I just switched political parties

[TrogL]

I've been a die-hard, broken-glass Liberal for decades. I've campaigned for them, donated money and everything else.

At noon I was at a campaign stop for Jack Layton, talked with him for five minutes, was 10 feet away from him during his speech and got to talk with him again after.

Tonight I'm literally wearing an NDP t-shirt and tomorrow I'm going on a campaign sign-planting binge.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Jeebus.

I had to read this thing three times and hit Google. You scared the hell out of me. ;-)

Good luck with the NDP.

[Critters2]

2. Pardon my ignorance, but what are the differences between these two parties? nt

[Ediacara]

19. Liberals are like mainstream Democrats, and NDP are like liberal Democrats and Greens

(well not exactly, but it's center-left vs left).

[Critters2]

24. Oh. Sounds like I'd be NDP if I were a Canuck.

Thanks for the clarification.

[Peacetrain]

32. well the greens gave us Nadar, who ended up giving us Bush..

:shrug:..

[Puregonzo1188]

59. Which relates to Canadian parliamentary politics how?

[readmoreoften]

63. Don't you get it? Any Canadian who doesn't vote for Obama is voting for McCain.

Do TEH MATH!!1!!

[Peacetrain]

64. Actually does not relate to Canadian parliamentary politics at all

I was responding tongue in cheek to the poster ahead of me who said the NDP were like liberal democrats and greens in the United States.. I was just being a smart a@@ .. sometimes what seems funny sitting at the keyboard, falls a tad flat on the screen:)

[Greyhound]

62. Bullshit.

[Taverner]

Ahhh the rationality of the Parliament system

We should only be so lucky :)

[AzNick]

3. Tell us you're Canadian first

Because most people here do not know about the NDP.

[stopbush]

4. Deja vu? I'd swear I read this exact post back in 2006. Anyone else?

[The Wielding Truth]

5. So, you are a Canadian Democrat? Okay. I guess.

[LiberadorHugo]

10. It's a social democratic party...

It's a tent of Third Way Blairites, social democrats, democratic socialists, the evangelical left, and Trot entryists...But it's a bit more fluid than that. I'm a democratic socialist with a lapsed NDP membership and a good-standing membership in the International Socialists (which is a Trot group with some members who critically support the NDP and others who have washed their hands of it all together). I'm so far to the left that if I were to become a surrogate for Obama, McCain would win over 400 EVs. :-(

[SharonRB]

6. Oh, yeah

I met him at Take Back America -- he's great!

[Mabus]

11. His wife was pretty nice too.

:hi:


P.S. You know! Mike told you and you know. You've been waiting on this. LOL.
The rest of us will find out Monday. I can wait. ;)

[SharonRB]

14. I'll find out Monday if I know what I think I know

I might not.

:hi:

[Mabus]

18. Mike trusts you

So I think you do know. If you don't, we'll both know by mid-Monday afternoon.

[SharonRB]

26. This could be a totally different one than the one I know about

although that one was supposed to break in the fall, so it could be it.

I had no idea something was getting ready to break until I saw your message to Mike on Facebook and followed the link back to his blog.

[Mabus]

39. I find out about all kinds of stuff on facebook

I figured that's where you saw it. And naturally, I saw you wrote on Mike's wall. Damn, this is a small world.

[LiberadorHugo]

22. His wife is a very classy and very progressive lady...

I had the pleasure of meeting her at a 2004 rally in Toronto. :-)

[Mabus]

23. SharonRB and I shared a table with the two of them

for lunch at a conference (along with several others). We ended up talking about several things including the climate crisis. They were a lovely and very intelligent couple. They were also very open and approachable. To my knowledge there was no security and it was pretty cool being able to hang out and eat lunch with them.

[SharonRB]

28. Yes, it definitely was.

[SharonRB]

27. I liked her very much, too, when I met her.

[LiberadorHugo]

7. Good...

I've never been a Liberal. :-) Why would I want to be a member of the party of Tom Wappel, Paul Szabo, and Roger Galloway? I'm an atheist and I know that people like that won't even protect my fundamental civil liberties if they have their way. The NDP has had a strong evangelical/Christian socialist bent, but these are good evangelicals in the tradition of certain factions of the European Left...They've always been more concerned about building Heaven on Earth for everyone than with destroying the Earth to bring about a theocracy or theo"democracy" of the elite.

[iverglas]

56. that "evangelical/Christian socialist bent"

It's what we call "the social gospel", of course. ;)

The Church of England = the Tory party at prayer
The United Church of Canada = the NDP at prayer

The NDP is my present party, and the UCC is my long-ago church. The church was a major factor in my becoming the atheist socialist I am!

