After the last federal budget the NDP's Thomas Mulcair announced a National Day of Action. This is the kind of thing that gets my lefty heart pounding. Finally, citizens getting a chance to talk about substantive changes not just to the budget but to the whole idea of what government means to Canadians - what we are willing to pay and what we expect for that money. I was imagining a Nation wide debate, held at the local level but simultaneously with engaged and interested citizens mooting their own ideas and discussing issues that matter most to us. Instead, Mulcair decided the issues under discussion - and I'm not making this up - would be 1) ATM fees, 2) Credit Card interest rates, 3) Payday lending schemes, 4) corporate collusion and gas price fixing, and 5) companies adding a surcharge for mailing out statements at the end of each month.
Holy shit. It's lucky no one was killed in the resulting complete lack of interest. Why did they bother to stage a media event when they could have just stopped in to any Tim Horton's in the country and heard the exact same bitching? And got the exact same result. Nothing.
My five topics for a genuine National Day of Action? 1) Reducing income inequality to pre-1970 levels, 2) implementing a meaningful carbon tax for polluters, 3) the text of the apology to be delivered to scientists and librarians employed by the federal government as well as a repeal of all the insulting legislation the Harper government passed to curb their freedom of speech, 4) the creation of a new top tax bracket for incomes over $300k per annum and the elimination of a two decades worth of corporate tax breaks, and 5) giving subpoena powers to the parliamentary budget office.
and 6) reopening the Experimental Lakes Area with full funding. And one more for good luck 7) a federal commission on climate change run by climate scientists and funded by the federal government to provide the most up to date info to any member of parliament (to remain in effect until the climate stops changing or the world ends, whichever happens first).
Seriously, if I was a member of the NDP I would be very pissed off about this. What Mulcair is doing is taking the nation's pulse on issues that, by selection, belong to the conservatives. People who really think those are issues of importance are always going to vote for the conservatives because they are small issues that amount to, at most, a couple hundred bucks per year. And the conservatives will save them more than that by cutting taxes and services. Sure, those costs disproportionally hurt poor people but they are hurt far more by a government that keeps reducing its influence and ambition for the sake of reduced taxes.
People who support the NDP support big government - or, at least they are willing to provided the government has big ideas. The genuinely weird thing about Canadian politics, seen through the lens of American politics, is we are willing to pay more to get more. Canadians don't share the American fanaticism about small government. Most Canadians want a bigger government if you ask them on an issue by issue basis. When the sum of these issues is a government that takes a large and active role in our national life, people are not just willing to accept it - they welcome it. In 2004, the CBC started a contest to choose the "most influential Canadian". Most people thought it would go to Wayne Gretzky or Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson but it went to the Prairie Giant, Tommy Douglas. The father of socialized medicine in Canada. If the NDP wants to gain seats, if it wants to hold on to the ones it has, Thomas Mulcair better start thinking bigger.
No comments:
Post a Comment