NDP Leadership Convention 2017

[DL]

Linda McQuaig.

She speaks no French GONG!

[DL]

Ashton's not going to win, guys. Let's move on.

Cullen and Leslie have both said they're not running, but 2 years is a long time.

Yeah yeah yeah, Cullen feigned disinterest to avoid being seen as disloyal but no one takes that seriously. Keep in mind that for a year after the 2011 election Justin Trudeau steadfastly insisted he would not run for the Liberal leadership and wanted to spend time with his kids...what happened with that?

[DL]

Linda McQuaig.

She speaks no French GONG!

From wiki: In the 1970s McQuaig and four friends co-owned a house they called The Pit in Toronto's east end, where they hosted frequent house parties and dinners for friends in academia, media and the arts. In 1976 she lived for a year in Paris, where she learned French...

She has told me personally that her French is now almost non existent

[DL]

Count on Erin Weir to throw his hat in the ring.

Speaks no French EJECT

[DL]

People should stop wasting time suggesting public intellectuals with zero political experience as leadership material. It's simply not going to happen.

[DL]

For the record neither Avi Lewis nor Naomi Klein speak French with any degree of fluency - so let's end any speculation right away

[DL]

I don't think Angus speaks French.  

Learning wouldn't be that difficult, there is a significant number of Francophones in his riding and is right next to Québec.

Wikipedia says he lives in Cobalt, which is very English-speaking, but a 20 minute ride would lead him to Notre-Dame-du-Nord, Québec.

Angus has been an MP for a riding with a large francophone population for the last 12 years - and still hasn't managed to become at all fluent in French. If he couldnt do it in the past 12 years, its hard to imagine him suddenly becoming fluent in the next 18 months. Middle aged unilinguals do not sudden;y learn a second language perfectly at the drop of a hat. In fact it is close to impossible,

[DL]

I really doubt Cullen will run because he knows he is far too like Mulcair for the state the party is in now.

I'm not sure what that means. Much of the objection to Mulcair was his personality, lack of ability to nber a team player and lack of charisma. Cullen would remedy that since he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and seems to work well with others.

12 years ago Alexa McDonough was pressured to quit ostensibly because she was flirting with Blairite "third way" social democracy. but in reality i think people just thought she was a bore. Jack Layton was even more centrist ideologically but no one cared because he had a pleasing personality  

[DL]

Yes but Layton didnt win because of ideology. People liked his personality and the other people running for the leadership against him were seen as fuddy-duddies.

[DL]

A lot in this CP story. Davies thinks Mulcair should leave sooner rather than later, Boulerice thinks he should stay as long as necessary. Dusseault undecided. Julian hasn't thought about a bid, Boulerice needs time to talk about it with family and colleagues. Party insiders suggest the race won't last longer than 18 months.

Seems to me that Fall 2017 would be the perfect time for the NDP to pick a new leader. Let the Tory leadership race hog the attention in April may 2017, get the BC election of May 2017 out of the way and then Fall 2017 has no major electoral events anywhere...then Spring 2018 is the next Ontario election!

[DL]

I kind of wish Mulcair would run. We haven't had that kind of leadership convention in a long time and I think it would be entertaining.

We just had it in Manitoba when selling era ran to succeed him self and (unfortunately) won.

[DL]

Can Jagmeet Singh speak French? He would make a good leader... he'd be like the Barack Obama of Canada. There are enough racists in the country to keep him from leading the NDP to victory, but I think there are enough progressives that would fall in love with his candidacy, and might just be the right person to assure the party stays relevant. Also, might be key to winning immigrant votes.

In answer to your question YES Jagmeet Singh used to live in Montreal and speaks beautiful French (as well as English and Punjabi)

[DL]

Jagmeet would likely be a shoe in to succeed Andrea Horwath as ONDP leader after 2018 (or if a miracle happened and the ONDP won that election he would be a senior cabinet minister)...the only reason i could see for why he might want to go federal is that i hear he is personally much more interested in federal than provincial issues.

[DL]

Unfortunately, yes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMGQZSecdFc

It's mostly in Panjabi so I can't understand what he's saying but he's speaking to an anti-sex ed group.

As I recall, all he said was that the government should have done more community consultations on the curriculum rather than imposing it from on high. He never actually said he was opposed to the substance of the sex ed reforms.

[DL]

When you are an opposition politician and the government of the day brings in a policy that is wildly unpopular in the riding you represent - but where you and your party are actually supportive of the substance of that policy - then the logical thing to do it is to attack the government for incompetently managing the issue and failing to bring stakeholders onside etc...

[DL]

here we go again with people floating names of unilingual anglophones (ie: Darrel Dexter, Maureen McDonald, Peter Stoffer, Jack Harris...). When will this idiocy end. No French = 100% DISQUALIFICATION

[DL]

There is actually a theory that the Ontario purposely "mishandled" the sex education file because they wanted it to be as controversial as possible. They wanted it to become a wedge issue that they could use against the PCs so they did minimal consultations and went out of their way to provoke a reaction. I don't usually go for these crazy conspiracy theories but the Ontario liberals sre such a cynical and corrupt party that i wouldnt put it past them.

Anyways, its all water under the bridge, the curriculum is in place, the protests have petered out and even Patrick Brown of the PCs is now avoiding the issue. Its over.

Now after that huge segue let's get back to the federal NDP leadership contest

[DL]

...and in the wake of the 2011 election the news papers were full of doom and gloom columns on the "death of Liberal Canada" etc...

[DL]

Yes but there are many examples in canadian and Britsih history of once dominant parties being wiped out. Whatever happened to Social Credit that ruled BC for all but three years 1952 to 1991? The Union Nationale in Quebec went from being government in 1970 to 0 seats in 1973 and are now a dead party.

