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At this point I’m having trouble remembering the last time I read anything written by Jane Taber that wasn’t about this fantasy of a merger between the Liberal Party and the NDP. I am not going to criticize anyone for jumping up and down on their hobby horse; after all I do live in a glass house. But if you are going to beat a horse to death you should at least check and see if it was ever alive in the first place. This merger idea is simply not going to happen. Both parties have way too much to lose.
Lorrie Goldstein writes about at least one NDP activist who would abandon any merged party and start a new ‘progressive’ party. I doubt that there is only one, the true believers of the NDP grassroots and labour associates will not tolerate a merger with the Liberal Party. The idea that the two parties are similar enough to form a single entity is delusional in the highest extreme.
On the Liberal side I expect the situation is even worse. Notwithstanding the President of the Young Liberals of Canada, there is little indication that Liberal Party membership would welcome a merge with the NDP. In fact most of the Liberals I talked to over the years (because this has been discussed for decades) laugh at the very idea.
Besides the lack of any support for the merger, the very process of merging these two institutions is full of potential problems. The Liberal Party is the oldest federal party in Canada and the NDP have their own institutional quarks such as Labour union participation in their leadership race. How do you expect to merge organizations with such a diverse background?
Summer is coming and there isn’t going to be a lot for the chattering class of the mainstream media to talk about. So I expect this to be constant back and forth for the next three months.
If you keep in mind that this isn’t going to ever happen, you can sit back and enjoy the rather amusing idiocy of certain members of the media.
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6 comments:
maybe... I'm not so sure. I do enjoy all this, regardless. :)
Only federal Liberals brought this calamity to their front door. By not engaging seriously in policy discussions and by presenting the electrolate with coronations instead of leadership conventions, they now find themselves in a dreaded position. Irrelevant in their own party. Cheers. FernStAlbert
There is pretty well zero chance of a merger before the next election. But, if both the Libs and Dips lose MPs after the next election, then the likelihood of a merger moves up, I'd say to around 30 %.
I think one other determining factor will be how much money keeps rolling in to these Parties.
The Dippers are talking tough, but they can't keep going at the rate they are burning through their contibutions. Last election, they spent around $18 million, to elect 37 MPs ... an absolutely unsustainable half a million dollars per MP !
The PC/CA merger was hairy enough - months of negotiations, lawsuits, MPs throwing chairs at the next convention, all kinds of fun stuff. And those are parties that had been apart for less than two decades, who had been trying to merge as official policy for several years, and who had always had significant numbers of dual members. The idea of two parties whose animosity goes back three generation dropping everything and joining up because of some temporary trouble in the polls - good freaking luck.
I have a dream that someday all leftards will think as one and unite for a common cause, the implementation of communism world wide. Yes, that is good so I can know who to fire at! (real conservative)
A merged Liberal-NDP is a nightmare for the CPC.
Anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves.
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