So with the Liberal meeting in Ottawa, the idea of uniting the left is coming back around again.
Not surprisingly, Liberal leader Bob rare is pissing on the idea.
Now Bob’s reasoning may be somewhat different than the one your humble e-scribbler offered last June but the point still holds up:
Meanwhile over on the left, the New Democrats united with the other left wing party – the Bloc – and became the official opposition. Now they’ll basically face the same sort of question the Conservatives already addressed. There’s no guarantee how they’ll answer it nor is there a correct answer.
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Do they head toward the centre, as other successful left-wing parties have done, or will they continue to embrace their ideological base and potentially kiss power good bye?
Put another way: Is Jack Layton going to emulate Tony Blair or Michael Foot?
And that’s really the point. The left wing in the country is already united. The Bloc and the NDP merged even if the Blocists weren’t willing partners to the political marriage.
Put another way, the Bloc NDP essentially pulls together the ideological left in the country. At the same time, the NDP is well on its way to morphing from being a national party with representation in all the regions of the country to a party representing regional interests nationally.
Meanwhile, the Liberals remain a coalition party that has, historically, shifted ideologically from the centre left to centre right based on the dominant trends in the country.
So if Denis Coderre wants to frig off to join the Bloc NDP, he can certainly go ahead.
But since the ideological left is already united, why would the Liberals – a federalist party of the political centre that long ago rejected reactionary politics of the left and right – ever want to join with the Dippers or the Connies, for that matter?
