Category Archives: Canadian Politics
January 9, 2014 Critics maintain stance
Jewish Western Bulletin, July 19, 2002
By Pat Johnson
A recent full-page ad in the Georgia Straight, an alternative Vancouver weekly, was critical of Israel and called on Canada to alter its foreign policy on the Middle East. But several of the signatories deny that the context was anti-Israel or that they are placing blame exclusively on the Jewish state.
The ad, which was sponsored by the Canada-Palestine Support Network and ran in the June 27-July 4 issue, was endorsed by a long list of supporters, including Canadian politicians, labor leaders, community activists and artists. It blamed Israeli actions for creating “fertile soil for the growth of brutality and the perpetration of atrocities” and accused Israel of a “systematic violation of the Palestinian population’s basic human right to live free of military coercion and violence.”
Signatories to the ad included top union leaders, including George Heyman, president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union, New Democratic party MPs Libby Davies and Svend Robinson, as well as journalists, authors, environmental activists and even the support organization Rape Relief.
Patsy Kolesar, a spokesperson for Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, said the decision to sign on to the ad represents her organization’s commitment to the plight of women around the world.
“Our goal is for the liberation of women worldwide, so we work with women locally and women worldwide,” she said. “We are supporting the resistance to war and in support of peace.”
Kolesar denied that Rape Relief was choosing sides in the conflict.
“We’re definitely not one-sided about it. We have some Jewish women who are on our collective. We are in support of peace between the Palestinians and the Jewish Israelis. That’s why we signed on.”
The possibility that Jewish or Israeli-Canadian women might hesitate to approach her organization knowing the group’s publicly stated position was not considered before the decision was made, Kolesar acknowledged.
“It wasn’t something that we discussed,” she said. “We hopefully would be able to talk with the person if that was an issue … hopefully they would call us and get to talk to us and get our perspective.”
David Cadman, who ran for mayor of Vancouver on the COPE-Green ticket in the last election and is likely to run for mayor or council this fall, also signed the ad.
Cadman said he was motivated in part by his experience as a former national president and international vice-president of the United Nations Association. He was in Israel and Jordan in the summer of 2000 and is enormously disappointed that the peace process that was evolving at that time has collapsed.
“There was an agreement that was able and available,” he said. “I think in many ways Sharon destroyed it [by visiting the Temple Mount]. His actions were calculated and they set off now a whole reaction that I think has taken us back to the point where … I don’t see a way out.”
Cadman said he does not believe the ad represents a biased view of the Mideast nor does he see his signature on the ad as any sort of support for the Arab cause.
“I don’t characterize placing my name on this as an affinity toward the Arab world. I know that part of the world a little bit and what I’m looking for is to defuse what I think is a very, very dangerous world situation. What I hope is that we can come to an agreement where an Israeli state can live in security and a Palestinian state can live in security.”
The Israelis are demonstrating bad faith, he said, by expanding settlements in the occupied territories, something he sees as undermining the eventuality of a two-state solution. He also views the settlements as part of a larger Israeli policy that frustrates Palestinians and may lead to terrorism.
“I don’t condone [terrorism] in any way, shape or form, but I understand where the seeds of that kind of fanaticism are being fuelled,” he said.
David Diamond, a Vancouver theatre director, was also a signatory to the ad. He wants Canada’s federal government to exert diplomatic pressure on Israel to alter the way it deals with Palestinian aspirations. He compares Israel’s place in the Middle East with the United States’ role in the world.
“Israel’s behavior at the moment, just like the behavior of the United States on the planet, needs to be checked,” said Diamond.
Who started the conflict or who perpetuates it is irrelevant, he added.
But Naomi Frankenburg, co-chair of the local Israel Action Committee, said the ad distorts historical facts because Israel has repeatedly attempted to make peace but has been met with opposition.
From the day the state of Israel was declared, Frankenburg said, the Arab people have totally disregarded Israelis’ right to live in peace. Moreover, Israel defended itself against repeated Arab attacks and was still amenable to genuine offers of peace, as demonstrated by the peace agreement with Egypt, in accordance with which Israel handed over the Sinai peninsula. Israel has tried similar land-for-peace offers with other Arab neighbors, but no co-operation has been reciprocated, she said.
The demand that Israel “end the occupation now,” which the ad repeats, flies in the face of international law, she added.
