The pundits have spoken.
“The manifesto crystallizes an eternal conflict in left-leaning parties between the right of workers to work and the right of highly educated urban literati to express their opinion about how everybody else should live.” ~Paul Wells
“egregious nonsense…champagne socialist la-la land.” ~Michael Den Tandt
“…a utopian and bombastic rant.” ~Lysiane Gagnon
And here is Rachel Notley, the flukey winner of an Alberta provincial election, struggling to ensure that the pitchforks-and-torches crowd don’t show up at the Leg again:
“These ideas will never form any part of policy. They are naive. They are ill-informed. They are tone deaf.”
At this low point in the NDP’s trajectory—centrist “Third Way” politics in the dust-bin of history, but a possibly irreversible ebbing away of anything like vision or alternative politics from the ranks of the party—some still dare to dream. This has caused, of course, the usual backlash.
The wiseacres in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, offering their fifty shades of grey, are at their dismissive best. Unable, apparently, to grapple with actual ideas, they posture instead, as they inevitably do when new ideas manage to enter the national debate. One might forgive, however, the terrified Premier Notley, fighting off the nightmarish certainty that she is a one-term wonder: who would want to be in her position?
In any case, the NDP passed a resolution at the Edmonton Convention about the Manifesto. It wasn’t an endorsement. It simply called upon riding associations to discuss the ideas expressed in the Manifesto over the next two years. Debate. Argue the pros and cons. But even an invitation to hold a conversation is too much for certain politicos and the tapioca-dispensers of the PPG, although the shape of our future depends upon how we resolve the key public policy issues raised in the document.
I propose that we have some of that conversation right here. I’ll hold off for a bit, although, to declare interest, I’m a signatory.
This, then, is the Leap Manifesto. Discuss.