On false branding

Pop quiz time. Which is the first Canadian political party that comes to mind based on the following description?

...consumed by internal obsessions and bogged down with endless scandal and mismanagement...

Send your answer to Andrew Steele for his information.

Mind you, Steele's utterly bizarre theory about the NDP's current position goes a bit further than that phrase alone. But it doesn't make his take any more plausible:

The other, bigger issue is the toxic legacy of past NDP governments. Few would choose to return to profligate regimes consumed by internal obsessions and bogged down with endless scandal and mismanagement.

A vigourous debate about how to govern would be in the NDP's best interest. The time has come to move past some of the discredited shibboleths clogging up the NDP's policy cupboard - rent control and nationalized energy spring to mind - and find more effective policies to ennunciate the NDP's values.

Starting with the painfully obvious, the next party which actually has an internal debate about what level of "internal obsession,...scandal and mismanagement" it should seek to pursue while in office would be the first. (Even if I'd have to acknowledge that it would make for a highly entertaining conversation.) So Steele's supposed advice is obviously based more in an attempt to falsely brand the NDP than in any idea about what the party should actually be discussing.

But what about that attempted brand? There, the question is one of evidence rather than statements which fall apart even on their own internal absurdity. But Steele's case doesn't come out any better in his first description of the NDP as "profligate" based on the historical record:

NDP governments have balanced the books 46 per cent of the time. Manitoba’s NDP government has posed surpluses every year it has been in office and Saskatchewan’s NDP government posted 11 consecutive balanced budgets after ending a decade of Conservative mismanagement and corruption.

Despite Paul Martin’s frequent pronouncements on fiscal responsibility, Liberals have the worst fiscal record overall. Liberal federal, provincial and territorial governments have posted year-over-year budget deficits an astonishing 79 per cent of the time.

Conservative governments have only a slightly better record than the Liberals, logging deficits 65 per cent of the years in which they’ve been in power.

The report issued today by the Liberal government’s Department of Finance looks at federal, provincial and territorial accounts over the past 22 years.

In other words, NDP = fiscally responsible. Steele's Liberals = profligate. And dishonest about that fact.

But one might say, what if Steele were referring only to the federal NDP as compared to the provincial governments who have consistently been more responsible than their Lib or Con counterparts? I'd think that's more than ruled out by the feigned concern over the "legacy of past NDP governments", but just for kicks let's see how that assumption works with the rest of Steele's thesis.

So let's have another pop quiz - this a two-parter.

1. Never mind Steele's descriptor "endless", name a single scandal involving the federal NDP.

Go ahead, take your time.

2. If you've come up with anything at all, compare it to Steele's party's sponsorship scandal in scope, breadth, and damage to the party and/or the wider political system.

Now which federal party can possibly be considered as one associated with "endless scandal"? And I won't even get started on a Liberal criticizing another party for "internal obsessions" getting in the way of effective political action.

In sum, Steele seems to be putting up nothing more than a cynical effort to try to tar the NDP with his own party's obvious weaknesses. And while there are some honest points to be made about areas where the NDP can look to improve, it's fairly clear that Steele's are something else entirely.