Memo To Jagmeet: Piss Or Get Off The Pot

Call An Election Or Shut Up

For the life of me, I can’t do it.

I’ve started writing fiction again in recent days, and that’s also meant a lot of time going back through my old work – both unpublished and Salvation In The Storm – to remind myself, in effect, how to do it well. And it’s led me to think about a lot of things, including why I am so unable to write a romance moving slowly.

It’s not that I think a slow burn is necessarily bad – hell, I read a lot of them – but for the life of me I can’t write it myself, mostly because to me it feels inauthentic. I know the truth – I know whether or not it’s going to work out in the end, so for me, I don’t like the idea of stringing something out and putting more and more drama and angst into a situation that doesn’t actually need it.

Plenty of people would disagree with this, and that’s their right, but in a good romance, some angst and some doubt along the way is fine, even if you know the eventual ending will be what you want.

The problem? I’m okay with that when it’s a fucking book, and quite a bit less so when the leader of Canada’s third national political party tries to pretend they’re in opposition to a government only existent because of their fucking votes. And at some point, both the NDP and Jagmeet need to have separate conversations with themselves, because this – this absolute fucking bullshit where the NDP are both the Liberals’ enemies and their Parliamentary protectors - this ain’t sustainable.

Jagmeet needs to decide how much longer he’s willing to base his entire politics on a lie, and the NDP need to decide for how long they will let him, because this will end one way – with the NDP with less seats than they do right now, and no path back after pissing off everyone who might consider voting for them on the liberal left.

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The current NDP position is that the Liberals and the Conservatives are in a cahoots of the Establishment Parties to keep working people down to keep the rich getting richer.

Whatever you think the truth of that sentence, it is Jagmeet Singh’s stated, explicit argument right now.

Jagmeet Singh is the only reason Justin Trudeau is currently Prime Minister, and could revoke that status at – and I mean this with full fucking sincerity – any given time.

Jagmeet Singh is either the stupidest person in Canada, or he thinks so little of the Canadian people that he doesn’t realize that they know these two facts in tandem. It is either idiocy on his part or a shameful, scummy belief in the electorate as idiots, and either way, frankly, he’s an asshole for it.

He is propagating a political strategy that is dependent on the Liberals shitting the bed, because his electoral strategy is trade eventual losses in Timmins for gains in Toronto, but he is doing so by wanting this government to fail. He wants the Liberals to look out of touch, to look like they’re corporate stooges, and he wants this government to look like a failure.

Why? Easy – a Liberal Party that is weakened means the NDP can win back Danforth and Davenport and maybe even Beaches if NES runs for the Provincial Liberal leadership. A Liberal Party that is weakened will give the NDP back the London seat that has Western in it and maybe a few Greater Vancouver seats and maybe even Windsor. It’s in the NDP’s electoral interest for the Liberals to lose ground. The problem is, a 4% swing from the LPC to the NDP – even with no change in Conservative vote intention from 2021 – brings the CPC very close to, if into, government.

What the NDP is trying to do is essentially late stage Coalition Lib Dem-ism, their “conscious uncoupling” as they got to the end of the Coalition and tried to save their seats. In theory, pointing out the good things you did and trying to distance yourself from the bad things is a smart strategy, but in theory I should also be attracted to women, so the theory can fuck off on this one.

What happened to the Lib Dems – and to New Zealand First in 2020 (and 2008), and the German Free Democrats in 2013, and basically every minor party in supply and confidence or coalition – is that they got blamed by voters who didn’t like the government and the voters who did like the government voted for the party of the Prime Minister who they quite liked. If you were a 2010 Lib Dem voter because you liked the Lib Dems 2010 manifesto and hated the Coalition, you voted Labour. If you liked the 2010 manifesto but liked the Coalition’s environment policy or taking the poor out of income tax, you voted Tory, and if you voted Lib Dem in 2010 because Fuck The Establishment, you voted UKIP.

Here, the NDP are worried about this, so they’re doing this mug’s game of pretending they’re not the ones responsible for the bad things (inflation, Doug Ford’s health policies, and Loblaws’ pricing policies) but will take credit for the good things (GST credit checks, Dental, Pharma). They’re scared shitless that they’ll get their policy agenda enacted and not the credit for it, so they act in this completely deranged way.

The problem for them is, they’re acting as incoherent fuckwits who come off as less organized and serious than my old Uni’s campus communists. It’s a derangement to think that this helps the NDP, because it makes them look like a party of unserious people being led by an utter moron.

I don’t give a fuck about the fact that Nanos has the NDP doing a bit better than usual, it’s what happens between writs in this country. It is so fucking nonsensical as a strategy that the fact the NDP is doing it makes me think they’re either too stupid to realize how crazy it is or they’ve genuinely drank the Kool-Aid from the leader that this is working. It’s not.

I know the NDP have been a bit of a punching bag on this site in recent months, but it’s not because I hate them, it’s because I love them. I love the NDP, I consider Broadbent and Douglas to be two of the most influential Canadian politicians and I love the fact we have a politics that allows for a strong left check on the Liberals. The NDP have been the intellectual home for some of the best ideas in Canadian history, and their party is being betrayed by a Leader and a strategy that is destined to ruin it.

If I’m the NDP, the time to have the conversation about Jagmeet was after 2021, but when someone who voted NDP in 2021 and is actively getting more left wing as they age is filled with rage on a near daily basis by what you’re saying, this strategy won’t work. The Liberals will eat your lunch when the election actually happens, because when the benefits of four years of progressive administration and tangible success on Pharma and Dental occur, the goodwill will go to the people who did it, and every time you distance yourself from the Liberals, you are saying they’re the Government, not us.

It is a strategy bound for failure, and it is one that will make our country poorer for the continued hollowing out of a beloved and important institution, but in reality, the NDP was hollowed out when they let such a vacuous clown and staggering incompetent stay as leader after winning less seats in English Canada than Tom Mulcair 2 separate times. Jagmeet Singh has been a big of a failure as my straight dating life, a disgrace to a party that deserves better, and a politician unworthy of his title or his status.

Jagmeet is hurting a party I love in the interests of vain delusion, he is hurting the people he seeks to represent by making them stupider every time he speaks, and his willingness to lie and misrepresent the truth at his convenience makes us all worse off.

Someone needs to end this farce, and they need to do it now. Call an election, or fucking change the leader. Piss or get off the fucking pot, because every moment the NDP tries to cling to this fraudulent existence, they are killing themselves.