“Israel is the only country in the entire world that has been asked to give back land that was won in a defensive war,” said Frankenburg. “I don’t know why the world doesn’t see that it’s the same for Israel.”
The signatories may be ignorant, biased, anti-Semitic or misled by propaganda, she said.
“I don’t know these people. I can’t understand what motivates them, but I certainly find it very disappointing and very sad. I think they’re buying the Palestinian propaganda.”
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January 9, 2014 The Social Credit’s darker side
Jewish Western Bulletin, April 6, 2001
BOOKS
By Pat Johnson
The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) cut its teeth battling institutionalized anti-Semitism in the early Social Credit movement. And though it lost the battle against Social Credit, it learned invaluable lessons for its ongoing war against intolerance in this country.
That is the opinion of Dr. Janine Stingel, an author and historian who spoke at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre last month.
In her book Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit and the Jewish Response, Stingel outlines the efforts of the CJC to confront the stereotypes of Jewish power and financial control that were being perpetrated by the Social Credit government of Alberta and its federal cousin from the 1930s onward. She spoke to the Bulletin while visiting Vancouver; she lives in Ottawa.
Stingel has a personal interest in the issue, as an Alberta native and a high school student in a nearby town when Jim Keegstra was teaching anti-Semitic “history” in Eckville, Alta. Her first university paper was on what Stingel calls Canada’s “triumvirate of hate”: Keegstra, Ernst Zundel and Malcolm Ross. The issue continued to concern her and the book is a version of her PhD thesis, which she completed at McGill University.
William Aberhart, leader of Social Credit in Alberta, swept to power in the 1935 election. Stingel outlines the elaborate economic and social theories underlying Social Credit from its roots in England to its appropriation as a Prairie populist movement in Canada. Although there were very few Jews in Alberta at the time, the concept of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy overseeing the entire economic order made Jews fine scapegoats for the Alberta leader. A Christian minister and radio evangelist, Aberhart was able to whip up enthusiasm and make straw dogs out of the mythical Jewish menace.
It would be simplistic to suggest that anti-Semitism resulted in the election of Social Credit to power in Alberta. In the heart of the Depression dustbowl, Aberhart promised every adult citizen with $25 a month in scrip (the “social credit” which gave the movement its name), though throwing in a whack of anti-Semitism probably didn’t hurt the campaign. Canada’s Supreme Court later ruled the $25 scheme unconstitutional.
Social Credit publications propagated typical Jew-baiting propaganda. Aberhart bought into the theories of Social Credit’s English founder, Maj. C.H. Douglas, who blamed the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the 1940s – and the British government’s efforts to control it through mass slaughtering of all infected cattle – as a “Jewish-socialist plot” against English cattle owners.
Using his own words, Aberhart melded his Christian fervor with Douglas’s political conspiracies to create a stereotypical portrayal of the financial system.
“[T]he principles of the old-line politicians and their henchmen are like those of the man who betrayed the Christ,” Aberhart said. “Gold was his god and millions have suffered because of it. The moneychangers upheld his right and crucified the Christ and they have been crucifying everyone since who follows in the steps of the Savior.”
In a similar vein, Solon Low, the provincial treasurer, had some advice for Jews in combatting anti-Semitism.
“[A]nti-Semitism is spreading,” he said, “because people cannot fail to observe that a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control in international finance, in revolutionary activities and in some propaganda institutions, the common policy of which is the centralization of power and the perversion of religious and cultural ideals.”
Ending anti-Semitism, he said, would require Jews to denounce those “arch-criminals” in their midsts who are responsible for these initiatives.
This argument would continue for years, with the CJC calling on Social Credit to reject its anti-Semitism, and Social Crediters responding that they would be happy to do so as soon as the CJC rejects the perpetrators of world domination, and so it went.
Later, in 1947, when Low was federal leader of the Social Credit party, he used a national CBC broadcast to lambaste “the international power maniacs who aim to destroy Christianity” and the “international gangsters who are day-to-day scheming for world revolution.” He also couldn’t resist the “close tie-up between international communism, international finance and international political Zionism.”
