Liberal leadership hopeful Bob Rae says he left the NDP because his party was incapable of rising beyond a "knee-jerk" antipathy toward Canadian business, an explanation spelled out in a new book coming out just a month before the big vote.
Rae writes that after 20 years, he concluded the NDP was "wedded to a culture of opposition and protest."
The federal NDP's recent opposition to any tax changes for large and even small business is a sure sign that 'private sector is bad, public sector is good' is a flawed mantra it simply can't avoid," he said.
Ouch! That old accusation, now wielded by one of the NDP's stars of yore.
Unfair? Maybe. People forget that, for example, Rae Days were an attempt at deficit reduction which fell entirely upon the Ontario NDP's own political base (public sector unions). Yet, it isn't like the business community of the day gave them any credit for "rising above" party ideology. And if you look at this article in the current The Hill, it seems that the Tory's philosophy of government is too ignore any part of the country that does not share its central beliefs. Every act is aimed at appeasing the Hardcore.
So Rae is blaming the NDP for not doing something that nobody else does either and, when he did it as NDP Premier, brought the party nothing but the enmity of CUPE and OPSEU.
Even more interesting to me was Rae's appearance on CBC's The House this Saturday, where he claimed that his great mistake as Premier was to think he could affect the Ontario economy in 1990-91 through Keynesian "pump-priming". His repudiation of Keynes seems a bit broad, although there is no question that trying to spend your way out of a recession when the deficit was running at a little under $10,000,000,000 was a mistake.
Finally, a fuller statement by Bob Rae of his reasons for leaving the NDP can be found at the Macleans website.
4 comments:
Rae wrote:
the New Democrats are confining themselves to an ever-smaller universe
If that's true, it must be an awfully crowded universe, since the NDP vote since 2000 has gone from 1.1 million to 2.6 million.
But why should the Rhodes scholar let a detail like the increasing popularity of the NDP get in the way of his argument that their 'universe is shrinking'?
Why would that hurt? Just because someone doesn't agree with you anymore. I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but so what.
I don't think NDPers care that he changed parties, people change their minds, that happens. Also doesn't mean that it's not fun to snipe away and point out where he's been a hypocrite or otherwise become compromised. ;)
I am curious about the rewriting of history here, but nonetheless, the reality is that Bob was not a one man show at Queen's Park, and it required a majority of the NDP MPs to support the change to dealing with the deficit, budget, and direction of the NDP govt. He makes it sound like he was the sole NDP responsible for the financial books, when in reality the whole NDP govt got behind this move (well most of them). I find it interesting that Bob is taking credit for some good policies and programs that the Ont NDP did well in Queen's Park, but is disassociating from the negative ones. You can't have it both ways.
" That's Gotta Hurt" - not really. I'm a New Democrat and we were well rid of him. The damage he did to our Party's reputation after his first disasterous budget in Ontario has ripples to today. Especially when you look at the fiscal responsibility of other NDP Premiers like Romanow and Dewer. In fact the Nova Scotia NDP have come up just shy of government because of ongoing fears that Rae's fiscal madness caused.
Nope - glad he's gone. If Libs are smart, they will avoid him as their leader.
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