The UCC is one of the Cdn churches currently active in campaigns around water -- to ensure clean drinking water for everyone in the world, and to fight the commodification of water.

Tommy Douglas, father of Cdn medicare etc., was a Baptist clergyperson. Not, one must assure our southern colleagues, anything like the Baptists of their acquaintance.

The NDP and mainstream protestant Canadian churches oppose any criminalization of abortion. The NDP and mainstream protestant Canadian churches were active protesters in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Several mainstream Canadian churches have less than honourable things in their past (the residential schools that First Nations children were forced into being the big one), but at present there is very little that they can be reproached for, in terms of social justice issues.


Oh -- and of course the United Church first ordained women the better part of a century ago, and accepted gay and lesbian clergy a couple of decades ago, and was a player in the fight to have same-sex marriages recognized, as was the NDP, and performs same-sex marriages.

[Gwendolyn]

8. Hey, the Canucki side of our family said the same thing!

They were also die-hard liberals. I'm not sure what the diff between liberal and NDP is either, but they say Jack Layton is like the Canadian Obama. Maybe the whole North American continent needs to take out the trash. :toast:

[LiberadorHugo]

17. There's a big difference...

Much less corruption, and the NDP is rooted in the labour movement, the left-wing components of Western Canada protest movements, the evangelical left, and the radical farmers of old; in contrast, the Liberals are genuinely rooted (at least since WW2...Once you get into early Canadian history, it's a little bit different.) in the factions of the Canadian elite who have backed Keynesian economics, secularisation, and social liberalism. Making it even more confusing is the fact that the NDP is the only party in which the provincial and federal parties form an organisation. The provincial Progressive Conservative/Conservative and Liberal parties have nothing to do with any federal parties (aside from some informal ties) and may hold some markedly different ideological positions. For instance, Ontario's Progressive Conservative party was significantly left of the Liberals from the early-20th century to about 1985. A lot of progressive reforms (of the Keynesian welfare state varieties) took place during the years of George Drew right up until the electoral defeat of the Bill Davis government in 1985 and the election of hard-righter Frank Miller as leader of the Ontario PCs. This shift to the hard neo-liberal right was compounded by Mike Harris' faction and the young ultracons who drafted his Common (non)Sense Revolution platform in the mid-1990s. Many provinces also have only two viable political parties (NDP-Liberal, NDP-Saskatchewan Party, NDP-Social Credit, etc...) and there is no correspondence between the provincial parties of Quebec (three parties that are heavily in favour of neo-liberalism but who differentiate themselves by their opinion on social issues, immigration, and the question of Quebec independence...) and the parties on the federal landscape. In provinces where the NDP is the dominant party of the centre as well as of the left, there is significant support for Keynesian economics or even neo-liberalism as opposed to any sort of real socialism. Along with the unwillingness of Western NDP governments to pursue electoral reform where they have held power and the party's collective unwillingness to review its membership in the neo-liberal "Socialist" International (home to Latin American parties who have been just as despicable as Pinochet's gang...Read up on Venezuela's Democratic Action, Nicaragua's Sandinista Front, and Mexico's PRI to understand what I'm getting at...There's also an Egyptian that rigs elections, marks in lockstep with Washington, and has been involved in the persecution of atheists and Coptic Christians), these positions have played my major role in my allowing my NDP membership to lapse in 2006.

[Gwendolyn]

31. Thank you!

That's a little more in depth than I've gotten from the family. They're mostly splotted in parts of Ontario and Quebec. I take it that people are somehow asking for a change in the status quo above the 49th parallel too.

[LiberadorHugo]

34. Yes, they are...

There's been a movement towards the NDP and the Greens (our Greens disgust me...But I have some vacuuming to do before bed, so I won't go into the reasons) as well as a slight movement to the Tories. Unfortunately, due to our ridiculous electoral system, this may lead to a Tory majority...But since I'm now a student in Ottawa, that's going to make me very busy. :-P I've never lived anywhere aside from Eastern Ontario. I just have an enormous interest in modern Canadian political history as well as some enormously strong views. :-)

[arthritisR_US]

9. You Canadian? n/t

[Siyahamba]

52. Let's see: "Liberal," "Jack Layton," "NDP"

Seems like a pretty obvious yes to me.

[arthritisR_US]

55. ok, dumb question: yes. snotty answer needed: no. thanks n/t

[Sarah Ibarruri]

12. You scared the heck out of me!! Don't do that! LOL

I thought for a moment you were a Dem switching to become another blood-sucking tick of the GOP.