Originally, the CJC paid little attention to the Alberta phenomenon. With the vast majority of Canada’s Jewish population situated in Montreal, Toronto and, to a lesser extent, Winnipeg, Congress was dealing with issues closer to these areas. There were outbreaks of anti-Semitism throughout the Depression and war era that could have kept the CJC officials busy. But Stingel credits the relentless lobbying of Winnipegger Louis Rosenberg with forcing the CJC to face the threat presented by Social Credit.
Stingel points out that, while anti-Semitic sparks were emerging throughout the country at the time, they differed from the Social Credit experience, which represented an institutionalization of Jew-hatred within a legitimately elected Canadian government.
In 1947, the anti-Semitism of Alberta’s Social Credit government began to be recognized as a liability. With the boom of the post-war years, economic scapegoating lost its cachet. The backwater anti-Semitism became even more anachronistic when the oil resources turned Alberta from a “have-not” province to an economic powerhouse.
At that time, Aberhart’s successor, Ernest Manning, initiated a purge of anti-Semites in the party ranks, though the CJC viewed the purge – as Stingel does today – as a politically expedient and cosmetic change. In fact, there is reason to believe that the purge had as much to do with internal power plays between the federal and Alberta branches of the party as it did with any moral distaste for bigotry.
Manning’s opponents in the party declared that he had joined the side of the Zionists. In Quebec, Réal Caouette, who would become the de facto leader of the francophone Socred rump, declared that the party had been taken over by “those who aspire to establish a world Jewish and Freemasonry government.”
During this time, of course, some of the realities of the Holocaust were coming to world attention and suggestions of a world order governed by Jews seemed, as Stingel wryly puts it, “ill-timed.” It was far more expedient for the party to jump the gun on the Cold War and zero in on international communism, which they had previously attacked alongside “international Jewry” all along.
Stingel notes that the provincial Social Credit party in British Columbia was Social Credit in name only; really just a convenient label used by W.A.C. Bennett as a vehicle to oppose the established parties.
Although Social Credit still exists and emphasizes a Christian perspective on politics, it has ceased to be a force in Canadian politics at federal or provincial levels. Stingel laments that Manning has gone down in the annals as the man who purged the anti-Semites from Social Credit, something she considers a generous assessment from what she knows of the machinations around the issue.
She also sees a direct ideological (and blood) relationship between Social Credit and the Reform party/Canadian Alliance, which was formed by Ernest Manning’s son, Preston. She will address the political similarities in an essay this summer in the academic journal Canadian Jewish Studies titled “From father to son.”
Stingel concludes that this turn of events has little to do with the CJC’s best efforts, but rather to a combination of forces, including the loss of a need for scapegoating in a “have” province.
The happier ending to this story, she concludes, is that Canadian Jewish Congress learned from the Socred experience how to battle defamation at the highest levels. Though its efforts against the Social Credit party took much energy and saw limited tangible results, it was a proving ground that has helped make the CJC one of Canada’s foremost fighters against intolerance wherever it rears its head.
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- Posted under BC Politics, Canadian Politics, History, Race & Discrimination, Reviews
January 9, 2014 (Mostly) great speeches
Vancouver Courier, December 26, 2004
BOOKS
By Pat Johnson
GREAT CANADIAN SPEECHES
Edited by Dennis Gruending
Fitzhenry and Whiteside
– – –
A book about great speeches is like a book about great music. There’s plenty to say, but it can’t possibly tell the whole story. Speeches, like music, can be described, but not well. You have to hear them in order to measure their greatness.
This is one of the challenges facing a book like Great Canadian Speeches, which is edited by journalist and former Saskatchewan MP Dennis Gruending. Still, there is plenty of interesting reading in this volume, which covers pre-Confederation era to the death of Pierre Trudeau. It’s pithy, partly due to the fact that most of these speeches have been edited down to bite-size chunks. Joseph Howe’s 1835 testament to a free press is winnowed down to a few hundred words, yet within them lies the seed of what makes this country different from our neighbour to the south. Spoken in his own defence during a libel trial, Howe called for freer speech as a step toward responsible government.
“I do not ask for the impunity which the American press enjoys,” Howe said, implying that there could be reasonable restraints on free expression in a free society, but added: “Let not the sons of the rebels look across the border to the sons of the Loyalists, and reproach them that their press is not free.”
Further on, Papineau and Lafontaine make their cases for responsible government as well. Thomas D’Arcy McGee makes the case, in 1862, for a Canadian nationalism without hyphens, a case made exactly a century later by John Diefenbaker.
