Friday, March 13, 2009

The Incredible Lightness Of Being The Ontario NDP

They reject their green candidate and embrace the smelly shop floor. They give 7/9 votes to Unionists for every non-union vote. The Ontario NDP: a party, or a cult nostalgic for Woody Guthrie and the distant past?

6 comments:

Mark Richard Francis said...

The weighing of votes to unions is putting the "socialist" into democracy.

Talk about grubs at the grassroots!

Skinny Dipper said...

Both the federal and Ontario provincial NDP are going to need to redefine themselves in a world where traditional industrial jobs are declining. With this decline, the union membership will also decline. Less donations from the unions will go to the NDP provincially.

If the PCs or Liberals had weighted votes for businesses based on donations to these parties or gross revenues, I believe there would be an outcry from the public.

Tiny Perfect Blog said...

Say what you want about the unions, but the implication of your post is that we should turn our back on manufacturing.

I suppose the NDP could adopt the Liberal and Tory approach to the manufacturing sector and just throw thousands of sinking Ontarians an anvil.

I'm starting to get why people hate Torontonians so much - if its not their industry, it's backward and out of date and not worthy of attention. How great to be prosperous and smug.

Anonymous said...

Andrew Cash can go buy a Green membership along with his friends at NOW magazine for all I care. Just because his local hero Tabuns didn't get in.

Sustainable development does not mean imposing a Riverdale based tofu-style socialism to Northern Ontario or the Rusting Horseshoe. Look at what happened to the Green Shift.

Anonymous said...

Why is Ontario still in manufacturing? The only reason I can think of is to delay the loss of jobs until it's finally absolutely inevitable (which could be now). We cannot compete with the likes of "developing" countries.

Lamp-lighters never wanted to adopt electricity, either. It's time for us to adapt and adjust according to the world, and embrace new initiatives like the Green Energy Act -- which, I'm sure you know, plans to creat 50K jobs.

Tiny Perfect Blog said...

Got to love people who think you can just drop an entire industry in a heartbeat and convert to something else overnight.

To quote Jon Stewart - this isn't a fucking game, people's lives are at stake.

Manufacturing is the number one sector in Ontario. How about converting it to greener pastures by encouraging green cars, better uses of energy, production of green products? Instead of smugly writing the whole thing off and leaving millions to drown.

It's not an either/or senario. And frankly I doubt Andrea Horwath or Pater Tabuns are stupid enough to think it is.