Throne Speech: Don Davies Made The Right Call

On The NDP’s Smart Call

There’s been a dumb sports media feud this week between Bill Simmons and Pablo Torre about the virtue of deep, detailed, exacting reporting on Bill Belichick dating a 24 year old. I consumed the takes about it and listened to their conversation on Simmons’ podcast because I live for fundamentally low stakes beef between ex-ESPNers like an addict lives for the next hit, but 95% of the takes about it fundamentally missed the point. People went at Simmons for having opinions on what constitutes journalism, calling him a hypocrite. The thing is, it’s not true, because for it to be hypocrisy, Simmons would have to consider him a journalist, which he very obviously doesn’t and isn’t.

The takes against Simmons fundamentally missed the mark because they didn't get his position. Simmons didn’t deny his sites over the years has prioritized the silly and the fundamentally unserious, but his contention, which he tapped around explicitly saying, is that the bar is higher on people who call themselves journalists than on people who openly own their biases and rarely claim to be doing reporting or journalism. It’s a whole group of people mad because of a premise they imposed on this situation.

I wonder where else this is true this week.

Look, Don Davies pissed off a lot of Liberals this week by saying he would vote against the Throne Speech. This is leading those same Liberals to claim Don Davies made a bad decision, because in their view, whether they say it explicitly or not, the point of the NDP is to make Liberals happy. But that’s not the NDP’s job, their job is to rebuild the NDP. And Don Davies pissing off a lot of Liberals is a very good first step to rebuilding the NDP.

There are two seats where the NDP are within 10% of a Liberal incumbent. There is only one seat where they’re between 10% and 20% behind a Liberal incumbent. There are 7 where they’re within 15% of the CPC, four of which are within 10%. An NDP revival in the next election requires winning Conservative seats. And breaking away from the Liberals is how you get those Conservative voters to come back home. The NDP were hammered in seats like Transcona and Griesbach and London and Windsor and Skeena and Powell River for being too close to the Liberals amongst culturally conservative, Poilievre curious voters, and then they lost some voters to the Liberals who disliked that the NDP were so mean to and about the Liberals. Bearhugging the Liberals failed in no uncertain terms, scoring 6% and 7 seats. So they have to try something else.

The reason this is getting criticism from Liberals is that they want the NDP to be reliable partners in a minority Parliament, which is a very different priority set than actual New Democrats who want the NDP to do better have to manage. The job of interim leaders is to take unpopular decisions with some people for the broader, long term goal in mind. With one press availability, Don Davies got the entire Ottawa press gallery to write and say the NDP doesn’t support the Liberal Throne Speech for 6 hours or whatever. It’s the best press the NDP’s gotten since … honestly I don’t know when. At a time when the NDP just got fucked for being the LPC’s bitch, they finally stood up for themselves.

“Oh, but there wasn’t a recorded vote, they could have forced one, this is the same old NDP…”. Honestly listen to yourselves. Do you think any sane person will learn this information, and more importantly retain it? To the extent anybody remembers this they’ll remember two things - the NDP opposed the government and the Liberals survived anyways. This is the NDP’s dream. Obviously they can’t actually afford another election any time soon, but they bluffed that the Bloc can’t afford one either and they won.

“Oh, but the country wants to back Carney and let him govern.” It really doesn’t fucking matter to the NDP what the country as a whole wants. They are not, functionally, a national party right now. They got the same fucking vote share as the Bloc. Tap through any number of “traditional” NDP targets against the Liberals, and the NDP are dead. Joel Harden couldn’t crack 20% in Ottawa Centre. Parkdale saw the NDP get 23% and lose by nearly 30%. Will Greaves in Victoria won by nearly 30% against an incumbent Dipper. 12.5% and 3rd place in Toronto Centre, 7.8% and third place in Spadina Harbourfront, and 9.9% and third place in Uni-Rose, all seats the NDP hold provincially. In St. Paul’s, where the NDP used to hold the provincial seat? 3.5%. They’re not a national party any more, and trying to appeal to the broad country isn’t their job.

What the NDP are at this point is a proper minor party who has to solve problems for themselves in a narrow way. They have an incredibly narrow band of seats to prioritize moving forward, and in that narrow band trashing the government plays better than backing the government. If they want to be a force in working class seats where the Liberals have been deeply unpopular in recent decades, then they need to oppose the government.

The problem with everyone denying this and getting mad is they’re not New Democrats. They’re Liberals who want the NDP to be a party that says nice, anti-Conservative things and then does whatever is easier for the Liberals. If they were just going to do what the Liberals want, they should become Liberals. But they’re a separate party who are fully entitled to put their self-interest above what’s convenient.

The Jagmeet era, at least initially, was full of optimism because a lot of Liberals liked him. He always had great approvals, because Liberals quite liked him. None of them even considered voting NDP in 2019 or 2021, but hey, they liked Jagmeet! I’m sure the “most liked leader” medal made the NDP feel great.

If you’re a progressive who feels upset at the NDP but hasn’t voted for them since Jack, you don’t really get to say it was a mistake that they’re not appealing to you. You gave that right up by never voting for them. I at least have some leg to stand on, given that I voted NDP in 2021, but at the end of the day the NDP’s job is not to appeal to people who never fucking vote for them. It’s to win votes and seats.

The best thing the NDP can do for themselves is symbolically oppose this government as much as they can, so that on the handful of important policies where the NDP need to vote with us, they can do so without being tagged as “always supporting the Liberals”. If you’re mad the NDP didn’t back the Liberals but you supported the Liberals not giving them party status, you’re just a hack. And that’s fine! But don’t pretend your objection is rooted in what’s best for the NDP, it’s that you’re mad they’re not helping us as reliably as we want. Boo Fucking Hoo.

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