The power of spoken imagery and its indelible force in history is evidenced in another address to a jury. In 1885, Louis Riel, the Western Canadian Metis leader, on trial for the crime of treason, for which he would hang, addressed the rumours of his insanity. Maybe so, he seemed to say, but if I’m crazy, you made me that way. “So confident am I, that I have not the slightest anxiety, not even the slightest doubt, as to your verdict….” Yes, well, optimism aside, any Canadian school kid knows what the jury decided and the hopes for French-English harmony that died at the end of that rope.
History repeats itself and so do speeches. John A. Macdonald’s defence of imperialism during the free trade election of 1891 had echoes in the free trade election of 1988, though party positions were reversed. Gruending includes the spat between John Turner and Brian Mulroney over who has a monopoly on patriotism, though one suspects history’s jury is still out on whether that falls under the rubric of “great speech” or snarky sniping.
The book offers a strangely engaging walk through Canadian history in the first person, of Tommy Douglas standing almost alone against the War Measures Act, of Jean Lesage explaining that the 1960s would be a time of change for the Quebecois, of Stephen Lewis on Canada’s contemporary obligation to millions of dying people in Africa and elsewhere.
Adrienne Clarkson’s moving testament of an immigrant’s path to the head of state seems a full circle away from just four decades ago, when the term “foreign-born governor-general” had a completely different meaning in the imperial context. Joe Gosnell’s comments on initialing the Nisga’a people’s long-awaited treaty with Canada is a sad but redemptive story of justice delayed. Some trivia emerges: Diefenbaker, apparently, coined the term “sacred trust” in 1957, which might be news to contemporary Canadians who thought it was Brian Mulroney who had created, then betrayed, the concept.
The editor makes a good case in the introduction that oratory changed fundamentally with the advent of radio, then TV. Not only did media advances change our society’s orientation from one of words to one of images, it also increased our casualness, with speakers now addressing people in their living rooms, rather than shouting to be heard at the back of a church hall or town square.
It was a Canadian, after all, who coined the term “the medium is the message,” though Marshall McLuhan is absent from these pages. This was probably one of many hard choices the editor had to make. But he made some odd ones, too. Jean Chretien’s speech days before the nearly catastrophic 1995 Quebec referendum is here. If greatness is measured by outcome, this one was a toss-up. Roy Romanow on medicare isn’t exactly Lincoln at Gettysburg, but you have to admit: few things are more central to our identity as a country than our health care system. Worst choice award? Justin Trudeau’s eulogy for his father. Watching his painful display at the time made me wish I was dead. Reading it without Justin’s drama-teacher affectations made a similar impression, from the first three words–“Friends, Romans, countrymen” –when it seemed Justin may have come to bury his father, not to praise him, until it dawned on us that Justin just didn’t understand what he’d written. He may have inherited many things from his father, but Pierre’s intellect was not among them.
Still, if anyone doubts the power of words to move mass audiences, reflect on another speech included here. Days after 9/ 11, UBC professor Sunera Thobani delivered a few choice words about American foreign policy and Canada went wild. Words still have power.
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January 9, 2014 Billboards say we are to blame
Vancouver Courier, August 30, 2006
The bottom line is, with rare exceptions, the bottom line. Economic imperatives trump most things, even when it is the economic imperative of the few trumping the well-being of the many.
Cases in point: shutting down a city block to film a movie, closing off a road to accommodate construction vehicles, the thankfully dead Molson Indy Vancouver.
Each of these cases is an example of the profit-motivated few inconveniencing the many. But we take it, for a range of reasons. We tell ourselves that progress, or economic advancement, benefits us all. Deep down, any misgivings we have about the profit motive, capitalism or our anything-for-a-buck culture are submerged by our realization that we’re all in this up to our necks. These are relatively minor inconveniences and an unavoidable part of living in a society that is driven by the almighty loonie.
So why the kafuffle about billboards going up adjacent to our bridges? Colleague Naoibh O’Connor reported here recently that the Squamish Nation intends to erect 13 billboards alongside local bridges. The ads, which will generate revenue for the band, will undoubtedly compromise the spectacularness of some of our greatest natural and human-made vistas.
In the commentary around these billboards (Google the blogs if you have the stomach for racist rantings), there is outrage that a First Nations band can arbitrarily and unilaterally impose itself into our sightlines in this way.
