Saturday, April 29, 2017

Leadership 2017 Links

The latest from the federal NDP's leadership campaign.

- Sid Ryan's endorsement of Niki Ashton both answers one of the more persistent questions as to possible additional entries into the race, and offers some helpful institutional support for Ashton's campaign.

- Mick Sweetman interviews each of the MPs in the race about their plans in general, and for Toronto in particular. And Charlie Angus discusses the need for Canadians to benefit more from the resources extracted from our country.

- Karl Belanger asks whether Pat Stogran fits the bill for an outsider candidate in the race, while Gloria Galloway examines how Stogran might change the course of the campaign.

- Finally, Tom Parkin discusses how the leadership campaign fits into a wider pattern of NDP momentum across Canada. And Murray Dobbin examines the NDP's role in movement-building rather than mere partisan interactions, while lamenting the lack of a stronger set of social movements today:
In this context it is interesting to watch the NDP leadership race to test for signs that the candidates understand what they are up against in rebuilding the party. Two of them, Niki Ashton and Peter Julian, have spoken of the importance of social movements in creating a newly robust progressive party...

The difficulty with this recognition of social movements is that it comes too late. The sad reality is that there are almost no social movements in Canada...

Simone Weil wrote that "[t]o be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." The lesson here for the NDP leadership candidates genuinely open to "social movements" is the need to shift their attention inwards: a renewed NDP must itself become a movement rooted in community (like its predecessor, the CCF), going beyond a list of policies and pledging to help build a society which offers people meaning in their lives.
[Edit: fixed wording.]

No comments:

Post a Comment