As a longtime NDP voter, thanks for writing this. I became a Dipper many years ago when I lived in Northern Ontario and was disgusted by the neo-Liberal BS of Mulroney and then, when I moved to Ottawa, Chretien/Martin. I don't know if that NDP exists anymore.
This is not a Singh issue, however, as I view him as a symptom of a global problem, namely, that too many progressive parties have opted to represent wealthy lefties who pontificate about society, rather than the working class. Replace Singh, and the NDP will be left with the same problem.
Could it be that Jagmeet Singh is just not a very smart person? Perhaps surrounded by equally not very smart persons?
For example, his latest contributions to the housing debate were beyond infantile. Helping over leveraged people pay their mortgage because interest rates have risen? And complete silence for people that are struggling to pay rent?
The only place in Canada where the NDP has had success is BC. And they did this by being uber-pragmatic and occupying the political centre with confidence. In all other places, provincial and federal, they seem to be lost. Do they want to be in power, or is it more important to be vocal about their views? I found the aftermath of the Alberta elections most telling. The NDP lost against a deeply flawed opponent, but at least they got to express their views? Who cares?
..yours is not ‘an opinion’ - far more a Chapter & Verse recitation of ‘Failure’ - and/or ‘wrong person at the wrong.. or worst time’
I’v never really bothered to examine him carefully.. as it’s my belief ‘winning via signing up the most new members’ aint ‘Leadership’
Having to parachute into a ‘safe seat’ much later to ‘become or remain credible’ ? Everything I hear about the guy is ‘very nice man’ etc etc
Well Educated, yada yada.. bespoke suits, born into wealth & has a twin brother.. Somewhere down the lazy river.. was a bizarro dreamy ode emanated from the guy in a bath tube.. I never got that either.. ‘But Wait ! There’s More !!
I laud the NDP as a Bulwark against The Harper & Ray Novak Conspiracy & Criminal Elements Party that Simply by Rebranding Itself as Conservatives .. haha ‘tories’ via Peter (Sack of Hammers) MacKay’s treachery.. immediately captured the ‘35 + % Auto Vote The Conservative Party’.
Sadly, I came to see the NDP as the ‘Split The Vote’ Party.. that gifted Canada with the twisted likes of Michelle Ferreri in Peterborough / Kawartha.
Can I give credit for 10$ a day Daycare ? or Dentistry for Children ? Or denying a secretive F’n Reform/Alliance the ability to take Power via Non-Confidence Vote ? Where does it go now ? Why on earth would Jagmeet care about a Pension ? What ? He needs the money ?
I keep saying Jagmeet might be a fine Civil Servant at the Civic Level.. Brampton or Mississauga.. or wherever a ‘good hearted person’ is needed
As well, on a personal level.. most or many of The Boss’s homies & secret cabal are either ‘Actual Tories’ or Actual NDP & Highly Politically Informed & my farm lad manners or respect suggests keeping my City Boy Catholic feral sarcasms somewhat blurry. To me ‘politics’ too often seems like hockey sweater ‘fantasy & camouflage’ Try telling me that Christy Clark was a ‘Liberal’.. all I saw was a Harper Disciple & Crook.. grifting on behalf of Vested Interest. I mean c’mon.. Ken Boessenkool as her Chief Of Staff ? He was Signatory to The Harper Firewall Letter that Jason Kenney was enacting until Danielle ‘toxic talkshow’ Smith took over to Enact Her Avowed Separatist Version of ‘Nation Building’ .. I was born in ‘51’ and Non Partisan, never knew a Mom or Dad, a freak show of Nature / Feral but a Dad & Grandad.. and full disclosure - luckiest man on Spaceship Earth.. & if the last & best ‘thing’ I ever do.. is save Canada from The Notorious Daily Liar Pierre Poutine.. amen 🦎🏴☠️ & I fully admit .. it’s my belief Carleton Riding is The Hill Poilievre & CPC must Die Upon.. gutted like the parasitic lamprey eel he is
He lost many of us when Singh turned full on reformed conservative on Twitter. He’s no politician, he does not reflect the NDP, it burns me up that the game players in federal NDP are keeping him on. Asking for money constantly when I made it clear he’s not the one to invest in. He was darn near word for word with conservatives. Lots of us commented back really upset with his stance, he pushed us out and continued his sabotage. They have made a joke out of politics. They refuse to listen. Others say they like him and support him, why? because do they feel like they have to? I still haven’t found out who paid the long time federal NDP debt. They won’t even tell us, nor have they paid the provincial NDP back. These power trip people refuse to listen to us. Right now all they are doing is damaging our democracy, we need those votes going to the liberals to keep our democracy. I can’t live through another reformed conservative government, I’m pushed to the edge already by the provincial government barely hanging on. There’s no help when it’s a rcon government party that’s harming us criminally.
