Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The BQ Membership of the NDP Interim Leader and Other Stuff

I'm not a political junkie. I didn't know that Nycole Turmel was a member of the Bloc Quebecois. I also didn't know about the flirtations of the other two parties with Quebec nationalism. My head has been in the clouds thinking about foreign and economic policy and harper's serial abuses of basic Parliamentary principles.

What the sniping about the Turmel thing represents to me is that the NDP is trying to solidify its Quebec base and the harpercons are playing the anti-Quebec card and the Liberals are trying to Quixotically place themselves as the federalist non-harper alternative.

Whether the NDP has tossed a rope down to allow the Liberal Party of Canada to clamber back up out of the grave is something I'm not prepared to speculate upon, nor is it something I'm inclined to speculate upon.

I'll let the voters decide. And I can't predict that.

It does show that the Liberals are looking to knock the NDP off from its perch as the second party in Canada. For the issues of economic and foreign policy, I hope they fail. I hope, for reasons of foreign and economic policy, that the NDP hews closer to the principles of former BQ voters in Quebec. Because given the failure of mainstream (read: harpercon and Liberal) economic and foreign policies, the NDP might just find that adhering to Quebeckers values will resonate with more and more people in English Canada.

6 comments:

Owen Gray said...

What is lost in the hullabaloo is that -- with the exception of the independence mantra -- the BQ is a social democratic party.

Nonetheless, the NDP has walked into a buzz saw.

thwap said...

Maybe Owen. On the other hand, it helps them in Quebec and is the electorate going to remember all this screeching 3-4 years from now?

trevorus said...

i tend to believe that the general electorate will remember whatever they're told to remember by all their good friends down at the corporate news publishing house in 3-4 years.

perhaps anders will have officially become a hero by then. harper can only beat off to that secretly at the moment.

Orwell's Bastard said...

Good post, thwap. I have one or two Liberal friends (nobody's perfect) who need to read it and give their heads a shake.

Alison said...

Of course we'd have to hear about those BQ principles via the corporate news vehicles who have done an absolutely crap job of conveying them so far.
BQ members like Maria Mourani and Serge Menard would do a brilliant job of cross-examining witnesses and defending hard-won Canadian values in committee but English corp news would only report what the Con, Lib, and sometimes the NDP MPs said. For years.
I remember Mourani once did a one-woman filibuster on Omar Khadr but corp news didn't mention it or him till a Lib made a statement months later.
Hoping this will change now.

thwap said...

Trevorus,

I think I've seen enough of the electorate tuning out information and forgetting about atrocities to doubt the media's power in this regard.