What We Knew
At the beginning of the campaign, Rob Ashton was the political neophyte in the race. That meant we had relatively little to go on in terms of his personality, plans and prospects - other than the general impression that he had ample support from the labour movement.
The sense of the unknown them built further when Ashton declined to offer policy proposals, stating instead that he’d develop those in talking to people over the course of the campaign. But he did start off strongly on the organizational front, getting successful events organized from the early stages of the race.
What We’ve Learned
If any candidate’s position has improved meaningfully over the course of the campaign, it’s Ashton’s. He’s managed to win coverage delivering an oppositional message against Avi Lewis’ front-running campaign, elevating him above the other lesser-known candidates to the point of having a plausible path to benefit from an effective candidate alliance with Heather McPherson.
Yet if Ashton’s organization has built up over the course of the campaign, his personal appeal hasn’t done the same. He’s still a distinctly less effective communicator than the top tier of candidates, as a middling speaker in English and a write-off in French. And while he’s gone further than I would have expected in winning labour support, he hasn’t moved meaningfully past its boundaries.
What He’s Proposing
For the extra time Ashton took in presenting his policies, he hasn’t offered much that doesn’t echo other candidates. Perhaps the most distinctive proposal he’s put forward is to tie an explicit tax surcharge to pay disparities between the CEO and median worker of a single company - but that looks to be a relatively minor piece of puzzle in addressing inequality which largely arises out of disparities both between organizations, and between types of income and wealth.
What to Watch For
At this point, the best guess for Ashton’s result is to finish a solid third, with the ability to direct much of his support to McPherson to put her over the top. An extreme best-case outcome for Ashton would be to have those standings reversed to allow him to win as the leading alternative to Lewis, while a drop to fourth or lower would be a disappointment.
But perhaps more important will be his choices after the campaign is over.
Ideally Ashton and his labour movement supporters will want to stay involved in building the party no matter who wins, including by having him take a prominent role going forward. But his relatively negative messages again Lewis raise the risk he’d choose to do so if the leadership campaign doesn’t turn out as he hopes - and that could only further attenuate the connections between the NDP and its labour base.
I'm a union member myself. I want to like Ashton, but in the end I don't all that much. He's a union guy, he wants to say the same old union things and do the same old union things and talk the same old union tough. And he doesn't have much of anything else to say. If that stuff was going to work, it would have worked in the 80s, or the 90s, or SOMETIME in the long union decline. It didn't, so what does he expect he's going to do trying the same old stuff now?
ReplyDeleteEven in union terms, he's kind of disappointing. In the debate, I didn't see him talking about the gig economy, I didn't see him talking about the challenges of unionizing precarious work like Amazon, I didn't see him talk about introducing things like sectoral bargaining . . . even in terms of how you defend and increase the union sector, he seemed stuck in the past.
And there is more to Canada and the situation of people in Canada than unions. Every other topic, he had nothing much to say, just kind of me-too. He's a staunch union guy, we need guys like that in the party, but hell, I'D make a better minister of labour than he would, let alone minister of anything else.