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Back to the table
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Race
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Oct 16, 2008 06:02am |
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| Category | Editorial |
| Media | Newspaper - Toronto Globe and Mail |
| News Date | Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | After being poised once again for the breakthrough that did not come, the New Democratic Party should now take a long look at itself in the mirror. It set out to be the party of "the kitchen table," but its message did not hit home with most Canadians. In fact, one wonders whether the New Democrats know what Canadians talk about at their kitchen tables.
They talk about money. How to make more of it. How to pay less of it in taxes. How to stretch it further. How to do the things they need to and would like to do for their children. There is surely a role for a left-wing party to defend social programs in a globalized world, but around the kitchen table no one likes to pay endlessly in taxes for those programs, even those programs they fully intend to rely on in a crisis.
Is a shortage of doctors really the most important issue? Defending medicare would be a good position for a left-wing party if medicare were under attack. In the current context, it seems a substitute for a convincing program. The proof is that the party of Tommy Douglas was shut out in Saskatchewan, the birthplace of medicare.
Is an attack on corporate tax cuts passed by the Conservative government and before them the Liberals resonating around the kitchen table? If it were, why was the party of Ed Broadbent shut out in Oshawa, Ont., home of the imperilled auto factories? Jack Layton, who was the most adept in the English-language TV debate at seizing on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's diffidence toward factory workers, was still unable to persuade working families he had a program that made sense. To them, he sounded too much like an unreconstructed socialist - which most see as a prescription for going broke. |
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