[CraftyGal]

13. I was there as well...

I have always been an hard core New Democrat. Check out DCScripts for more information. Jack Layton could very well be the next Prime Minister of Canada or become a strong opposition. Harper has done nothing for Canada and for working families. We need a change, and I believe it is him.

CraftyGal

[TrogL]

15. Found the video

I was standing next to the cameraman during the floor shots.

http://edmontonsun.com/canadavotes/videos/home.html

[TrogL]

25. Found a better video of the entire speech

(fixed link)

I was standing just to the right of the two cameras (on a platform)

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/election-2008/ndp-promise/#clip94385 (part 1)

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/election-2008/ndp-promise/#clip94386 (part 2)

This is the media scrum after. I was behind the guy speaking French. You can here me attempt a question at 8:46 but I got interrupted.

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/election-2008/ndp-promise/#clip94384 (part 3)

[TahitiNut]

16. You didn't leave the Liberal Party. It left you. That's why the NDP even exists. Bravo!

[LiberadorHugo]

21. That's an oversimplication...

The Liberal Party has represented the same interests and the same factions since WW2 (Hell, they opened another satellite U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Vancouver as a means of helping Washington control the cannabis trade during the Chretien years)...People are just now starting to realise it as the Keynesian welfare state goes down the shitter. That being said, the NDP and the Liberals do attract many of the same voters, but that doesn't mean they have the same class makeup or have historically represented the same interests. I refer you to some of my previous posts in this topic. :-)

[TrogL]

44. I'm Keynesian and that's got little to do with the "welfare state"

Keynes is more about the government taking a firm hand on the economy especially by spending on infrastructure.

The Liberal party tended to attract the middle class until it left us in the dust catering to corporate interests - blame Paul Martin.

The NDP tended to attract labour, particularly the unions, but now is collected disenfranchised former Liberals like myself.

[johnaries]

48. Right. And in the US we need to return to Keynesian econ.

It works. The Austrian School doesn't. That's been proven 3 times now in the US.

[HeresyLives]

20. 4 more years of Harper then.

Enjoy.

[CraftyGal]

29. Harper is Conservative...

We want them out!

CraftyGal

[HeresyLives]

30. Well that won't happen if

you vote NDP. The NDP has no chance whatever of becoming the govt, or even the Official Opposition.

[CraftyGal]

33. I think that Jack and the other NDP candiates are running a very strong platform.

I think they have an excellent chance to win. One thing that has been noted from Ray Martin (Edmonton-East) is the Red Tories are switching to the NDP. Something is up. There were even other former Liberal supporters at the events.

CraftyGal

[HeresyLives]

36. NDP have been around for over 60 years.

I've been around for 62. And every election we hear the same thing. THIS time they'll make it. Why, EVERYBODY is switching over!

Except the polling numbers don't support that, and never do.

All you do is split the vote, and allow the Conservatives to come up the middle and win.

Considering the mess the Conservatives have made in just little over 2 years, you won't recognize this country if they have 4 years of majority govt.

[iverglas]

58. Liberal shill # 1 has joined the party

Uh, this party here, that is, not the NDP.

For the auslanders: The Liberal Party is Canada! Canada is the Liberal Party! If you don't vote Liberal, the big bad wolf will get you!

That about sums it up.

Me, I live in a riding with an NDP member who had a very health plurality (three-way split) in the last election. The Liberals were second.

If NDP voters fell for the scare tactics being mongered here and voted Liberal, supposedly to make sure that the (third-place) Conservative didn't win, they could very well end up splitting the Liberal and NDP votes evenly and letting the Conservative win up the middle.

That's how much the Liberals really care about Canada.

About as much as they cared when they were siphoning off the public funds paid to advertising agencies in Quebec to do nothing ... except make donations back to the Liberal Party.

Then there's long-time PM-in-waiting and then, finally, briefly PM Paul Martin, who, when Finance Minister, arranged the offshore tax-haven provisions in Cdn income tax law to protect his own private Caribbean tax haven from Cdn taxes, the better to operate his huge shipping corporation to his own advantage, at the cost of millions to the rest of the taxpaying public.

Corruption, thy party is Liberal.

The Liberal Party trades on its "social liberal" public image -- the party of Pierre Trudeau, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the state not belonging in the bedrooms of the nation.

Many people today don't remember that Pierre Trudeau also brought us "wage and price controls" in the 1970s. Well. Wage controls, anyhow. "Social liberal" because what do a transnational corporation and its political cronies and operatives really care about who sleeps with whom? As long as the profits aren't disturbed. These people are smarter than Republicans.

Just yr classic wolf in sheep's clothing, that's the Liberals. And they're just not as good at the act as they used to be.

