PART MAN, PART PIT BULL
So, Tom Mulcair is in charge of stuff now over at the NDP desk. I suffer from a fatal character flaw: I’m a pragmatist. To that end, I’m not sure it matters if Mulcair’s plan on bringing the centre to the party is indeed the opposite. I just want a clear alternative so that Canadians stop voting in the Conservatives out of poverty of choice. Harper is not just ineffective, he is actually anti-progress. His government undoes good things and good laws that already exist. The legislation it enacts (or at least attempts to enact) does not reflect reality. In their minds, the Conservatives are already governing the perfect society they apparently hope to create. Their social platform is a series of hard lines drawn in the sand; their legislation is not based on any real survey of what the population needs, but rather on fulfilling the central party dogma.
Will the omnibus crime bill lower the crime rate, lower the recidivism rate, help rehabilitate non-violent offenders before their prison education ruins them for life? It’s highly unlikely. But that’s okay, because these are the Conservatives, and Conservatives are Tough on Crime.
Or the debacle a few years back, when Tony Clement threatened to rescind InSite’s government exemption? Never mind how many overdoses InSite has prevented, how many users were saved from HIV and hep C infection, how many users accepted passage into heroin detox facilities…Tony Clement is a Conservative, and Conservatives are Tough on Drugs!
This is no way to govern; these fools have to go.
Is Mulcair too Liberal? Almost certainly. After spending more than a decade as a Liberal MNA, I have no illusions that he’s magically left-ified all of his deepset political ideas.
On the count of divisiveness, I’m inclined to count the suit for defamation as a strong strike against him; obviously he doesn’t know how to play nicely with the other children (although I really just want to know what he said). On top of that, I also think he’s spent too much time dealing with the peculiarities of Quebecois politics and risks alienating the West by having the gall to reside in Central Canada. (I have no hope for Alberta, but the CCF-CLC merger was born in Saskatchewan, so the lack of NDP seats there is rather embarrassing).
Finally, does he need a shave? Quite desperately.
But, most importantly, does he represent a viable alternative to the Conservative juggernaut? If that answer is yes, how could we disagree? With the real Liberals in disgrace, maybe the best chance this country has of unseating the fuck-ups we let in this time is to present a centre-leaning, aggressive, outspoken leader who has enough street cred with Quebec to prevent the separatists from blowing things sky-high and derailing an otherwise productive term.
Anyway, forget all of this, I don’t have much faith left in the executive branch. As far as I’m concerned, elections are a kind of placebo that exists solely to give people the illusion of choice. The real work of keeping the nation on the rails falls to the judicial arm, so consider me an amicus curiae, at least until I end up with my own defamation suit.
