Canadian Politics

[Luziyca]

CBC just did the same....NDP put up a hell of a fight though, particularly in Calgary, and they made some gains.

They did: the NDP gained ten or eleven more seats than they had coming into this election, and I think assuming the NDP plays their cards right, they will be poised to win again in 2027 (although I'm not sure if Rachel Notley will be leading the Alberta NDP by then given she's already leading the NDP for nearly a decade now).

[Shrillland]

Now the east burns like the west, a huge wildfire in HRM

[Luziyca]

Now the east burns like the west, a huge wildfire in HRM

Damn: I hope my aunts who live out there are doing alright.

As for the supply and confidence agreement between the federal NDP and the Liberals (or as many of my compatriots call it, the Liberal-NDP coalition), Singh will be keeping the agreement as is "until confidence in the electoral system is restored" and would not support forcing a federal election.

[Kubra]

Just champagne socialist things

I mean, not even champagne socialist - the party was trumpeting a commitment to keeping corporate taxes low on twitter, if that gives any indication of their tenor. The best way to understand the Alberta NDP and its tactics in this election is that they're essentially just small l-liberals who have a profound aesthetic revulsion towards the UCP and want to bring back Sensible Government by Serious People.

And sometimes that works - it got the BC NDP a razor thin majority in 2017 that they successfully maneuvered into a larger majority on the back of a desperately out of touch BC Liberal government. It worked for the federal Liberals in 2015 in the face of a Harper government that was tired and made major missteps in its attempt to shift the political consensus rightward.

But I don't think Notley or the Alberta NDP has that special sauce, that combo of a minimum amount of personal charisma and a few attention-grabbing line-in-the-sand signature policies, to pull it off. To that extent it's quite similar to the 2013 election in BC, where the BC Liberals were also in a rut and the BC NDP was polling in majority territory, but when the ballots came in the BC Liberals came away with a majority because the then-leader Adrian Dix also just didn't have that special sauce. I suspect Ces is right and the Alberta NDP are going to underperform significantly when the chips go down because of it.

Yeah, ANDP watered down. They, at least by their reckoning, had to.
I mean electoral politics means you're gonna water yourself down, unless you're the liberals and only consist of water. So you approach the bluest province and figure "how the fuck am I gonna win this coming election" and the only feasible solution is to don the blue yourself (quite literally, in this case).
You know how it is, the ANDP got teased with a term of government and now they're fighting just to challenge the one-party system itself, rather than pass any particular policy with any particular conviction. Maybe they'd do better in an election or two if they sacrificed seats this one to take a more principled stand, but that's asking way too much of a party desperate for validation. Who knows, maybe the capital L Liberals will sense an opportunity after Polliviere has had a couple years in office and sweep up the ANDP in the same way Trudeau did Mulcair.

Now the east burns like the west, a huge wildfire in HRM

Damn: I hope my aunts who live out there are doing alright.

As for the supply and confidence agreement between the federal NDP and the Liberals (or as many of my compatriots call it, the Liberal-NDP coalition), Singh will be keeping the agreement as is "until confidence in the electoral system is restored" and would not support forcing a federal election.

I really don't get why he simply refuses to say the actual reasons he won't back out and instead resorts to this kind of shit. This is arguably weaker.

[Nilokeras]

Yeah, ANDP watered down. They, at least by their reckoning, had to.
I mean electoral politics means you're gonna water yourself down, unless you're the liberals and only consist of water. So you approach the bluest province and figure "how the fuck am I gonna win this coming election" and the only feasible solution is to don the blue yourself (quite literally, in this case).
You know how it is, the ANDP got teased with a term of government and now they're fighting just to challenge the one-party system itself, rather than pass any particular policy with any particular conviction. Maybe they'd do better in an election or two if they sacrificed seats this one to take a more principled stand, but that's asking way too much of a party desperate for validation. Who knows, maybe the capital L Liberals will sense an opportunity after Polliviere has had a couple years in office and sweep up the ANDP in the same way Trudeau did Mulcair.

I wish the modern NDP was more conversant with its own history, because there are good examples of how to challenge a one-party monopoly out there for them to mine.

BC used to be a one-party Social Credit state like Alberta and the other prairie provinces, with a tired WAC 'Wacky' Bennett government trundling into the 1972 election on the heels of a series of gaffes and scandals. Dave Barrett, leader of the BC NDP, ran a smart campaign that contrasted his youth and Bennett's out-of-touch government with some smart technocratic policies like extracting higher royalties from resource extraction (sound familiar?) and public transit. He managed an upset victory that got him a shock majority government, the first time a non-Socred government had been in power for over 20 years. A very similar story to Notley in many ways.

