Not surprisingly given my earlier posts on NDP strategy, I'm with pogge in not seeing a lot of upside to the NDP's declaration that it will support the Cons until EI changes are passed - particularly since that announcement wasn't paired with any particular urgency to actually pass the new EI bill. But I do wonder whether the fact that the NDP signed on to vote in favour of Friday's ways and means motion - even after the Bloc had already indicated that the Con government wouldn't be toppled - might be a sign of potential or actual cooperation between the NDP and the Bloc along the lines of what I mooted earlier this year.
After all, there's been a fairly clear line drawn between the Con/Lib and NDP/Bloc groupings within the House of Commons over the past few months. Both Harper and Ignatieff have publicly declared that they have no intention of working with either of the latter two parties - which means that in order to increase their influence, both the NDP and the Bloc have a strong interest in improving the share of seats taken out of those two parties' hands. And of course the NDP and the Bloc also share a common strategy of painting the Cons and Libs as mirror images of each other.
So might the NDP's decision to give the Bloc some political cover on its vote with the Cons be a first step toward the two parties working together more often - giving them an effective voting bloc larger than the Libs in the current Parliament, with an eye toward applying joint pressure on the Cons as matters stand now and developing a governing alternative in the future?
No comments:
Post a Comment