[DL]

Just to segue briefly to the 1989 NDP leadership convention, a big factor was the fact that Dave Barrett spoke no French whatsoever - and it didn't help when he dismissed this as being equivalent to not being able to speak Chinese. Remember that in 1988 the NDP had made a major push in Quebec and though they won no seats it was still fresh in peoples minds that Quebec had been so winnable so recently. Also in 1989 the dominant political issue was Meech Lake and so with national unity at the top of the agenda - having a unilingual anglo as leader was a non-starter for many people.

At the same time there was a powerful sentiment in 1989 that the NDP ought to be the first party in Canada to be led by a woman and so McLaughlin's gender helped her a lot.

[DL]

IMHO, people often conflate ideology with personal charisma and ability to connect with people - especially in the NDP. Alexa MacDonough was as dull as dishwater and bored everyone to tears and did not motivate party members. Because she also wanted to explore the "third way" in the late after the UK Labour Party had had such success - people in the party equated moving to the centre with being boring.

Then Jack Layton came along who was everything that Alexa MacDonough was not in terms of personal charisma. He was if anything even more dedicated than she had been to making the NDP electable and being more moderate - but the vast majority of party activists were happy because his personal style made them feel good. To a surprising number of NDP members, being on the left just means "able to give a good speech and communicate well and having good emotional intelligence" while being a "centrist" is just code for being a dull technocrat.

Many people have noted that the actual NDP platform in 2015 was more ambitious and more progressive than anything the party had run on in the last 20 years...but Mulcair made it sound wishy-washy because he came across as a "dull technocrat".

In the 2012 NDP leadership contest, Cullen started out as almost a fringe candidate and yet he gained a ton of support during the campaign because he appealed to people as a person. He was literally the only candidate in the race that had modicum of personal appeal (though Paul Dewar sometimes showed traces of it in English only). His proposal to have an electoral alliance with the Liberal raised the floor of his support but also lowered the ceiling. I'm not sure how it is that people are placing Cullen on any ideological spectrum within the party now. Sure in 2012 he wanted to make a deal with the Liberals - but at the time, that was a sentiment expressed by people across the political spectrum within the NDP - and it was something condemned by people across the political spectrum. Today in 2016 it is a moot point. The Liberals are in government now and the Harper Conservatives were crushed despite there being no pre-election electoral alliance between the NDP and the Liberals. So all Cullen has to say is "that was then and this is now".

IMHO, a lot of New Democrats are not looking to elect a leader from the Socialist Caucus, nor are they looking to elect anyone who is 100% behind every clause of the so-called Leap Manifesto. I think the dream candidate would be someone who could take the 2015 NDP platform and run an exciting campaign out of it...and who had good political instincts and personal warmth and willing to listen to people and make good hiring decisions.

[DL]

In some ways that's why Obama was considered more "left-wing" than Hillary Clinton in 2008, even though there's no real ideological difference between them.

The fact that Obama had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning while Clinton had supported it was also a BIG factor and that was a bigger deal in 2008 than it is in 2016

[DL]

Brosseau is considering.

It would be nice if the article actually contained a quote or something. Instead it just says that she, along with almost every other MP asked has not "ruled it out". I don't blame her. It's good for her image to be the subject of idle speculation...if someone asked me if I would run for the NDP leadership I would also not rule it out and would bask in all the imagined scenarios about speculation about secret exploratory committees. Why not be coy.

All that being said, being leader of a party is not the same thing as being star of a reality TV show. You have to show evidence that you can be CEO of a party with millions of dollars of assets and liabilities and that you have mastery of complex policy files and that you are a shred tactician etc....with all due respect to Brosseau she has exceeded expectations as a local MP but I think people,are getting wayyyyy ahead of themselves in thinking she is leadership material right now. She's still only 28 years old for god sake

[DL]

Much of that was said of Trudeau...

Yes it was but Trudeau had been an MP for longer, had grown up at 24 Sussex Drive and therefor had some conception of what the job of PM consisted of, had some post-secondary education AND had some smart people around him to help cover up how shallow he is. He was also a leader of a party that makes no pretence to standing for anything or having any core values.

The worst mistake parties tend to make in picking leaders is in trying to refight the last election. If the attitude is "the Liberals won in 2015 because they were led by a good looking airhead who posed for lots of selfies - therefor we have to find another goodlooking leader who poses for lots of selfies for the 2019" - its a recipe for disaster. I can just imagine NDP billboards in 2019 showing Trudeau and REB side by side with a caption that says "Ours is prettier"

This is not a serious discussion.

[DL]

Stop ruining our fun, DL. This isn't the first time we've heard about a REB candidacy. Her story is right out of a movie; I think she would attract a lot of attention. Of course, she may not be able to carry herself in a national campaign (yet), so it would be a gamble. But there's a reason why she was the only NDP MP to see a positive swing in her riding. You can't ignore that kind of hard data.

The factors that make someone successful at the riding level have almost nothing to do with the attributes of being a national party leader. At the riding level its all about person to person contact...and on top of that the bar she had to pass to be seen as a good MP was very very low. Previous MPs from that riding had been totally invisible, and there was a myth that she spoke no French at all when in fact she had been to French immersion in elementary school...but at the national leadership level there would be totally different expectations and the bar would be very high not very low.

The reason REB's name gets bandied about at all is that people are engaging in "magical thinking" that somehow the way to compete with Trudeau is to find another bright shiny object that is bilingual.  There is a lot more to leading a party than that.

Having an inspiring personal narrative is a wonderful thing...but its only one part of what you need to be to lead a party.