A few links and updates from the NDP's federal leadership campaign...
- The (primarily) English leadership debate can be found via CBC:
- Perspectives Journal's January issue focuses on the leadership race and its relationship to the NDP and Canada's progressive movement generally. And Peggy Nash has also been interviewing the leadership candidates for Perspectives Journal: see so far her interviews with Tony McQuail, Heather McPherson, Tanille Johnston and Rob Ashton.
- Laurie Adkin examines the bad-faith complaints about Avi Lewis - including familiar demands of fealty to exploitative oil and gas interests with no regard for the harm they do to public health and well-being - from inside and outside the leadership campaign.
- Finally, Dale Smith offers his take on the campaign, recognizing that the likely decision will come down to Lewis versus McPherson.
In my opinion, Avi won the debate.
ReplyDeleteHeather McPherson seemed to want to do the same stuff as what got the NDP into the ditch it's in, just do it harder and better; this is not an answer. And I didn't respect her literally provincial approach. Rob Ashton wants to go back to the past and just do union stuff; unions are great, but that doesn't deal with the challenges of today. If you're going to be a heavy union person, I'd want to see something about how he's gonna organize the gig economy and outfits like Amazon, but nothing, just union platitudes for the most part.
Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail are good, sweet people with a lot of wisdom and some good ideas. But I can't see putting them up against the news media and political opponents.
Avi has the political chops to handle the rough and tumble of politics, to refuse media attempts to put hostile frames around him and so on. And he has a plan to do real things, big things, things that will help people in fundamental ways not just around the edges, things that will catch people's imagination, things that are about today's economy and environment not about a golden past. And he conveyed it pretty well, given the constraints of a very short-form-response oriented debate.