I really have no use for Jagmeet Singh, largely, I suspect, for the same basic reason: no one knows (least of all him) what he's good for. That said, I think by your own reasoning you're being a bit hard on him. He's a symptom of what's ailing the NDP and frankly, it's hard to see who could have "turned things around" given where they were at, which is to say years of irrelevance, a purely personality-driven bump when the Liberals had less than nothing, followed by an angry, opportunistic chameleon who tried to make the NDP the CPC-lite. Someone could have made the NDP relevant, but I don't know whether anyone knows who that someone is.
One of the problems with the CPC taking on the role of pure obstruction and the politics of personal character assassination is that this leaves no role for a third party. The most reasonable thing Singh has done, for both wings of the NDP, is the supply and confidence agreement. But in these circumstances, Singh is not up to the task of boldly supporting the Liberal implementation of NDP goals, because he's too busy not wanting to seem like he's in any way supporting them. So he moronically jumps on the CPC attack Trudeau bandwagon, rather than charting his own course and talking up the positive changes the NDP helped (in a very meaningful way) bring about. He should be crowing about the positive outcomes from the handling of the pandemic because lots of folks got badly needed support thanks (in no small part) to the NDP. He should be taking credit for higher wages, yes, but also should be making meaningful contributions to the housing debate, instead of merely parroting the CPC's dull idiocy from the other side of the mirror.
I still nominally plan to vote NDP, but my last straw will probably come during the fall session. If the Online Safety bill is anywhere near as messy as it seems, it'll spell the departure of myself and many other left-wing supporters from the NDP--at least until there's a change.
Where will we go? I'm not sure. But I can't compromise my morality by voting for a party that supports legislation that violates it. That doesn't mean I can justify voting for Poilievre, either.
It's depressing.
As far as strategy goes--the current one just isn't working. They need to target the right districts, sure, but they also need to figure when to break ranks with the Liberals, because the message of 'we hate this government too, but we vote with them 100% of the time' just ... isn't going to win anyone over.
100% spot on. Also with liberal brand dead in the west why in Federal NDP not more focused on winning seats in the west. They are the western progressive choice.
The Federal wing of the NDP has a very tough row to hoe. In order for them to form a government, one of the two other parties must collapse. This is very unlikely. Additionally, the Liberals can always steal their better policies. At the provincial level, the NDP have success when they are in a two party race. As we have seen here in Ontario, they have failed to form government while in opposition to either the Liberals or the Conservatives. Part of that is because of their incompetence when they formed government 30 years ago. But mainly, when the voting public has a choice between either a centre left party or a centre right one, or a pure left wing party, they will chose one of the first two.
Oh my goodness enough about electoral reform. No one wants this except for dreamers that think Prop-Rep will suddenly make NDP a power holder. Maryan Monsef (remember her?) literally went from city to city and held town halls to ask people on the ground what they'd want, and in those town halls (I was at the local Ottawa region one) people had very little interest in change. Yes, there were militants who wanted Ranked Ballot or Prop-Rep but overall people didn't want a change. And this has been reflected in provincial referenda on the topic. They've all failed. Most importantly, IF E.R. WOULD HAVE WON LPC A MAJORITY THEY WOULD HAVE GONE FOR IT.
