If There is Hope on the aftermath of the Canadian election; the anatomy of Liberal Party failure:
The fallacy of ABC
With the media reinforcing the Tory attacks on Dion’s character and the Green Shift, the Liberals were in dire straights. This led many to believe that Harper was on the way to a majority. Midway through the election Liberals, Greens and many on the left began calling for an Anything-But-Conservative vote. The end result was probably many thousands of left votes being tossed away by backing the Liberals. The left-wing ABCers tied themselves to a sinking boat and did nothing to build a left alternative. And this latter point is the main point. The left cannot be built by proposing strategic votes for a corporate party. It can’t be built during election campaigns either. And it can’t, as some have suggested to be including someone from FairVote Canada, be built through reform of the electoral system. These are all narrow, short-sighted proposals. Building the left means laying the groundwork between elections through campaigning on particular issues that are at the forefront of people’s minds – climate change, the economy, the environment.NDPers and the rest of the left should be knee deep in local climate change campaigns that organize educational events, flyering and leafletting, and rallies. It needs to be engaged in unionization campaigns on picket lines, listening and talking to workers and building trust and solidarity. It needs to be engaged in the anti-war movement in the unions, on the campus, in the streets and in the neighbourhoods. Carrying coherent arguments into these campaigns can begin to galvanize the existing left, while attracting people to it, people who may be open to campaigning on climate change but may still think the war is the right thing to do, or that tax cuts are the way out of economic crisis. By working alongside people to the right of the self-identified left towards a common, limited goal, a friendly political discussion can be carried out that wins people to the left. It’s hard work, it takes time, but it lays a real basis for building a real left with real convictions. Changing the electoral system to PR to prevent strategic voting and distorted results is all fine and dandy but without a grassroots political campaign running all the time, such changes are largely meaningless.
