Exit Music (For A Failure)

On The NDP Convention

“Wake from your sleep/The drying of your tears/Today, we escape/We escape”

What if we didn’t do this?

This weekend Jagmeet Singh will face a leadership review at the NDP’s convention in Hamilton, and the wide expectation is that he will pass with flying colours. There’s no organized attempt to get rid of him, the supporters of the party like him, and there’s nobody obviously looking to get rid of him. But, stay with me, what if we didn’t?

What if the NDP took a stand for vision, and for hope? What if it took a stand against defeatism and pessimism and stood for something more? What if they accepted that this is a prison of their own making and decided to leave? What if – what if – they decided that better is possible when the status quo is failure?

It’s not gonna happen, because the NDP lack the testicular fortitude to do it, but I think a lot of NDP delegates, members, and voters are going to walk away from this weekend and look back asking it, because if Jagmeet survives this weekend, the party is admitting it doesn’t care if it lives or dies.

…

It is my most bleeding heart liberal opinion, but the point of politics is to do things, and the NDP are setting themselves up to be a useless part of that process for at least a decade. If the NDP doesn’t replace Jagmeet, they’ll lose at least 6, if not closer to 10 seats to the Tories, as they are facing wipeout in their heartlands. Vancouver Island, Skeena, Kootenay, Timmins, Windsor all have seats that can fall to the Tories, and even with the Liberals in the shits, they’re not making gains. At best they’ve made themselves toxic to Liberal voters by bashing the Liberals despite supporting them on the floor, and at worst they’ve gained some Orange Liberals and lost as many voters to the right.

This is, of course, the leader who has twice won less seats than Tom Mulcair in English Canada, who has made an ass out of himself any time he exposes himself to any form of scrutiny, and who has rotted out the NDP’s intellectual capacity to such a degree that they cease to provide many good ideas on what’s next. The fact that strong climate and housing plans have come from a Liberal backbench MP (for his Ontario Liberal Leadership race) and not from the NDP is pathetic. The capacity for formulating good and strong ideas is there, if you want it. And it’s clear Singh’s NDP doesn’t want it.

The legacy of the Jagmeet NDP is the lack of ambition – signing a confidence and supply agreement that would inevitably kill the party for the dental equivalent of Medicare For All Who Want It won’t exactly be looked back at fondly. They didn’t get electoral reform for their suicide pact, they didn’t get lasting economic reforms, they got a benefit for a meaningful number of people that the majority of the population won’t ever see and that can easily be replaced by the next government.

Where has been the public tour designed to build the party’s support? Where has been the radical offer to confront rising food prices? Where has the NDP been on making the public case for electoral reform? Where’s their legislative answer to soaring executive pay, or the need for a top rate rise? Where is anything that might move the public, and the debate, leftwards?

The NDP have settled with Singh – they have decided, for reasons I’ll never understand, that he is good enough. They have settled on the idea that him being the guy minding the store when the Bloc revival fucked the Liberals out of majority government means he gets 3 elections to do what Mulcair did before being tossed. They have settled on a dangerously incompetent fool who lies as easily as he breathes. They have settled on someone who is failing his party and his country. And for some reason, they are just okay with it, because they lack the courage, the conviction, or the intellectual capacity to do anything about it.

The NDP is full of smart people who know I’m right – from activists and voters to people who have actual influence, there is a clear understanding that he must go. But for some reason, to say any of this is uncouth, because Jagmeet deserves better, as if a political party is supposed to give more of a fuck about the leader’s feelings than the people they serve to represent. In its current malaise, the NDP is failing to either represent the working class it claims to care about or those from marginalized communities who want a full throated defence of their right to exist.

The NDP has been stripped of a purpose, a clarity, a signal post to rally towards by Singh’s inability to care about anything other than his own vanity. A man more concerned with meeting his pension date than his voters’ best wishes doesn’t deliver the right outcomes, because if we didn’t all know that the NDP cannot go to an election before 2025, they might have more leverage to get more in these talks. But they don’t, because we all know there’s a better chance of my gay ass fucking Taylor Swift tonight than there is of Jagmeet risking his pension, and so the Liberals don’t have to give anything.

Jagmeet has left the party broke in every way – intellectually decrepit and devoid of the ability to push the debate forward, strategically broken and unable to decide who they should appeal to and what path they need to pick, and so broke financially that they can’t afford an election for two years even if they had a leader who wasn’t devoted to his own self interest.

They’re about to lose their most plausible next leader when Charlie Angus loses, Singh has failed to make his party strong by making it all about him, and he has put himself above the party by staunchly failing to make the inroads necessary to win. Jagmeet Singh is a cancer on the NDP and on the ability for workers in this country to have a party and a movement dedicated to them. Jagmeet is killing a venerable institution worth fighting for. He must go.

And if he won’t, the NDP must escape his leadership, or else they will exit the national stage entirely.