NDP: When Moustache Rides Just Don’t Cut It Anymore
Believe it or not, this photograph actually brought me back towards the NDP fold (that man’s got legs like an Orion slave girl). But, alas, it alone was not enough to firmly re-entrench me in the left-wing clusterfuck that is the New Democratic Party.
When Tommy Douglas spoke in Regina in 1983 at the 50th Anniversary Convention, warning that Medicare would slip away, warning, that, taxing us like head of cattle might actually be a “fucking stupid idea, bitches” (his words), I sat up in my crib and listened. At one year old, my British Columbian head started partitioning off a sizeable chunk of my brain matter, labelling it: “FOR SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC USE ONLY.” Don’t ask questions, that was the law in BC at the time. We also had to listen to four hours of Yanni cassettes per week. I don’t want to talk about it.
As I grew into a pimpled, awkward adolescent—one who bore a freakish resemblance to McLovin from Superbad—I felt comfortable in letting Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark captain my ship on our quest for social democratic treasure. Of course, how was I to know that the ship was to become a FastCat Ferry? And the treasure: skimming off Bingo charity proceeds? Yes, by the time the 90s were over, BC was broke, our progressive social ministries were closed, our government-activist ties were in tatters, and perhaps worst of all, I still looked like McLovin. (Yes, Jack, that was me at the 2000 Convention in Seattle; I was dressed as Counselor Troi. I thought we had a moment by the Klingon Bloodwine stand.)
Don’t get me wrong. The NDP’s platform still rings true for me: environmental protection; increasing corporate taxes; reducing poverty; renegotiating NAFTA; gutting the Senate and turning it into an indoor botanical garden/ gay leather bar. I like your ideas. But then the 2008 Federal Election came around, and suddenly Jackie was all “Mr. Kitchentable,” thinking he ran the coalition because he was doing his best Barack Obama impression (needs work, by the way; try putting Olivia in a sleeveless Jason Wu number). And that’s when I realized that at the federal level you were all set to fall apart like you did in BC. If I wanted you to run huge deficits, employ a cap-and-trade carbon plan that even David Suzuki won’t endorse, and try a socialized economy in a country whose neoliberal business community runs 86% of our exports into a country that’s even more neoliberal than we are, well, then, I’d exhume Pierre Trudeau, flip Alberta the bird, do a pirouette and say: “Just watch me.”
I suppose what I’m saying is that when you have a corporate-run media that will always err on the side of big business; when you have a population that will never accept Scandinavian-level taxation; and when you have an electoral system that doesn’t represent diverse interest groups and that makes the governing party throw principles out the window to ensure re-election—you need to come up with a better fiscal strategy than “we’ll tax corporations until they bleed orange.”
So, I sit here, weighing things, and I’m trying to decide why I’d pick Jack Layton over a leftist Grit like, say, Gerrard Kennedy (sorry, Ignatieff, I’m not impressed by big-business sluts from Harvard). Both speak with a common sense and empathy that resonate with me. Both have significant challenges to overcome: Gerry has a club foot and can’t speak French; Jackie has…his personality. I know, I know, that’s not fair. What personality?
The more I look at it, the more I’m convinced that the New Democratic Party—both federally and provincially—is more lost and confused than Jim Flaherty in a basic economics class. I want to support your party, your activist MPs like Paul Dewar, and your attempts to fend off Neanderthalian Tar-Sands Torries, but I just can’t do it until you have something meaningful to say beyond: “You may lose your job, but we’ll hire an extra civil servant to look into that!”; or “Look at Stéphane Dion, he’s gonna cry!”; or “Hey, remember Ed Broadbent?” Socialist principles are fine, and like any good officer of the Star Trek Fan Club of Canada (or NAMBLA), I espouse them regularly. But unless you learn your lessons from Bingogate in BC, or Rae Days in Ontario, then you are going to get nowhere and fuck up our country while doing it.
Jack, I’m not surprised that you wear a Starfleet uniform on the weekends, because in the Star Trek universe, utopian economics have done away with money and capitalism, and humanity pursues social justice ends via benign, non-competitive means. Famously, Captain Kirk made his date pay for dinner because ‘we don’t use money in the future’. What a space-douche. But Jack, this isn’t Star Trek, and you aren’t Captain Kirk (or Picard, I can see that you’re trying). I truly like and identify with the ideas you are bringing to the table (non-kitchen variety). But I beg you, Jack: take me out to dinner, but before you do, come up with a plan where you won’t just be stiffing me with the bill at the end of the night. Because otherwise I’m going to have to keep voting Green in protest, and seriously, Elizabeth May is one Borg drone short of a collective. (OK, even I don’t know what that means.)
Rick Largesse writes for no one and has no impressive resume. He lives in Ottawa with his dog Richard.