Onto the weird thing about Harper...I don't want to be patronizing so apologies here but you obviously weren't in a government position when he was in power. Departments were massively understaffed when they weren't completely eliminated. I was in a good job as an EDITOR at CIDA (remember that org?) and it was doing good work getting educational needs in developing counties and it all got cut overnight. And the Status of Women office got shelved, leading to lack of birth control grants in other countries. And and and. You should stop on this because you are completely out of your element. Those of us who lived through the Decade of Darkness know otherwise.
Lastly, on Singh, he appeals to me. I'm an urbane, university-educated technocrat that loves his vibe. He's definitely out in QC but he _should_ win seats in urban Ontario and B.C. while losing working-class seats. It's not happening but not because of Jagmeet in specific but mostly because a wing of his party are "Blue Oranges" (like the heinous Charlie Angus) and those should have been purged from the party in want of socialists and progressives. That Angus is still in the NDP caucucs is a huge strike against Singh. It's one of the things you can actually hold against him, but for some reason don't for whatever reason.. Well, the seat will flip CPC soon enough and the NDP will be at around 20-25 seats.
Can anything change this? Two words: Niki Ashton. Get her or someone left wing and watch the fireworks.
Why take it out on Jagmeet? He is just a symptom of the problem. You say it yourself: The problem with the NDP runs much deeper than Jagmeet Singh, but he is the perfect illustration of what’s institutionally broken in the party.
Evan Scrimshaw. You have obviously thought long and hard about who Jagmeet Singh is as well as what he represents and embodies. I agree with you that whether or not he's a "nice guys," he symbolizes a deep malaise in our national politics.
I was pleased to find your Substack item with such a razor focus on Canadian politics. I have voted NDP many times, most recently for Rachel Notley in 2015. I was surprised and energized when she got in. In 2023 I really feared she would get back in and I was happy that Danielle Smith was elected in spite of the huge opposition she faced from what I call the saboteur media who have lied to us again and again over the last three years.
As I read more and more of your work I am shocked by your blinkered, if sometimes narrowly insightful, approach to contemporary politics. You can zero in on a topic like housing and yet you have nothing to say about the larger context of what we have been living through these last three years.
In my books its pretty obscene to see you again and again just look away from the tens of thousands of injured people in our midst who have been badly injured by the Trudeau-Singh government that apparently you half support. How many millions worldwide have already been outright killed by the jabs. How many are in the process of dying in slow and agonizing ways from the mRNA/lipid nanoparticle procedures that are altering the human genome.
You notice the unusual level of hostility to Trudeau without taking into account the extreme conditions driving the phenomenon. By giving Trudeau a blank check to do what he wants, Jagmeet Singh bears an enormous part of the responsibility for so much of what is pushing Canada into such precipitous decline. Are you blind? At this stage, I don't think it can any longer be seriously argued that the harsh effects of the jabs are nothing but "conspiracy theory" and "alt-right extremism."
You called Christine Anderson a "nazi," parroting a characterization that the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs forced on Pierre Poilievre. Heh... sometimes you have to take orders from the big bosses if you want to get elected..... Anderson to me represents a voice of sanity in the face of the totalitarian overthrow of what remains of our democratic institutions. Here's a link of her speaking her own words in the European Parliament.
Did you ever pay any attention to Christine Anderson's own words before labelling her a nazi. To be called a nazi in the present climate goes to the radical extremes of trying to discredit and marginalize a fellow human being? I see her as a defender of human rights, democratic principles, and the rule of law.
As a longtime NDP voter, thanks for writing this. I became a Dipper many years ago when I lived in Northern Ontario and was disgusted by the neo-Liberal BS of Mulroney and then, when I moved to Ottawa, Chretien/Martin. I don't know if that NDP exists anymore.
This is not a Singh issue, however, as I view him as a symptom of a global problem, namely, that too many progressive parties have opted to represent wealthy lefties who pontificate about society, rather than the working class. Replace Singh, and the NDP will be left with the same problem.
Could it be that Jagmeet Singh is just not a very smart person? Perhaps surrounded by equally not very smart persons?
For example, his latest contributions to the housing debate were beyond infantile. Helping over leveraged people pay their mortgage because interest rates have risen? And complete silence for people that are struggling to pay rent?
