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Jagmeet Singh, probably the biggest political loser?

brihard said:
The LPC have been pulled from their more centrist roots. The NDP are just doing exactly what they’ve always tried to do and what their voters have always realistically wanted and expected. Few of the people upset at the NDP for the supply and confidence agreement would have ever voted NDP anyway, so it’s not like they’re losing votes with this strategy.
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I think it was deliberate, and I think it was Trudeau et Cie. trying to absorb some of the NDP’s base. Time will tell if it was worth losing some Blue Grits.
 
brihard said:
He came in third and yet managed to parlay the NDP position of kingmaker into what’s shaping up to be the most significant advancement of NDP policy interests in a generation. NDP could not hope to form government; despite that they’ve made significant advances in universal pharmacare and dental care.
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I'll grant they got publicly-funded pharmacare and dental care on the table. Until more than a couple of categories of meds are covered, and enough dentists participate to make that plan viable, "significant advancement" isn't how I'd characterize it.

Pharmacare will probably stick around - companies will be happy to ditch private plans (their share of premiums is just a cost to them) except for "extended" coverages to pave over the inevitable shortfalls of what public funding will cover (eg. brand names). Provinces that already have effective public coverage won't even notice, nor will their voters, unless the provinces behave like corporations and transfer the responsibility to the feds - in which case, people will start to notice when the feds squeeze costs and remove options.

Dental care might collapse the same way one of the drug harm mitigation "pillars" is collapsing in BC (ie. if it's too poorly implemented to save).

All of the advances came at the cost of other stuff, particularly health care which we know requires funding increases greater than foreseeable public revenue growth. If people were sufficiently economically literate to make the direct connection, the NDP would be in trouble.
 
Good2Golf said:
I think it was deliberate, and I think it was Trudeau et Cie. trying to absorb some of the NDP’s base. Time will tell if it was worth losing some Blue Grits.
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It was a play that worked when things were going swimmingly economically in 2015. The ABC crowd wanted Stephen Harper out and so it was move left and absorb the overflow.

Now that we're a decade on and the world (and Canada for that matter) is no longer in such a rosy state, the move to the left may have bit the LPC in the ass in the long term.

Additionally, it may have cemented the belief that an NDP majority (if possible) would be disastrous economically for Canada, especially if this NDP Lite is to be a litmus test.
 
brihard said:
To be blunt I think you’re just mad that he won’t trigger an election and hand the Conservatives a relatively effortless majority.
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I expected him to do this.

No, I am pissed at his double speak tough guy talk and does the opposite. I have voted for NDP provincially in the past.
 
Anybody else like Vasey Kapelos? She is growing on me. She comes out and grabs the politicians by the throat looking for answers. Hand her a scripted pile of dung and she will kick their asses.
Don't matter the political affiliation either, she is sans remorse.
 
Remius said:
In his defense he has done more to advance and get results (the kind the NDP have in their platform)than any other NDP leader I think. But, that likely cost him his and the NDP’s soul to do it. Like the LPC, the NDP probably needs a fresh leader. The difference is that I can see a few candidates for the LPC leadership in the wings but I don’t see any yet for the NDP.
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I disagree, I think Mulcair did more for the NDP than Jagmeet. Plus he did it without selling the NDP soul. I think Mulciar had he been in Jagmeet current position would have extracted much of the same, but would know when to distance the party from the LPC.
 
Colin Parkinson said:
I disagree, I think Mulcair did more for the NDP than Jagmeet. Plus he did it without selling the NDP soul. I think Mulciar had he been in Jagmeet current position would have extracted much of the same, but would know when to distance the party from the LPC.
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I’m perfectly ok with that but what did Mulcair achieve policy wise? Sure he became the official opposition (which was really because of Jack Layton) and was a very effective opposition leader but what NDP initiatives did he manage to get made into policy and reality? Not questioning your opinion just looking for the evidence of that thought.
 
What has the NDP really managed to get made into policy?

Consider - again - what's happened with drug addiction harm reduction in BC. All the experts and cheerleaders told us it was a good thing. All the supporters - including people here - repeated that it was a good thing each time the topic came up. It would save lives, didn't we know? The politicians cut the ribbon, posed for the pictures, basked in the adulation of their supporters. Then they all did what the ADD-riddled progressive factions always do - marked themselves up a "win" in their minds, and moved onto their next project. Finish the work started? Nope. Dial forward a few years. Now we get the lamentations over the failures. Did permissive drug use policies cause more people to die than otherwise would have? If so, I suppose we'll get blood-on-their-hands, callous-about-lives rhetoric - the kind of stuff used to sell policy changes in the first place - any day now. Is anyone who supported the policy going to acknowledge his mistake and a share of the responsibility for lives lost?

Daycare. Same. Cheerleading and fanfare at the start; belated recognition that the terms are hindering providers and the benefit isn't really universally accessible because you have to find daycare to claim the costs.

Health insurance. Same. Points of significant failure; a benefit also not accessible if you can't actually get care.

Dental insurance. So far, not good. Not much uptake among dentists. No care means no benefit.

Before touting another policy victory, wait and see what happens. Worst case, something gets rolled back because it's an utter failure. Next worst is that whatever is already there staggers on like a zombie because the politicians are off chasing the next ribbon. F*cked up incomplete implementations are not good public policy.

