The NDP Have To Stop Treating Us Like Idiots

On The NDP's Rental "Plan"

On Sunday, the NDP put out a press release touting a plan to lower rent. The “plan”, such as it is, would “create an affordable home acquisition fund and introduce a moratorium on housing profiteers from buying existing affordable housing.” You know what the “plan” doesn’t have? Any answers to any of the following followups:

·         What qualifies someone as a housing profiteer? Would, say, a suburban family who got money from the death of a parent that they then invested in a property they rented count? If not, how many properties are you allowed to own before you hit the moratorium?

·         How would the Affordable Home Acquisition Fund work? Is it just another handout to prospective homeowners, like the Liberals proposed tax free savings provisions?

·         What qualifies as an “affordable home” per the policy?

·         How much will the policy cost?

And most of all:

·         Do you think we’re all idiots?

For some reason, the NDP has decided – not for the first time, and not even close to it – that their electoral strategy runs through thinking that Canadians are idiots. They’re trying to get the words NDP, Rent, and Plan in a headline, but the problem is, their supposed plan is idiocy on stilts and completely unbecoming of a national party. It’s a joke, but the problem is the NDP doesn’t seem to mind consistently and habitually outing themselves as unserious frauds.

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You know what a serious plan to lower housing costs – for both renters and owners – would be? More fucking housing. For some reason a fairly basic idea – that big increases in population and a much smaller increase in housing supply will raise prices and fuck over people – is controversial, to the point where the NDP’s official housing plan includes the word “build” once, stuck at the very end. What mechanism the Feds have – or more accurately, which mechanism the Feds should invent – to invoke this solution is unclear.

The answer is that the Feds have to do everything – they have to bribe the provinces to incentivize housing, they have to threaten the municipalities if they don’t massively liberalize planning law, and they probably have to federally fund some direct housebuilding, especially if we’re committing to the levels of immigration that the cross party consensus supports. But what we get from a supposedly national party that supposedly wants to govern this country some day is such nonsense that can be picked apart by someone who took one econ class at University.

The broader problem isn’t just about housing, or this plan, or whatever. It’s about a party that either has aspirations above its intellect or that has decided that it’s too much work to not be clowns. In the same way that Jagmeet Singh called on Justin Trudeau to pay nurses in Ontario more or when he misleads Canadians on the nature of Doug Ford’s so-called “US-style private healthcare”, Jagmeet’s NDP is in the business of treating the electorate as idiots. And that’s just not acceptable.

We know that the NDP aren’t that stupid, because Daniel Blaikie gave a Commons speech that showed seriousness on the issue of housing. We know because under Jack they weren’t idiots, as much as I didn’t always love the party. But now, they have made a political decision to act like Canadians are too stupid to understand that what they’re saying is vacuous nonsense. And that’s what it is, fundamentally. Canadians know that provincial governments pay for our hospitals and our health care, and we have the capacity to understand arguments of more than 3 words. But to the NDP, we don’t.

The flaw in every argument about populism and the NDP needing to appeal to a more populist sentiment is that it seems the party has internalized a very Laurentian Elite understanding of the voters they need. Far from the party being better able to understand working class voters, they’ve internalized that the voters they have and the voters they need are dumb, they’re idiots, they are the rubes and hicks of so many Laurentian Elite depictions of them.

It's the only argument that makes any sense, because you’d expect that if the NDP actually understood the kinds of voters they’re trying to appeal to – young voters and students in the cities and workers in the regions – they’d understand that these people are actually plenty capable of hearing a nuanced idea. What the NDP have settled on is an approach warped by the worst of biases – that young voters only pay attention if it’s in a 12 second TikTok soundbite and that workers in Comox or Nipissing are too stupid to know when they’re being lied to.

Nobody will be able to convince me that the NDP actually believes the press release masquerading as a plan is worth the domain it now holds on the NDP’s website, but they want Canadians to think they care. Maybe if you want to get people to care about you and get their votes, the right answer is to give them an actual vision. In 2015, Justin Trudeau met the voters where they were on terror legislation, and the electorate rewarded them for a position of nuance and a willingness to explain it.

The NDP knows they’re lying to the electorate when they call this a plan, they know that even if they were in government tomorrow the underlying ideas wouldn’t make a dent in the housing crisis, but for some reason they think this is a winning message for them. It’s not a winning policy agenda, since, you know, there’s no actual policy, so this has to be a messaging effort. And if this is their idea of good messaging disband the party.

I have a lot more time for the NDP than a lot of my followers and unlike many of them that wish the NDP would fuck off and die so that the left was more unified I think having a strong left is important if only to force the Liberals there. But this isn’t a strong left and this isn’t helpful to Canadians. This is political malpractice, deeply intellectually offensive, and a disgrace. If this is what the NDP is going to spend the rest of this Parliament and the next campaign doing, fuck it, they should die, because this is plainly unacceptable.

If the NDP genuinely thinks this is the level of seriousness the Canadian people deserve from their politicians then they deserve to lose out of idiocy. But if they know that this is banal idiocy and they still peddle it, then they should disband the party and leave public life forever.