Saturday, August 27, 2005

The NDP's direction

Awhile back, Koby posted a list of proposed NDP campaign planks. By request, I'll take a moment now to comment on them, then over the next couple of weeks I'll try to toss out a few ideas about the direction the party should be taking.

My main area of disagreement with Koby is a familiar one: his platform seems to me to be primarily a protest platform, while my take is that the NDP should be positioning itself as a future government. I'll examine Koby's ideas in order of how easily I see them being dismissed - while I like a couple of them, I'm far from sure that any of them should be in the party's next platform.

Koby accordingly includes two planks which in my view should be dismissed out of hand. Abolishing the Senate and the monarchy may sound great from a "fight the power!" standpoint, but they're both impossible without constitutional change, and uncertain to bring about better results in any event. Any focus on electoral reform should stay right where it is: toward PR, which is both more easily accomplished, and more likely to lead to better representation of Canadians' interests.

Next comes the euthanasia plank. While it's a worthy enough goal, it's one which should be fought for on an individual basis rather than a society-wide one. It's easy enough to say that a Sue Rodriguez is entitled to make her own decisions when she publicly made her intentions known on as many occasions as she did; it's much harder to draft a statutory provision that'll avoid the risk of unwanted deaths, or avoid accusations of wanting to put lives at the discretion of the state. The NDP's stand here should be to continue to support individual efforts under the Charter as it did with Rodriguez, but to avoid demanding change through Parliament.

Following that, there's the dental care idea. In principle, this is where the country should be going in the long term. But it would be utter lunacy to propose adding an extremely costly, less-necessary component to health care when the health care system is alreadly woefully underfunded. The first step has to be to preserve one-payer health care; maybe a couple of elections out, if the system is in better shape, then we can consider including dental care.

Next to last, there's vacation time. This is an even better long-term issue, but I don't see the NDP as the body to start pushing for it now absent substantial public demand. This is an issue that unions should take up ASAP in order to attract attention; another election cycle down the road, if people respond positively, it'll then be time for the NDP to take up the mantle.

Finally, legalizing marijuana. I'm on the fence as to whether or not this should be included in a platform: I tend toward a libertarian view on drugs myself, and particularly in the case of marijuana there's no real basis for keeping it illegal (even with the recently-reduced penalties for possession). While I'm not a fan of making policy based on polls, this would be one issue for a cost-benefit calculation: it'll resonate mostly with younger voters, and I'd be glad to include it in the platform as long as the votes attracted will be close to the number of law-and-order voters who would be completely alienated.

To sum up, Koby's ideas are by and large good ones, but that shouldn't be enough for admission into the NDP platform. For that, an idea should be not only good in the abstract, but also both realistic, and popular enough to attract positive attention. Again, I'll try to pitch in a few such ideas over the next little while.

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