“Is this the end of the Orange Crush?” a reporter asked. It was the first question, and only somewhat less silly than inquiring whether the Liberal’s win had heralded the resurrection of Mountain Dew Code Red.
“This is the best result the NDP’s ever had in Toronto Centre, which is a very difficult riding, a very Liberal stronghold, as you know,” said McQuaig. “And in fact, in 2011 it didn’t go with the Orange Crush. We did better this time than we did in 2011.”
But when the last polls reported at 2:05 am, and the returning officer certified the results, this was no longer quite so true.
Yes, the NDP finished the by-election with 36.3 per cent of the vote, ahead of the party’s 2011 share of 30.2. But the Liberals also jumped, from 41 per cent to 49.4; their margin of victory actually increased, from 10.8 per cent to 13.1. That is, the NDP wound up slightly further behind than last time.
Beyond noting the collapse of the Conservative vote (from 2011’s 22.6 per cent share to Monday’s 8.6), however, there’s not much of a shift to be inferred. It’s more that the NDP, which had long benefited from diminished expectations, no longer has underdog status by default.
And so we have peculiar situations such as that in Toronto Centre, in which the Liberals and NDP each sees itself as the outsider being savaged by the reigning establishment.
Asked about Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s comment that the NDP is no longer Jack Layton’s party of hope and optimism, McQuaig told the press, “Well, I say that’s absurd and that’s what you’d expect from Justin Trudeau. You’d expect him to say that, right? I think we’re very much the party of hope and optimism.”
It was as though she’d fallen into a deliberate trap; her remark was arguably both accurate and ironic. For an avowal of optimism, it was awfully bitter, much like the Trudeau statement to which she was reacting. Once you begin thinking about it, you realize there’s potential for infinite regress: a chicken-and-egg of who called out whom first.
At the same time McQuaig was giving her post-concession scrum at the Hot House Cafe, Freeland was delivering a less than gracious victory speech at the Yonge-Dundas Jack Astor’s.
Rather than thanking her supporters and congratulating her opponents, Freeland devoted most of her remarks to denouncing the NDP’s campaign.
“What we discovered in this race,” she said, “is that the NDP have looked at how the Conservatives fight and at the way the Conservatives have decided politics should be done in Canada.”
“Shame!” someone shouted.
“They’ve decided that the way you win is by being negative…” – some boos – “…through negative, personal attacks that have nothing to do with what actual Canadians, with what the actual people of Toronto Centre need and want. And I am so delighted that in the face of that, we stayed positive.”
It’s two parties clawing each other’s eyes out for the status of “most positive.”
Freeland was referring to the NDP’s repeated knocks at her for having only very recently moved to the riding (after a decade living abroad) and for having been a manager at Thomson Reuters during a period in which the company outsourced jobs in her department. (Both are legitimate subjects of criticism but needn’t necessarily have been key messages.)
In her own speech, McQuaig characterized her campaign this way: “I feel proud of the campaign we ran. Because it was about issues. We didn’t back down – we addressed the issues in this riding,” the most prominent of which was income inequality.
“And this election became an opportunity to talk about that, and to draw attention to that,” she said, “and to point out that the dramatic increase in inequality we’ve seen in Canada is not some inevitable development. It’s the result of Liberal and Conservative policies that have been put in place by Liberal and Conservative governments over the past 30 years.”
This is exactly correct. It would be difficult to have an honest discussion about inequality without examining the specific policies that have created (or at least exacerbated) ever-growing distinctions in class.
And yet in her victory speech, Freeland disparaged the NDP’s approach to the issue as excessively negative. “They tried to divide this riding,” she said. “They tried to say that Regent Park and Rosedale were opposed to one another, that we can’t have a solution that brings Canada and Toronto Centre together.”
Here we see the limits of the politics of positivity. It’s like dismissing the concept of systemic racism because you think it’s an impediment to celebrating a glorious post-racial era.
Elections don’t have to be vicious, but they’re inherently adversarial. And now this idealized vision of Laytonian virtuousness has been seized as yet another club with which to beat one’s opponent.
“Make no mistake: the NDP is no longer the hopeful, optimistic party of Jack Layton,” Trudeau said in Montreal. “It is the negative, divisive party of Thomas Mulcair. Because it is the Liberal Party, tonight, that proved that hope is stronger than fear, that positive politics can and should win out over negative.”
It was a provocative pronouncement that elicited (the presumably intended) outrage.
But it’s hard to tell who’s feigning offense here vs. expressing legitimate surprise. The NDP isn’t accustomed to being attacked in this way, and the Liberals aren’t accustomed to being on the outside of power.
Make no mistake: none of us has ever embodied the sentiment of the hopeful, optimistic final paragraph of Jack Layton.
It’s an aspiration, not a pedestal.
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Jonathan Goldsbie
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