Remember Canadian Liberals are much more to the right

they may even be right of the DLC. They would see no value in having the Democratic party win this election.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Really? A government who kept Canada out of Iraq

supports universal health care, and is looking at marijuana decriminalisation, might be right of the DLC? What are their right wing policies? From a third country (the UK), I'd have said they look about the same as Howard Dean.

[Frederic Bastiat]

3. Rubbish!

Name one policy where the Canadian Liberals are to the right of US Dems, one!

[iverglas]

4. eh??

"Remember Canadian Liberals are much more to the right
they may even be right of the DLC."

Don't confuse what Canadians say about Canadian politics with how things work in the US!

The Liberals are right-wing, no doubt about it. But they're considerably lefter-wing, both socially and economically, than the right wing of the US Democratic Party, and in fact than anything but the most left wing of the Democratic Party.

In practice, that is. Liberals are most concerned, in practice, with which side their bread is buttered on, and how to stay in power to keep the butter coming. Since the Canadian electorate is, overall, must lefter than the US Democratic Party, the Liberal Party tailors its message, and to some extent its actions, to fit that mould.

In actual fact, the Liberal Party equivalents of the DLC, what we would just call the backroom boys up here (and specifically Paul Martin's backroom boys during the years he was in exile as PM in waiting), are no social democrats, economically. They'd as gladly privatize health care as any right-wing think tank would, for instance. They just couldn't possibly get away with it, and commitment to the public plan is the best strategy at present for retaining power, which is useful for a whole lot of other reasons.

Socially, yes, many Liberals, both prominent and rank-and-file, are "liberal", and actually believe in the equality guarantees in our constitution, and oppose draconian interferences with liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, for instance. The Liberal Party has a history of having a socially liberal left wing in this respect that it tolerates much more readily than any economically left left wing that has ever arisen in its ranks.

One factor in this is Quebec: the intellectuals who came out of the Quiet Revolution there in the 60s, like Pierre Trudeau, were concerned with individual liberties much more than with economic equity. And the federal Liberal Party in Quebec has long been the home for many politicians who might have been NDP had they been in another province, simply because the Liberal Party offered the only opportunity to actually get elected in Quebec. Longtime federal Solicitor General Warren Allmand is an example; he was courted by the NDP for a long time, and he did endorse the (successful) campaign of the former leader of the NDP in last month's election:

http://www.adamradwanski.com/column060504.html
(worth reading; a leftyish columnist in an extreme right-wing newspaper in Canada)

For a brief time on Tuesday, it appeared the NDP had gotten a massive pre-election boost. Along with another former Liberal cabinet minister, Warren Allmand, and Tory stalwarts Hugh Segal and Flora Macdonald, Mr. Axworthy appeared set to endorse Ed Broadbent's comeback bid in Ottawa Centre.

Mr. Axworthy, in particular, would have been a dramatic coup. As close to a small-l liberal icon as the Chretien era produced, the former foreign affairs minister speaks for a contingent that the NDP would desperately like to win over. Mr. Broadbent knows that, as does Jack Layton - which is why the NDP leader openly courted him in January.

Note that Flora Macdonald, once a candidate for the leadership of the old Progressive Conservative party, also endorsed Ed. She was one of the last of the Red Tories, mainly rendered extinct in Parliament in Brian Mulroney's 1984 corporatist takeover of the party and Parliament -- a C/conservative who was and is waaaay to the left of the DLC, both economically and socially.