After the election the BC NDP didn't try to triangulate against the Socred voters who had evidently jumped ship over to him to push his party over the edge like Notley did, though. Instead he rammed through a blitzkrieg legislative campaign, passing an average of three bills a day and created the institutions of modern BC: the Agricultural Land Reserve, our public auto insurer ICBC, BC's pharmacare program, bans on corporal punishment in schools, our human rights laws, the air ambulance service, mining royalties, you name it. He said it pretty directly - his government was 'here for a good time, not for a long time'.

He picked too many fights and lost the next election pretty definitively, but the strategy worked - many of the policies that he implemented were so popular that the following Socred government couldn't touch them, and in so doing he pushed the window of political acceptability leftward for the first time in BC political history. I don't think you would get the modern BC NDP ascendancy without his transformative premiership, even though it took decades for those transformations to catalyze the electorate's shift leftward.

It's a difficult pitch for a political consultant to make for a respectable middle class social democrat/liberal party though, compared to trying to lean on nervous UCP voters and say 'we're not so bad, we're just going to do what you want to do, but competently'. They're used to thinking in terms of swing voters and targeted messaging, not wielding power and using it to transform the political landscape at the cost of an election in the short term.

[Kubra]

Yeah, ANDP watered down. They, at least by their reckoning, had to.
I mean electoral politics means you're gonna water yourself down, unless you're the liberals and only consist of water. So you approach the bluest province and figure "how the fuck am I gonna win this coming election" and the only feasible solution is to don the blue yourself (quite literally, in this case).
You know how it is, the ANDP got teased with a term of government and now they're fighting just to challenge the one-party system itself, rather than pass any particular policy with any particular conviction. Maybe they'd do better in an election or two if they sacrificed seats this one to take a more principled stand, but that's asking way too much of a party desperate for validation. Who knows, maybe the capital L Liberals will sense an opportunity after Polliviere has had a couple years in office and sweep up the ANDP in the same way Trudeau did Mulcair.

I wish the modern NDP was more conversant with its own history, because there are good examples of how to challenge a one-party monopoly out there for them to mine.

BC used to be a one-party Social Credit state like Alberta and the other prairie provinces, with a tired WAC 'Wacky' Bennett government trundling into the 1972 election on the heels of a series of gaffes and scandals. Dave Barrett, leader of the BC NDP, ran a smart campaign that contrasted his youth and Bennett's out-of-touch government with some smart technocratic policies like extracting higher royalties from resource extraction (sound familiar?) and public transit. He managed an upset victory that got him a shock majority government, the first time a non-Socred government had been in power for over 20 years. A very similar story to Notley in many ways.

After the election the BC NDP didn't try to triangulate against the Socred voters who had evidently jumped ship over to him to push his party over the edge like Notley did, though. Instead he rammed through a blitzkrieg legislative campaign, passing an average of three bills a day and created the institutions of modern BC: the Agricultural Land Reserve, our public auto insurer ICBC, BC's pharmacare program, bans on corporal punishment in schools, our human rights laws, the air ambulance service, mining royalties, you name it. He said it pretty directly - his government was 'here for a good time, not for a long time'.

He picked too many fights and lost the next election pretty definitively, but the strategy worked - many of the policies that he implemented were so popular that the following Socred government couldn't touch them, and in so doing he pushed the window of political acceptability leftward for the first time in BC political history. I don't think you would get the modern BC NDP ascendancy without his transformative premiership, even though it took decades for those transformations to catalyze the electorate's shift leftward.

It's a difficult pitch for a political consultant to make for a respectable middle class social democrat/liberal party though, compared to trying to lean on nervous UCP voters and say 'we're not so bad, we're just going to do what you want to do, but competently'. They're used to thinking in terms of swing voters and targeted messaging, not wielding power and using it to transform the political landscape at the cost of an election in the short term.

Well you know how it is over here it was the PC's who ousted the socreds, and we both know why that didn't break the one-party state.
In any case, maybe there was a case for this approach back in 2015, but hindsight is 20/20 and it's hard to make a case now for any upset NDP victories that don't involve Lougheed cosplay, despite comrade Smith's hard work to the contrary. The plan at this point is probably just to stay relevant and "electable" in time to pick up the pieces of the next oil bust (and then be blamed for it again).

[San Lumen]

https://www.westernstandard.news/albert ... bd60f.html

Smith to create 'council of defeated' to advise on Edmonton issues

I fail to see how this is in anyway democratic or helps the UCP. Does Smith not realize Edmonton has representatives the residents voted for in a free and fair election? Why not listen to what they have to say?