During the NDP (now also known as the Bloc Orange) leadership debate last year, Topp insisted that if voters had two Liberal parties before them, they’d vote for the real one. He argued the NDP should avoid moving too close to the centre, something Thomas Mulcair was implicitly advocating.
Topp believed the NDP should stick to its convictions instead of trying to please everyone. The Liberals made the same mistake under Michael Ignatieff. While they were promising corporate tax hikes and increased spending on social programs of dubious jurisdiction, they were also accusing Stephen Harper of spending like a drunken sailor.
Those positions might not be contradictory, but the point is this: in politics, attempting to please everyone on a single policy frontier might not work. You might end up pleasing no one. Advocating social progress and fiscal responsibility is far easier than pushing fiscal responsibility in tandem with spending increases.
The same goes for national unity. The NDP’s ‘Unity Bill’ — introduced by law professor MP Craig Scott despite the fact that it contradicts a Supreme Court reference — was intended to help the NDP solidify its control over Quebec’s political landscape while keeping open the option of increasing the party’s seat total outside of Quebec. Instead, Mulcair’s party is now one MP short in Quebec and his leadership has been ridiculed by Canada’s anglophone press.
The recklessness and irresponsibility of bringing up a dormant issue in a way that was so obviously inconsistent with a landmark judicial decision made the NDP an easy target for editorial boards across the country. Regardless of what one might consider morally correct as a threshold for separation — and I believe it must be more than a simple majority — the Supreme Court has already clearly stated that 50-percent-plus-one is not enough to trigger negotiations.
Furthermore, regardless of what the NDP’s bill proposes, Canada’s highest court has already made it clear that elected politicians — not judges — will decide whether a referendum question is clear and what the threshold is to trigger talks.
The Unity Bill was designed to placate Quebec nationalists. It clearly wasn’t enough for Claude Patry, the NDP MP who has now defected to the Bloc Québécois. Somehow — perhaps because the bill posited the need a clear referendum question — Patry asserted that the proposed legislation threatened to rob Quebecers of their right to self-determination.
How clear-cut sovereigntists such as Patry ended up running under the NDP banner is quite obvious. Before the 2011 election, the NDP wasn’t even on the radar in Quebec — Quebecers had no idea what the party stood for, including its supposed federalist convictions. Thomas Mulcair became in 2008 the first Quebec MP elected under the NDP banner in a general election.
Perhaps because of the party’s famous Sherbrooke Declaration, many Quebec nationalists offering up their names to run under the NDP banner in 2011 had little or no idea that the party was supposed to be federalist.
The past few weeks have demonstrated that on an issue as critical as national unity, there is no room for pandering. One either believes in Quebec sovereignty or in doing everything possible to stop it. Making it easier for Quebec to separate while simultaneously claiming to be a federalist party at the national level just doesn’t work. You either believe in fighting for a united Canada at all costs, or you don’t.
Quebec sovereigntists already have a home on the federal scene — the Bloc Québécois. I think it’s time we were clear: No party that claims to be federalist should have any MPs in its caucus that back Quebec sovereignty.
When it comes to national unity, your convictions matter as much to Quebecers as they do to people in other provinces. The significant increase in support for the federal Liberal party in Quebec following the proposal of the Clarity Act is a case in point.
We knew pretty well from the get-go that Mulcair’s brand wouldn’t resonate as much in places like downtown Toronto as Jack Layton’s did. Mulcair’s brand might not resonate among Quebecers as well as Jack’s did either. If so, he’ll have no one to blame but himself.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Zach Paikin
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