Strange, in a way, that we are getting so exercised about the billboards when equally egregious commercial affronts to nature and propriety greet us daily. Could there be a racial component to this discussion?
Of course there is a racial component in this issue–but it is not the abomination of an unrepresentative First Nation band forcing billboards onto our precious urban panorama. It is the economic necessity that forces First Nations communities to subsist through dubious economic undertakings like billboards and casinos.
The Kelowna Accord was the most rational and comprehensive effort in Canadian history to remedy the economic and social conditions of aboriginal Canadians. The Accord was intended to eliminate the abominable disparities in educational, health, economic and social conditions between First Nations and other Canadians. It was summarily assassinated as one of the Stephen Harper Conservatives’ first acts in office.
It may sound silly to blame the proposed billboards on the collapse of the Kelowna Accord but, in a broad view, it is the very social and economic conditions festering in the absence of Kelowna that result in unwanted outcomes like these 13 billboards.
The Squamish band is one of the most economically and socially successful of Canada’s First Nations communities. That they feel the impetus to exploit the land with billboards is not an indicator of insensitivity and greed, but of the same desperation that makes socially negative economic undertakings like cigarette smuggling and gambling the most viable options for bands all across Canada.
Until the consequences of this economic reality are thrust unavoidably and literally into our sightlines, we pay little or no attention. People indignant over the potential of billboards should consider how our actions have created the economic necessity for billboards on Squamish lands.
When you drive, muttering, past the billboards blocking the scenery, think back on what you have done to ensure your federal government keeps it promises to First Nations. Did you write your MP about the Kelowna Accord? Did you even know it was aborted?
The billboards’ blot on our pretty view reflects the blot on our collective conscience. When the billboards go up, don’t blame the victims who, for economic necessity, erected them. Blame yourself.
Allen Garr is on vacation.
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January 9, 2014 Pot issue the ‘perfect storm’
Vancouver Courier, August 24, 2005
By Pat Johnson
Camping with family recently, a faint whiff of sweet something floats across the fresh Kootenay air. “Smells like weed,” says the 14-year-old nephew. “How do you know what weed smells like?” I ask. It’s a trick question, one my mother had tried out on me some 30 years earlier. To know the smell of the demon herb was to be guilty by mere proximity. Not anymore.
“Dude, we live in Vancouver,” he says. Translation: you can’t grow up in this city–however squaresville a Daddy-O you might be — and remain oblivious to the aroma of what may as well be the province’s official leaf.
I too grew up in Vancouver, but when I was his age, pot was something smoked furtively behind school portables. With rare, and seemingly arbitrary police enforcement of existing pot laws, Vancouverites can now be found toking in the most indiscreet locations. It is, like gay people holding hands, something that gains attention only from passing turnip trucks.
Decriminalizing or legalizing pot may be more popular than the ward system. But the thing about marijuana reform is that, while most people see pot as no worse than booze, most voters don’t care enough about it one way or the other to make it a litmus issue on voting day.
The Marijuana Party, with its surprisingly comprehensive and arguably quite right-wing policies, is never going to form a government.
But when push comes to shove, Canadians inevitably settle for reasonable compromise. The Marc Emery case, in which Canada appears complicit with the United States in bringing to “justice” Vancouver’s most prominent potrepreneur, may bring this still- peripheral issue to the front burner of Canadian politics.
That was certainly the aim of Emery’s cohorts, who popped up everywhere I went last week–protesting Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and buttonholing NDP leader Jack Layton to act on pot reform.
Canadians might not be sure we want legalized pot. But most of us would consider a long sentence in an American prison outrageously excessive for a crime most of us consider as serious as a double martini.
What voters will get agitated over, though, is cavalier or arbitrary government actions they deem excessive. If one of our local celebs (Emery may be no Rob Feenie, but he is a local character with a certain notoriety…) ends up in a foreign jail for a crime most Canadians would decriminalize, it may provide the impetus for criminal reform.
For pot activists, this may be a perfect storm. We are facing civic elections in a dozen weeks and a federal election soon after. Criminal matters are federal affairs but, as the existing drug policy indicates, the city can exercise de facto decriminalization if they talk nice to the feds. That and the fact that a lot of pot smokers may not appreciate the nuance of constitutional division of responsibilities means attitudes to pot could play a role in a close civic election, followed closely by a close federal election.