The only place in Canada where the NDP has had success is BC. And they did this by being uber-pragmatic and occupying the political centre with confidence. In all other places, provincial and federal, they seem to be lost. Do they want to be in power, or is it more important to be vocal about their views? I found the aftermath of the Alberta elections most telling. The NDP lost against a deeply flawed opponent, but at least they got to express their views? Who cares?
..yours is not ‘an opinion’ - far more a Chapter & Verse recitation of ‘Failure’ - and/or ‘wrong person at the wrong.. or worst time’
I’v never really bothered to examine him carefully.. as it’s my belief ‘winning via signing up the most new members’ aint ‘Leadership’
Having to parachute into a ‘safe seat’ much later to ‘become or remain credible’ ? Everything I hear about the guy is ‘very nice man’ etc etc
Well Educated, yada yada.. bespoke suits, born into wealth & has a twin brother.. Somewhere down the lazy river.. was a bizarro dreamy ode emanated from the guy in a bath tube.. I never got that either.. ‘But Wait ! There’s More !!
I laud the NDP as a Bulwark against The Harper & Ray Novak Conspiracy & Criminal Elements Party that Simply by Rebranding Itself as Conservatives .. haha ‘tories’ via Peter (Sack of Hammers) MacKay’s treachery.. immediately captured the ‘35 + % Auto Vote The Conservative Party’.
Sadly, I came to see the NDP as the ‘Split The Vote’ Party.. that gifted Canada with the twisted likes of Michelle Ferreri in Peterborough / Kawartha.
Can I give credit for 10$ a day Daycare ? or Dentistry for Children ? Or denying a secretive F’n Reform/Alliance the ability to take Power via Non-Confidence Vote ? Where does it go now ? Why on earth would Jagmeet care about a Pension ? What ? He needs the money ?
I keep saying Jagmeet might be a fine Civil Servant at the Civic Level.. Brampton or Mississauga.. or wherever a ‘good hearted person’ is needed
As well, on a personal level.. most or many of The Boss’s homies & secret cabal are either ‘Actual Tories’ or Actual NDP & Highly Politically Informed & my farm lad manners or respect suggests keeping my City Boy Catholic feral sarcasms somewhat blurry. To me ‘politics’ too often seems like hockey sweater ‘fantasy & camouflage’ Try telling me that Christy Clark was a ‘Liberal’.. all I saw was a Harper Disciple & Crook.. grifting on behalf of Vested Interest. I mean c’mon.. Ken Boessenkool as her Chief Of Staff ? He was Signatory to The Harper Firewall Letter that Jason Kenney was enacting until Danielle ‘toxic talkshow’ Smith took over to Enact Her Avowed Separatist Version of ‘Nation Building’ .. I was born in ‘51’ and Non Partisan, never knew a Mom or Dad, a freak show of Nature / Feral but a Dad & Grandad.. and full disclosure - luckiest man on Spaceship Earth.. & if the last & best ‘thing’ I ever do.. is save Canada from The Notorious Daily Liar Pierre Poutine.. amen 🦎🏴☠️ & I fully admit .. it’s my belief Carleton Riding is The Hill Poilievre & CPC must Die Upon.. gutted like the parasitic lamprey eel he is
He lost many of us when Singh turned full on reformed conservative on Twitter. He’s no politician, he does not reflect the NDP, it burns me up that the game players in federal NDP are keeping him on. Asking for money constantly when I made it clear he’s not the one to invest in. He was darn near word for word with conservatives. Lots of us commented back really upset with his stance, he pushed us out and continued his sabotage. They have made a joke out of politics. They refuse to listen. Others say they like him and support him, why? because do they feel like they have to? I still haven’t found out who paid the long time federal NDP debt. They won’t even tell us, nor have they paid the provincial NDP back. These power trip people refuse to listen to us. Right now all they are doing is damaging our democracy, we need those votes going to the liberals to keep our democracy. I can’t live through another reformed conservative government, I’m pushed to the edge already by the provincial government barely hanging on. There’s no help when it’s a rcon government party that’s harming us criminally.
