Quote:Finally, Justin Trudeau.

The Liberal leader is hardly a radical. His father, Pierre, wasn’t either. But Trudeau senior governed at a time when leftish ideas were in vogue. He could be pushed to adopt interventionist policies, like foreign investment screening, in order to meet the tenor of the times.

Trudeau junior will be prime minister in a more conservative age. Expect him to keep much of Harper’s economic policy — including his insistence on low business taxes and passion free-trade deals.

But the Liberal leader is different in style. He is sunnier; he exudes optimism; he seems more open.

We shall see what a Trudeau government ends up looking like. My guess is that it will be as centralized as Harper’s.

But it almost certainly won’t appear to be as mean. That, as much as anything, is what voters were looking for from this election.

Quote:After becoming official opposition, the NDP may have assumed that it was the logical alternative to the Conservatives.

But the voters never did. In particular, the voters of Ontario never did.

Tom Mulcair’s NDP did its best to show that it was as fiscally sound and pro-business as the older parties — perhaps even more so.

But faced with a choice between the Liberals and a social democratic party posing as Liberals, voters opted for the real thing.

In Toronto they trashed even well-known New Democrats like Olivia Chow.

Quote:That has always been true of the two Bay Street parties, and now that the NDP has drunk the we-can-win Kool-Aid, they join their ranks adopting a strategy that replaces principle with opportunism.

There is still a chance, however slim, that the party can recover from its new and catastrophic direction established by Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair. That new direction entailed accepting the rules made by the big business parties — rules that suited their style, their access to money, their privileged position in the media, their control of the bureaucracy and their deep connections to elite influence and power.It is painfully obvious that the more the NDP adopts the machine politics invented by and for the Liberals and Conservatives, the more it becomes like them in terms of policies, ethics and political strategy

Quote:If the current election-machine NDP wants to win an election, it will have to do so as a liberal party that has reached an accommodation with globalization and finance capital. Little by little, the adoption of Liberal and Conservative political strategy has corrupted what remained of a social democratic party. By the time they win an election on this basis, they will be completely indistinguishable from the Liberals they are determined to replace.

But if they want to win as a renewed and principled social democratic party, then they can only do so through a commitment to a long term redefinition of the rules of the political game, rules designed to benefit a genuinely democratic party that engages the population in a program of civic literacy — equipping people to deal with modern communications techniques that are used to manipulate them. By doing so and actually mobilizing the tremendous appetite for progressive change in a majority of the population, the NDP could actually begin to force other parties to play by its rules. When they did that in the 1960s the rewards were considerable and included Medicare, still the principle legacy of the progressive Canadian state.