If the NDP wants a project, here are some: fix federal finances to be sustainably solvent and so that we pay money for programs, not bondholders; increase health care funding to match demand or alter the terms to allow free market mechanisms to draw in more money; fix defence to improve acquisitions, meet spending targets, and contribute credibly to the defence of nations under threat. Unfortunately, these will all require long-term attention and consume all available resources; anything else on the political honey-do list will simply be a subtraction from solving one of the big problems.
 
Brad Sallows said:
What has the NDP really managed to get made into policy?

Consider - again - what's happened with drug addiction harm reduction in BC. All the experts and cheerleaders told us it was a good thing. All the supporters - including people here - repeated that it was a good thing each time the topic came up. It would save lives, didn't we know? The politicians cut the ribbon, posed for the pictures, basked in the adulation of their supporters. Then they all did what the ADD-riddled progressive factions always do - marked themselves up a "win" in their minds, and moved onto their next project. Finish the work started? Nope. Dial forward a few years. Now we get the lamentations over the failures. Did permissive drug use policies cause more people to die than otherwise would have? If so, I suppose we'll get blood-on-their-hands, callous-about-lives rhetoric - the kind of stuff used to sell policy changes in the first place - any day now. Is anyone who supported the policy going to acknowledge his mistake and a share of the responsibility for lives lost?

Daycare. Same. Cheerleading and fanfare at the start; belated recognition that the terms are hindering providers and the benefit isn't really universally accessible because you have to find daycare to claim the costs.

Health insurance. Same. Points of significant failure; a benefit also not accessible if you can't actually get care.

Dental insurance. So far, not good. Not much uptake among dentists. No care means no benefit.

Before touting another policy victory, wait and see what happens. Worst case, something gets rolled back because it's an utter failure. Next worst is that whatever is already there staggers on like a zombie because the politicians are off chasing the next ribbon. F*cked up incomplete implementations are not good public policy.

If the NDP wants a project, here are some: fix federal finances to be sustainably solvent and so that we pay money for programs, not bondholders; increase health care funding to match demand or alter the terms to allow free market mechanisms to draw in more money; fix defence to improve acquisitions, meet spending targets, and contribute credibly to the defence of nations under threat. Unfortunately, these will all require long-term attention and consume all available resources; anything else on the political honey-do list will simply be a subtraction from solving one of the big problems.
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This isn’t about what is good, poorly delivered or bad. It’s the fact that the NDP got their policy initiatives pushed and passed. Something they have never really been able to do before in any real sense.

We’re clearly not arguing about the same thing.
 
Remius said:
This isn’t about what is good, poorly delivered or bad. It’s the fact that the NDP got their policy initiatives pushed and passed. Something they have never really been able to do before in any real sense.

We’re clearly not arguing about the same thing.
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Sure we are. The NDP and LPC pass skeletal incomplete programs and define that as a "win". As long as they define "win", they can "win" anything. But if they're passing programs which are reasonably expected to provide universal benefits with broad scale and scope, and then the benefits are not universally accessible or only cover a trivially narrow subset of the problem domain, then really they're losers posing as winners.
 
Brad Sallows said:
Sure we are. The NDP and LPC pass skeletal incomplete programs and define that as a "win". As long as they define "win", they can "win" anything. But if they're passing programs which are reasonably expected to provide universal benefits with broad scale and scope, and then the benefits are not universally accessible or only cover a trivially narrow subset of the problem domain, then really they're losers posing as winners.
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That doesn’t really matter if they get their policies implemented. Regardless of effectiveness. That’s the point. The NDP have never in recent history been able to do that before.
 
Remius said:
In his defense he has done more to advance and get results (the kind the NDP have in their platform)than any other NDP leader I think.
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On paper, yes. But, to take this point a bit further ...
brihard said:
... it’s not like they’re losing votes with this strategy.
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Where Team Orange dropped the ball is exploiting the wins, such as they are, to translate into increased support for the party.
 
Remius said:
That doesn’t really matter if they get their policies implemented. Regardless of effectiveness. That’s the point. The NDP have never in recent history been able to do that before.
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You have to accept the premise, which is just a definition. "This is pharmacare program if we say it is." I reject the definition. When they say their aim is a pharmacare program, they have to produce a pharmacare program to claim the win. If they had said at the outset "we want a public birth control and diabetes medication program", then they could claim a win.
 
ArmyRick said:
Anybody else like Vasey Kapelos? She is growing on me. She comes out and grabs the politicians by the throat looking for answers. Hand her a scripted pile of dung and she will kick their asses.
Don't matter the political affiliation either, she is sans remorse.
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She's great. Had no choice but to like here since her show was all we'd watch in the ship's mess, years ago.
 
Brad Sallows said:
cover a trivially narrow subset of the problem domain, then really they're losers posing as winners.
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Fully Agreed.
The Bread Guy said:
On paper, yes. But, to take this point a bit further ...
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Yup. What matters to like most of us is not simply throwing good ideas out there but seeing them through to determine if they work, don't work or need a tweak.
 
Brad Sallows said:
You have to accept the premise, which is just a definition. "This is pharmacare program if we say it is." I reject the definition. When they say their aim is a pharmacare program, they have to produce a pharmacare program to claim the win. If they had said at the outset "we want a public birth control and diabetes medication program", then they could claim a win.
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Its like saying I own a car if I all I had was 4 wheels, 2 doors and a steering wheel.
 
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