As a long time NDP supporter everything here is 100% on the button
I really have no use for Jagmeet Singh, largely, I suspect, for the same basic reason: no one knows (least of all him) what he's good for. That said, I think by your own reasoning you're being a bit hard on him. He's a symptom of what's ailing the NDP and frankly, it's hard to see who could have "turned things around" given where they were at, which is to say years of irrelevance, a purely personality-driven bump when the Liberals had less than nothing, followed by an angry, opportunistic chameleon who tried to make the NDP the CPC-lite. Someone could have made the NDP relevant, but I don't know whether anyone knows who that someone is.
One of the problems with the CPC taking on the role of pure obstruction and the politics of personal character assassination is that this leaves no role for a third party. The most reasonable thing Singh has done, for both wings of the NDP, is the supply and confidence agreement. But in these circumstances, Singh is not up to the task of boldly supporting the Liberal implementation of NDP goals, because he's too busy not wanting to seem like he's in any way supporting them. So he moronically jumps on the CPC attack Trudeau bandwagon, rather than charting his own course and talking up the positive changes the NDP helped (in a very meaningful way) bring about. He should be crowing about the positive outcomes from the handling of the pandemic because lots of folks got badly needed support thanks (in no small part) to the NDP. He should be taking credit for higher wages, yes, but also should be making meaningful contributions to the housing debate, instead of merely parroting the CPC's dull idiocy from the other side of the mirror.
Ok, go ahead and be hard on him!
.. there’s a little bell ringing in my head.. something of an idea about a ‘structural or mechanical weakness involved
perhaps a better lens to look at Carleton Riding & the Liberal & NDP Candidates.. Such a historic Riding Vote
of course they can’t campaign.. yet at they have an Elected Public Servant who abandoned them
to Campaign & FundRaise everywhere else in Canada.. where they Cannot Vote for him.. but give him money !
In the meantime Jagmeet is the focal point - the falling tree in the forest - not the potential Candidates or MP’s
#BespokeBuffoon
I still nominally plan to vote NDP, but my last straw will probably come during the fall session. If the Online Safety bill is anywhere near as messy as it seems, it'll spell the departure of myself and many other left-wing supporters from the NDP--at least until there's a change.
Where will we go? I'm not sure. But I can't compromise my morality by voting for a party that supports legislation that violates it. That doesn't mean I can justify voting for Poilievre, either.
It's depressing.
As far as strategy goes--the current one just isn't working. They need to target the right districts, sure, but they also need to figure when to break ranks with the Liberals, because the message of 'we hate this government too, but we vote with them 100% of the time' just ... isn't going to win anyone over.
100% spot on. Also with liberal brand dead in the west why in Federal NDP not more focused on winning seats in the west. They are the western progressive choice.
The Federal wing of the NDP has a very tough row to hoe. In order for them to form a government, one of the two other parties must collapse. This is very unlikely. Additionally, the Liberals can always steal their better policies. At the provincial level, the NDP have success when they are in a two party race. As we have seen here in Ontario, they have failed to form government while in opposition to either the Liberals or the Conservatives. Part of that is because of their incompetence when they formed government 30 years ago. But mainly, when the voting public has a choice between either a centre left party or a centre right one, or a pure left wing party, they will chose one of the first two.
A final question re Jagmeet.. ‘hanging around to qualify to get the Pension’
Does he ‘truly need the money’ or is it ‘just to not lose face’ ?
Oh my goodness enough about electoral reform. No one wants this except for dreamers that think Prop-Rep will suddenly make NDP a power holder. Maryan Monsef (remember her?) literally went from city to city and held town halls to ask people on the ground what they'd want, and in those town halls (I was at the local Ottawa region one) people had very little interest in change. Yes, there were militants who wanted Ranked Ballot or Prop-Rep but overall people didn't want a change. And this has been reflected in provincial referenda on the topic. They've all failed. Most importantly, IF E.R. WOULD HAVE WON LPC A MAJORITY THEY WOULD HAVE GONE FOR IT.
