This morning I had quite the Twitter argument with the former Liberal candidate for North Vancouver in 2011, Taleeb Noormohamed, who had just been interviewed for an article in The Tyee. (Full disclosure: I voted for him. Strategically…) The article describes, in lurid yet ambiguous detail, what the BCNDP must do to win: “Become The Party Of Growth.” I will set aside the arguments in this article, as I find them irrelevant to the question of winning governments and holding them.
For me the question is not how to win, but how to deliver on progressive goals upon winning. This is something Liberals are notoriously bad at, the Trudeau government our latest demonstration of a hundred shattered promises. And this is the question I wish to address today.
Every time the NDP are on the precipice of forming government, the same horde of advisors appears, with the same set of demands: compromise, centrism, Third Way ideology, “growth”, business-friendly policies, and so on, and so forth. And historically, for better or worse, the NDP has caved to this craven crowd of functionaries like Taleeb. This latest crowd is of course in direct employ of greenwashing mall-developer-heir plastics queen Joel Solomon (more here).
And how have these concessions turned out for us in the past? Disastrous, one-term governments, in large part. Need I name Bob Rae? But the Harcourt-Clark decade is just as bad. Don’t even get me started on the Larry Campbell trojan horse in Vancouver. And in Mulcair’s case, we couldn’t even hold it together to form a neoliberal technocratic sellout one-term government (thank god). And now the same crowd had materialized, again, in BC, in 2016, because guess what? We’re on the verge of another breakthrough, so it’s time to water down the wine.
There can be no peace. There can be no compromise with these people, because they will betray us at the first opportunity. They care for nothing but themselves, and they have only one nature. They are hungry ghosts. They will dangle a carrot, they will show us a shiny bauble, and then when our guard is down, they will kill us in our sleep.
There is a story, a very important story, that goes in many iterations, but my preference is the Frog and the Scorpion. And this is exactly the story we’re living today. We are the frog. The scorpion says it’s friends now, and that it just wants to ride along, and everything will be okay. We have every right to refuse. Are we going to let kindness get the better of us? Because the scorpion will sting us, halfway across the river. And then, as it is every time, we will all drown.
Govern yourselves accordingly.
-N
