The NDP criticisms in the media are always just repeated talking points and it’s frustrating. Some of the most common ones being: we don’t have a legitimate leader yet, we’re too strongly against the building of mega-prisons, we wouldn’t be capable of running a good federal government based on past provincial performance, and we haven’t been successful as an opposition yet. To which I counter:
- Okay, the leader of the party recently died. That left us with the responsibility of picking a leader without his guidance. We’re trying to pick a successful leader, rather than a Republican wannabe neo-con like Harper or a failure like Dion (sorry bb, I did genuinely like you) or Ignatieff
- We prefer rehabilitation for petty crimes rather than arbitrarily locking up citizens. Especially since crime rates are way down. It didn’t work in Texas and it won’t work here.
- Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and British Columbia have all had successful NDP provincial governments. The only one that went sour was Ontario’s under Bob Rae who crossed the floor and became a Liberal anyways, so he’s not even a part of the NDP anymore and won’t be running things into the ground
- As for our limited success as an opposition, I’d love to see how the Harper government would run itself if Harper died and Peter Mackay, Jim Flaherty, Jason Kenney and John Baird, along with (probably) Tim Hudak and Mike Harris, all ran for leader at the same time. Almost all of the strong NDP MPs are out of the House of Commons running a leadership campaign, leaving the NDP with only Megan Leslie, Libby Davies, and Pat Martin as their strong, front bench MPs. Once the NDP has elected a proper leader and gotten rid of our interim leader, Nycole Turmel - who, yes, I’ll admit has not been a rousing success as interim leader - I’m sure things will be business as usual.
(Source: misanderysoncooper)
