These days, Michael Harris is ticked off with both the Conservatives and the Liberals. His disdain for Justin Trudeau grows with each passing day:
Whether it’s the corporate welfare bums at Bombardier, or the owners of those bitumen-laden pipelines, Trudeau can’t seem to say no to certain people. His claim that we can have it both ways on the environment is as tiresome as it is disingenuous.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives are living in a Petrified Forest:
An intelligent party would have made a course correction after Harper’s anti-democratic, anti-court, anti-free speech, anti-environment, anti-immigrant decade of authoritarian deceit and corruption. Now, his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, has reaped the harvest of Harper’s darkly manipulative approach to governing. Wright’s “ethical wall” apparently came equipped with a ladder.
An intelligent party would have seen the need to cultivate thinkers, not Kool-Aid drinkers. It would have taken the Michael Chongs and Lisa Raitts and embraced them.
Had it done that — had it learned from defeat — the CPC could have rebalanced its far-right recent history with its historic Red Tory roots. Stockwell Day and Joe Clark both could have supported such party.
Instead, the CPC appears ready to choose one of the B actors on the leadership list who have embraced Harperism in all its ideological rigidity — and doomed future.
Combine that with the idiocy erupting south of the border and there's little that encourages Harris. His hopes now rest with the NDP:
When you add into this mix the likelihood that the next big winner in Canadian federal politics will be the anti-Trump (assuming the Big Tuna is not beached by 2019), the NDP have a serious opening. They could make a comeback with progressives who parked their vote with Trudeau to defeat Harper but were betrayed on electoral reform, and Red Tories who were hoping for more from their leadership race than warmed-up leftovers.
The Universe may not be unfolding as it should. But it is unfolding.
Image: Amazon.com
6 comments:
We're members of the animal kingdom. Members of the animal kingdom have been noted to behave in unusual ways when on the precipice of disaster. We are on the precipice of disaster.
I agree, Dana. And we blindly rollick on our way.
What would Michael Harris suggest as an alternative to evil OR imperfect, Owen? Let me know the next time Dips hold power federally.
They're a rotten bunch, the lot of them. This neoliberal path they're on is a dead end road but even Elizabeth May won't speak out against the obvious, inevitable fate we face from pursuing perpetual, exponential growth.
Somebody has to reverse course. That's going to entail reclaiming facets of national sovereignty stupidly ceded to globalism, democratic restoration and catching up with long neglected measures to prepare Canada and Canadians for the challenges of this century. That means vision and leadership that's not stuck in the 80s. It's the sort of thing that electoral reform could facilitate given three or four election cycles. Perhaps that's why Trudeau reneged on his solemn promise.
I suspect, like lots of us, he's searching for an alternative to both, lovingit. However, in the real world it's hard to find an alternative to either.
One election isn't going to solve our problems, Mound. But taking them seriously would be a first big step.
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