All but the most deluded Canadian recognizes that we’ve lost the battle for economic independence. Our best hope now may be to eke out a little niche for ourselves doing things to reassure ourselves we still have the power to at least nip the heels of America over soft drugs or gay marriage or other comparatively insignificant issues that nevertheless seem to inflame American outrage.
If the Emery case, which is at its heart an issue of American extraterritoriality, drags out long enough to coincide with one or more elections, Canadians may be moved to show some independent- mindedness. Pot may prove the sleeper issue of the coming campaigns.
Allen Garr is on vacation.
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- Posted under Canadian Politics, Commentary, Vancouver Politics
Pat Johnson 
January 9, 2014 NDP success depends on being true to Canadian values
Vancouver Sun, August 24, 2001
By Pat Johnson
Alexa McDonough was here last week listening to local New Democrats about what they think is needed to bring their party back to the centre of the national political stage. Since the days of Ed Broadbent, when the NDP played an important watchdog role in a three- party Parliament, the NDP has stagnated at the federal level.
The NDP’s voice has been rendered almost silent, thanks to the splintered Parliament. The separatist Bloc Quebecois and the disintegrating Reform-Alliance provided much better sound bites and controversial copy than the ever-earnest socialists.
Even now, as the Alliance falls to pieces, the NDP seems unable to gain any residual benefit, despite the fact that much of the Western Canadian Alliance heartland used to be fertile territory for the New Democrats.
As McDonough and her colleagues strive to find a new path to success, some argue that the NDP must do a Tony Blair and turn itself into a middle-of-the-road party — Socialism Lite.
One of the problems with that theory is that Britain’s “New Labour” filled a genuine vacuum. Despite the best efforts of the liberal-democrats in that country, there was an extreme degree of polarization between the hard left under Blair’s predecessors and the hard right, under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. In moving his party to the centre, Blair was fulfilling a genuine need for moderation.
Notably, two of the most vocal proponents of moving the federal NDP closer to the centre are Lorne Nystrom and Chris Axworthy, two Saskatchewanians who point to the electoral success of the provincial party there.
Like Blair, Roy Romanow operated a middle-of-the-road government. It was a coup when Saskatchewan quietly balanced its budget before neighbouring Alberta — which had loudly wrestled down its deficit – – succeeded in balancing its books.
But Saskatchewan is more similar to the British model than it is to the Canadian federal political scene. It has a small, struggling Liberal party between two relatively successful socialist and conservative parties. Of course, moving to the centre succeeded there.
The federal situation is dramatically different. The Liberals in Ottawa are strong — so impenetrable, in fact, that some suggest we are doomed to a one-party government for years to come.
This means that, instead of beginning a quixotic rush to the centre, the NDP’s best opportunity lies not in convincing Canadians of how similar it is to the Liberal party, but to honestly express the values that make it different.
One of the problems the NDP has had is that members have come to believe the news stories that say their old ideas are dead. They have lately tended to hide the philosophical underpinnings of their policies and, in doing so, the party has rendered itself essentially neutral.
Yet the values that have traditionally been seen as NDP pillars are also those very Canadian values that the Liberal party has abandoned: economic nationalism, the necessity in a country as huge as this to have substantial government intervention in the economy, and that poverty is not the fault of its victims.
As the Liberal party has put its energy into economic policies that are fiscally conservative, they have allowed the traditional Canadian values of sharing, tolerance and care for the weakest to stagnate. At the same time, the other parties have been allowed to set the agenda toward tax cuts and business interests — an agenda in which the NDP is, by definition, at a disadvantage.
One of the party’s biggest mistakes has been its failure to defend the government’s role in making positive changes in Canada. The NDP must retrench to its traditional position that government has a tremendous ameliorative potential that can make society better.
In the British case, Labour made a natural move to the centre in order to fill a gaping hole. In Canada, there is no such vacuum and therefore no such opportunity. If impatient New Democrats, frustrated by their lack of political success, wish to move to the centre, they can join the wildly successful Liberal party.
On the other hand, if they seek to have a genuine, positive impact on this country, they can reflect on their traditional support for fine Canadian values like economic and social justice, nationalism and a voice for the downtrodden — and unapologetically advocate the role of government in ensuring all these things.