Sunday, April 15, 2007

Dion, May, and Jack Layton

The Progressive blogosphere is doing its echo chamber over Elizabeth May's comments today on Question Period where she whined about Jack Layton not taking her phone calls.

"What The Hell Is Wrong With Jack Layton?"

So Jack Layton, Don't You WANT To Save the Planet?


Which is once again disingenuous blather, since she clearly stated that Mssr. Dion would be and should be the next Green, I mean, Environmental PM. Something Garth Turner agreed with her on.

Liberals won't run candidate against Elizabeth May; she reciprocates for Dion, touts him as best PM


She has been promoting the Liberals and slagging the NDP since January.

Since she is so enamoured with Stephane what would she have to offer Jack? That he would be the best Environmental leader of the Official Opposition? Gilles Duceppe might have something to say about that.

Since she is Leader of an unelected party with no official standing in Parliament what makes her think she should not be shuffled off to talk to Stephen Lewis?

Heck that's better than
Miguel Figueroa of the other CPC; the Communist Party of Canada , gets. And he won a Supreme Court case for the rights of small parties. against Liberal election laws that stripped them of their right to run in elections. And they recently had their national convention covered in the MSM; Seeing red as way to change the world

And what the heck that would be solved with proportional representation, and democratic reform, something May and Dion have abandoned in this deal. And something the Liberals have abandoned doing anything about with NDP in this sitting of Parliament.

But then the real truth of the matter is that without Jack conceding the riding the chances are good that the NDP candidate can come up the middle and knock off Peter MacKay. And that's what pisses May off.

Federal New Democrats are set to name who will square off against Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in the next federal election.

Louise Lorefice, a mother of eight and retired teacher from Antigonish, will be confirmed today as the NDP candidate for Central Nova at a nomination meeting in Plymouth.

The riding has been attracting national attention since Liberal Leader Stephane Dion announced his party would not field a candidate there, in exchange for the Greens not running a candidate in Dion's Montreal riding.

NDP Leader Jack Layton has dismissed the bipartisan deal as undemocratic and unfair to voters.

Lorefice, who has worked on NDP campaigns for a number of years, is a new face to the electorate.

New Democrat MP Peter Stoffer says former candidate Alexis MacDonald, who fell second to MacKay in the 2004 and 2006 elections, is concentrating on her work with the Stephen Lewis Foundation and is not running again.

See:

My Planet, My Party

Non Aggression Pact

Liberals New Green Politics

Canada's New Progressive Right


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4 comments:

bigcitylib said...

An NDP/Green non-compete agreement would probably have involved not running a green candidate in certain NDP ridings where they might steal enough NDP votes to make a difference. But we will never know.

EUGENE PLAWIUK said...

The actuality is that the Greens would have stolen Conservative votes, not NDP. The Dipper vote is hard core, while the conservative vote is constantly in flux. Those who consider themselves progressive conservatives would then vote Green, while never even considering voting NDP, the best would be Liberal.

susansmith said...

As Devin Johnston pointed out, Jack Layton could never have struck a deal with May for a An NDP/Green non-compete agreement. Our party constitution does not centre power at the top, and only riding associations can determine who runs there. We take local democracy at the riding level very seriously, as it is a core principle.
" First of all, unlike the Liberal Party which operates on the basis of central office edict, the NDP embraces the principle of grassroots democracy. It has nothing to do with whether or not Jack Layton would be willing to consider not running candidates in certain ridings; he simply does not have the power in our party to prevent local members from electing an NDP candidate."
So Layton is just respecting the members of the NDP who create these bylaws, and doesn't believe that the ends justify the means. I mean if he didn't, he wouldn't be our elected leader.

Feynman and Coulter's Love Child said...

I know this was Google's headline and not yours, but how exactly would the CPC "change the world" by "seeing red"? Would we live in a country with stifling taxation, where government cronies set arbitrary rules that citizens have to live under without reprieve, with every single aspect of your life micromanaged by a government that claims to care about you while they cash in on their own gravy train? Would we live in a world so awestruck by the positive light provided by intrusive national governments that even when the world's dominant power expands its government day after day its derised as being some capitalist nightmare from which few can escape? If all these things came true tomorrow, would you or I even notice a difference?