Sunday, January 6, 2008

The Choice: Four years of Stephen Harper or Jack Layton's NDP

Consider this: you go to your favourite restaurant to find the kitchen and wait staff fighting with each other -- hurling insults and occasionally dishes. Would you want to eat there? Probably not.

You go to an auto dealer and everyone there is trying to undercut your salesman -- calling him incompetent and suggesting he’s not giving you a square deal. Are you going to buy a car from them? No way.

For most of us, a precondition of trusting someone is that they are rational and dependable.

That’s the point Angelo Persichilli makes about politics today.

“The Liberals”, he says “have taken the leave of absence from their institutional duty to engage in an internal war, just like the Conservatives in the previous decade.” As a result of their self-indulgent turf war, they are, he says “keeping the government alive, and it is only being in government that keeps the Conservatives together.”

His conclusion:

"It's time for Canadians to make choices. What are the choices available? Well, of the four choices available, Canadians only really have two, the Conservatives and the NDP. The Bloc Quebecois has to be excluded for obvious reasons, and the Liberals have excluded themselves for the time being. That leaves us with the Tories and the NDP."

By abdicating the responsibility of a unified opposition and instead offering life-support to an undeserving Stephen Harper, the Liberals have already side-linded themselves for the next election.

Rather than trusting a party that has put its own petty squabbles (like the Beatty-Orchard affair), and its own survivial (like the numerous times they abstained to keep Harper in office), voters will have the choice of a united and disciplined NDP that stands up for what it believes in.

Persichilli may be the first to say what many more will, in time, conclude.

7 comments:

susansmith said...

right on!

Oxford County Liberals said...

It's sad when NDP supporters are reduced to praising or taking as gospel what comes from the Sun chain of papers.

James said...

I echo Scott's comments. I don't suppose NDP supporters would question the messenger's motives?

Persichilli and the Conservative machine will win by making NDP supporters think they have some kind of false historic potential in the upcoming election.

NDP supporters would be much better served by getting off their high moral horse and voting for the only party that can keep the Conservatives out of power.

Or will they, too, engage in the same kind of intellectually-corrosive and childish "Dion is not a leader" tripe that keeps us wound up in this nightmare?

I hope not. NDP supporters would be well-advised to avoid the trap of becoming the Conservative's lapdog.

Blogging Horse said...

I hope not. NDP supporters would be well-advised to avoid the trap of becoming the Conservative's lapdog.

Something Liberals would know quite a lot about given their record of propping-up Harper since October.

It's rich for Liberals to call themselves the "anti-Harper" when they alone are keeping the Conservatives in office.

Malcolm+ said...

"voting for the only party that can keep the Conservatives out of power"


The only party that can keep the conservatives out of power is the NDP - since the Liberative and Conserveral parties are both conservative.

Scott Gillard said...

Strategic voting is a joke. Do we really live in a place where your vote should be cast based on who you want to lose?

I refuse to vote Liberal because I want Harper to lose. I want the NDP to win, that's why I vote NDP. I believe it's best for the country.

Blogging Horse said...

Scott Tribe said :It's sad when NDP supporters are reduced to praising or taking as gospel what comes from the Sun chain of papers.

You can't turn Persichilli into a raving right winger when he's also the political editor of Corriere Canadese, the pro-Liberal Italian language newspaper in Toronto where no less than Joe Volpe used to work.