Me, I'm actually not too happy about it. They do have a responsibility to offer an alternative to the vile Stephen Harper Conservatives. There are people and places in Canada that just won't be voting NDP in this lifetime, and I actually prefer to see them not go Conservative in the present circumstances.

What really disgusts me is watching the shills and hacks blaming everybody but the Liberals for the Liberals' own abject failure.

[TrogL]

35. In this particular riding, the Liberal's don't have a hope in hell

The specific NDP candidate (Ray Martin) is hugely popular here and can probably unseat the Conservative candidate.

If the Liberals had a proper leader (I was hoping for a leadership convention but Harper broke his own law and called an early election) and was running a proper campaign (there may be some collusion with the NDP here), I'd still be working for them.

Also, I think the Green Tax is a non-starter. I'm still not happy with Layton's unspecified plans to cut back on Alberta Oil Sands development, but I'll have a word with him about it.

[HeresyLives]

37. Layton isn't going anywhere fast

so you'll be able to have all the words you want with him.

Meantime, Harper will be busy tearing the country apart.

[TrogL]

41. So what, exactly, would you like me to do?

Work for the Liberals? - that's a non-starter. The campaign office hasn't even returned my calls. I've never heard of the guy. I understand he's dropped out of the race.

Work for the Conservatives?

I'd rather have one less Conservative seat.

[HeresyLives]

43. Local candidate is irrelevant.

Although I'm sure there'll be one, there always is.

If you want Harper out, then vote Liberal. They're the only party with a decent chance of winning against him.

They've been govt for 70% of our history. The NDP has never even been official opposition.

I personally don't care who wins, as long as it isn't Harper - and this is the only way of doing it.

[TrogL]

46. THIS IS A PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM

You do not vote directly for Jack Layton. Jack is not running for President. You cannot run for Prime Minister. The winning Party takes power, the head of that Party is Prime Minister. If there is a leadership change during the Party's time in power and new guy's in charge, he's the new Prime Minister.

If I do not work like hell to get my local candidate elected, the current Conservative idiot gets to keep his seat.

Is that what you want?

[HeresyLives]

49. So?

The local candidate is irrelevant. You are voting for a party, not a local.

Vote for the NDP...get Harper as PM. Simple as that.

[iverglas]

60. are you actually a Canadian?

You seem to be lacking the most basic comprehension of how the parliamentary system works.

Lacking that, or something else, anyhow.

[IntravenousDemilo]

61. People voting for parties rather than individuals is the surest way to bad government.

You end up with a bunch of slack-jawed seatwarmers like Jag Bhaduria, a Liberal candidate and later MP who had absolutely no qualification for the job except for the fact that he wasn't from Brian Mulroney's party. Is that what you want?

Parties are nothing but special interest groups writ large. If we vote for a candidate simply because of his party, irrespective of whether he's a fucking bonehead or not, we will end up with a Parliament of dunces. If we elect 308 MPs using the criteria of intelligence, compassion, and wisdom, along with a firm grasp of both reality and the issues -- we will get the good, intelligent, compassionate, wise, realistic, issue-tackling government that Canadians deserve. Quite frankly, I'm in favour of outlawing all political parties, prohibiting their re-formation, and letting everyone run as an independent based on his own merits as a person.

And BTW, nowhere on any ballot will you find the names Jack Layton, Stéphane Dion, Stephen Harper, and Gilles Duceppe all together. That's because you're not actually voting for them, but for someone running in your riding. And I remember that not so long ago, even political party names weren't allowed on the ballot. It was just the name of the candidate. Ah, the good old days!

I've been a Deputy Returning Officer in a great number of provincial and federal elections both back in Saskatchewan and here, including the Ontario provincial election that saw Mike Harris elected. On that election day, this woman came up to me and said she didn't know who to vote for. I told her that I couldn't advise her one way or the other because I was working for Elections Ontario and therefore was non-partisan. No, she said, she meant who was the Liberal, who was the PC, who was the NDPer? etc. I reminded her that the names of the candidates were posted outside on the door of the polling place, and told her to pop out and take a look. Can't you just tell me? she asked. No, I said, I can't, and I wouldn't if I could. Why?

Well, I said, do you live in this riding? Yes. OK, have you been out and about in your neighbourhood at any time in the last month or so? Yes. Did you happen to notice some big, colourful lawn signs? Yes. All right, by any chance, were some of these big signs in the colours of the party you support? Yes. Did you catch any of the names on those signs? No. So you couldn't be bothered, then? No. Then why do you think you deserve a vote if you can't even take even the minimal trouble to pay attention to what's going on around you? Go out and find your candidate's name, come back, and I'll give you a ballot.