Onto the weird thing about Harper...I don't want to be patronizing so apologies here but you obviously weren't in a government position when he was in power. Departments were massively understaffed when they weren't completely eliminated. I was in a good job as an EDITOR at CIDA (remember that org?) and it was doing good work getting educational needs in developing counties and it all got cut overnight. And the Status of Women office got shelved, leading to lack of birth control grants in other countries. And and and. You should stop on this because you are completely out of your element. Those of us who lived through the Decade of Darkness know otherwise.
Lastly, on Singh, he appeals to me. I'm an urbane, university-educated technocrat that loves his vibe. He's definitely out in QC but he _should_ win seats in urban Ontario and B.C. while losing working-class seats. It's not happening but not because of Jagmeet in specific but mostly because a wing of his party are "Blue Oranges" (like the heinous Charlie Angus) and those should have been purged from the party in want of socialists and progressives. That Angus is still in the NDP caucucs is a huge strike against Singh. It's one of the things you can actually hold against him, but for some reason don't for whatever reason.. Well, the seat will flip CPC soon enough and the NDP will be at around 20-25 seats.
Can anything change this? Two words: Niki Ashton. Get her or someone left wing and watch the fireworks.
Why take it out on Jagmeet? He is just a symptom of the problem. You say it yourself: The problem with the NDP runs much deeper than Jagmeet Singh, but he is the perfect illustration of what’s institutionally broken in the party.
Evan Scrimshaw. You have obviously thought long and hard about who Jagmeet Singh is as well as what he represents and embodies. I agree with you that whether or not he's a "nice guys," he symbolizes a deep malaise in our national politics.
I was pleased to find your Substack item with such a razor focus on Canadian politics. I have voted NDP many times, most recently for Rachel Notley in 2015. I was surprised and energized when she got in. In 2023 I really feared she would get back in and I was happy that Danielle Smith was elected in spite of the huge opposition she faced from what I call the saboteur media who have lied to us again and again over the last three years.
As I read more and more of your work I am shocked by your blinkered, if sometimes narrowly insightful, approach to contemporary politics. You can zero in on a topic like housing and yet you have nothing to say about the larger context of what we have been living through these last three years.
In my books its pretty obscene to see you again and again just look away from the tens of thousands of injured people in our midst who have been badly injured by the Trudeau-Singh government that apparently you half support. How many millions worldwide have already been outright killed by the jabs. How many are in the process of dying in slow and agonizing ways from the mRNA/lipid nanoparticle procedures that are altering the human genome.
You notice the unusual level of hostility to Trudeau without taking into account the extreme conditions driving the phenomenon. By giving Trudeau a blank check to do what he wants, Jagmeet Singh bears an enormous part of the responsibility for so much of what is pushing Canada into such precipitous decline. Are you blind? At this stage, I don't think it can any longer be seriously argued that the harsh effects of the jabs are nothing but "conspiracy theory" and "alt-right extremism."
You called Christine Anderson a "nazi," parroting a characterization that the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs forced on Pierre Poilievre. Heh... sometimes you have to take orders from the big bosses if you want to get elected..... Anderson to me represents a voice of sanity in the face of the totalitarian overthrow of what remains of our democratic institutions. Here's a link of her speaking her own words in the European Parliament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNFgoAdDN4E&t=280s
Did you ever pay any attention to Christine Anderson's own words before labelling her a nazi. To be called a nazi in the present climate goes to the radical extremes of trying to discredit and marginalize a fellow human being? I see her as a defender of human rights, democratic principles, and the rule of law.
How do you see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNFgoAdDN4E&t=280s
Look at you and all those opinions!
I gave you a ‘mercy like’ for good reason / then said to myself - “self.. he’s likely even worse than he seems ..
.. so why not go down his backtrail for a LookSee & Sniff.. see what really grips his shit ?
& It’s like so determined ... really digs out the big sneering gawds gospel smartest guy in every room
I retracted the ‘Mercy LIke’ .. thoughts n prayers mister emeritus.. ‘& so sorry you so SHOCKED..
Tough Guy Talking’ & he gots so Shocked ! I gives a ShitNot what you think or have to say..
.. It’s ‘your delivery’ .. it’s so ‘seething’ & so truly damned laughable I thinks I hurt meself eh ! 🦎🏴☠️