Honestly, some people are as thick as two bricks, and I don't want my future and the future of my country decided by the likes of them -- that is, those folks who eschew community involvement, who are ignorant of issues, and who vote reflexively for parties because, say, their ancestors have voted that way for generations.

[iverglas]

65. and going even farther back ;)

You end up with a bunch of slack-jawed seatwarmers like Jag Bhaduria, a Liberal candidate and later MP who had absolutely no qualification for the job except for the fact that he wasn't from Brian Mulroney's party. Is that what you want?

-- you end up with the entire population of the government benches in Brian Mulroney's government. ;)

Nobody had the remotest expectation that the Progressive Conservatives would win seats in Quebec. Nobody with a grain of sense or qualifications wanted the PC nomination in a Quebec riding. The massive anti-Liberal vote resulted in a boxful of doorknobs getting elected in Quebec, and us getting a Brian Mulroney government.

Lessons to learn.

Of course, I vote party, myself. ;)

[TrogL]

66. What part of "I CANNOT VOTE FOR A LIBERAL CANDIDATE IN MY RIDING" do you NOT understand?

Winning the election is zero-sum game. The Party with the most seats wins. The party with fewer seats forms the Opposition.

If the Conservatives lose enough seats, they will no longer be in power.

I spent today driving around town planting NDP campaign signs. Guess what.

THERE ARE NO LIBERAL SIGNS. NONE. ABSOLUTELY NONE. NONE. WHAT PART OF "NONE" DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND.

There is NO LIBERAL CANDIDATE in my riding.

I CANNOT vote Liberal. THERE IS NOBODY TO VOTE FOR.

So, I've chosen to do the second best thing, try to overturn the Conservative candidate by getting a very popular local politician (he's run Provincially and won for decades) elected under the NDP banner.

So please tell me, in detail, giving specifics, how, exactly, I'm supposed to vote Liberal. Move?? Are you going to buy my house? Are you going to pay my moving expenses? Are you going to help move furniture?

[iverglas]

67. hey, you could do what a Liberal in my riding did a few years ago

He was a crony of the slimy Liberal MP in a nearby riding. He decided he wanted the NDP nomination in my riding. So he just got a bunch of people (unfortunately, he targeted two particular groups of recent immigrants, and I can only guess the kinds of tactics used) to change the addresses on their drivers' licences to addresses in my riding, so they could vote at our nomination meeting. It almost worked.

Just go change yours, and vote Liberal in the next-door riding. There might even be a reward ...

[Dutch]

53. "If you want Harper out, then vote Liberal". Classic Liberal bullshit.

He's already said the NDP are the main threat to the Conservatives in his riding. This is true of many ridings, particularly in the west.

So by demanding he and others like him vote Liberal, YOU are in fact attempting to increase the likelihood of a Conservative victory.

[samsingh]

38. i hope harper doesn't win a majority

[HeresyLives]

40. He's done plenty of damage

with just a minority, so it really doesn't matter.

[Dutch]

54. Because your beloved Liberals have propped him up at every turn.

They had plenty of chances to bring Harper down by voting with the ACTUAL anti-Tory parties, the NDP and BQ. But they didn't, partly because they are cowards terrified of facing an election under their utterly incompetent leader, and partly because they are centre-right corporate aplogists who really aren't all that offended by Harper's agenda.

And yet you tell people the only way to stop Harper's agenda is to vote for his partners in this grand coalition. Classic self-serving Liberal bullshit.

[CraftyGal]

42. I don't think Harper will get the majority...

I think it will be a Conservative minority with an NDP Opposition. There are many strong candidates that are running in Conservative areas that will get unseated such as Peter Goldring.

CraftyGal

[HeresyLives]

45. Harper has the smallest minority

in our history now, and LOOK at the damage he's done.

An NDP Opposition won't be able to vote them out anytime soon, for the same reason as the Liberals couldn't. Too many elections in too short a time, and they all cost massive amounts of money.

The one thing the Conservative base is, is solid.

Whereas there are 4 parties on the left and centre-left, so that splits the vote.

[TrogL]

47. That system is not going to change in the next three weeks

So if we reduce the number of Conservatives seats below the magic number, we end up with some sort of non-Conservative minority government.

Canada has done well with this setup in the past.

I'm perfectly willing to live with a Liberal minority having to keep the NDPer's happy.

[HeresyLives]

50. Doesn't need to.

All we need to do is get Harper out of there.

You won't do it by voting NDP.

[opihimoimoi]

51. Congrats on the move....did Enki approve?? LOL, jus askin

:toast:

[enigmatic]

57. Jack's a good man

I'm volunteering for the NDP in this election; I'm very proud as a soon to be citizen to be doing so.