Head Tale

The NDP released their election platform today.  Called “Building The Country of Our Dreams” [PDF], it mostly summarizes the various proposals the NDP has been promoting over this entire campaign – affordable daycare, making post-secondary education more affordable, increasing corporate taxes and so on.  (Discussion on Reddit.)

Some highlights identified by a Reddit user:

• 7,000 more doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners and other health professionals
• expanding home care to 41,000 more seniors and providing funding for 5,000 more nursing home beds
• Tripling paid leave available for those too ill to work
• one million quality childcare spaces at no more than $15 a day
• extra five weeks of parental leave
• Cracking down on excessive ATM fees
• Creating 40,000 jobs, co-op placements and internships for youth
• reducing the small business tax from 11 to 9%
• $1.5 billion per year in new infrastructure funding to municipalities to fix roads, bridges and water treatment systems
• $1.3 billion per year in a national strategy to improve transit and reduce gridlock
• retrofit over 50,000 homes and apartment buildings
• returning the retirement age from 67 to 65
• Restoring home mail delivery
• hire 2,500 more front-line police officers
• Investing $454 million to give our veterans support
• Bolstering food and rail safety regulations
• repealing Bill C-51
• bringing in proportional representation for elections
• Giving the Parliamentary Budget Officer independent authority, and creating a Parliamentary Science Officer

There are many out there who are lumping the NDP & Liberals together (and I’ve been guilty of that on occasion myself) but although there are some similarities (which are especially appealing for those wanting to see Stephen Harper gone), there are some very stark differences between the two parties that people should consider if they’re thinking of voting for one party in place of the other…

1. Trans-Pacific Partnership
   Along with the Conservatives, the Liberals have indicated their support for this massive international trade deal while the NDP is strongly opposed to the deal which could cause great harm to Canada’s agricultural and automotive sectors as well as causing grave concerns for copyright,  intellectual property rights, and Canada’s ability to write its own laws regarding the Internet as well as Canada’s sovereignty in general (this is the first and probably only time I’ll link to the Green Party in this series of posts!) 😉
2. C-51
   Even though the Conservatives had a majority position and the Liberals did not need to vote in favour of it, they chose to do what was politically popular at the time and support Bill C-51 which gives much greater surveillance powers to the government.  Officially meant to help prevent terrorism, the bill actually could end up leading to increased government spying on private citizens in violation of our Charter rights.  Rightly, this bill is losing support as more and more Canadians become aware of how it could fundamentally change the nature of our freedoms.
3. Keystone XL Pipeline
   Again, the Liberals overlap with the Harper Conservatives in saying support this pipeline (just like most Republicans in the US) while the NDP (like most Democrats in the US including Obama and Hillary Clinton) have said very clearly that they oppose it.

A couple posts ago, I included an excerpt from Thomas Mulcair’s autobiography.  As a librarian who previously spent nearly a decade in the Canadian book industry, that made me think it might be fun to compare and contrast some of the details of each leader’s book (full disclosure – I’ve only read Mulcair’s…so far.)

I saw the above graphic on Reddit and it struck home.

The short term memory of Canadian voters always astounds me – many ridings across Canada will elect Liberals to defeat Conservatives, having apparently forgotten that only a short decade ago, the Liberals were the party that was seen as tired, out-dated and corrupt, much like the Conservatives are seen today.

The NDP has never had a chance to govern at the federal level and that’s one of their greatest appeals to me.  I’m very interested to see what they could do if given the opportunity to break the revolving “red door/blue door” cycle of the last 100+ years of Canadian politics.

Thomas Mulcair makes the point very well in his autobiography, “Strength of Conviction” when he talks about one example – how both parties have failed, repeatedly for over thirty years, to implement a national childcare strategy…

Red door?  Blue door?  On October 19, let’s hope voters open a new orange window!

For anyone who doesn’t know, that’s journalist Paul Wells in the middle, not the Leader of the Rhino party. 😉

All of us have reasons why we vote for the parties that we do – some people are “born wearing orange diapers” and will vote NDP as if the party were a family heirloom, passed down from generation to generation (and I’m sure many people have the same experience with red, blue or increasingly, green diapers – which would be cloth of course!)

Others will vote for some combination of the usual “big issues” in an election – the economy, the environment, foreign policy, etc.

Still others will vote for reasons that leave you shaking your head.  (My most notorious example here is one woman who apparently said she was voting for Stephen Harper because “he likes cats”.)

There are all kinds of reasons people vote for the parties that they do.  But if you want to check how your political beliefs might actually line up with party platforms, the CBC’s Canada Votes “Vote Compass” web site  allows you to answer a series of questions then indicates which party you should vote for.

(The site isn’t perfect – I’ve taken the quiz three times and been given three different parties I should vote for in different percentages.  I bet you can guess the only party I haven’t been told to vote for!)

One of the things that’s surprised me about the Harper government is how they seem happy to offend and mistreat even the people who make up their core constituents.

As a broad generalization, Conservatives tend to support the military and vice versa.

But what always amazes me is how the Conservatives stop respecting military personnel the moment they become veterans – whether it’s by closing veteran service centres…

“It makes no sense to take these services away from men and women who have sacrificed so much for this country,” said Roy Lamore, whose service dates back to the 1940s.  “This isn’t just about old veterans,” he said during an emotional press conference. “This is about young guys too.”

…ignoring the epidemic of PTSD and suicides among military veterans

According to the latest Defence Department stats, 160 military personnel committed suicide between 2004 and March 31, 2014. That compares to the 138 Canadian soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014.

…or underfunding veteran services by over one *billion* dollars and returning that amount to the Treasury while veterans struggle to get even basic benefits.

Frank Valeriote, the Liberal veterans critic, said ex-soldiers who’ve been denied benefits will look at the unspent funds and feel “hoodwinked, completely abandoned” and wonder why they’ve made sacrifices for their country.  “It is reprehensible and unconscionable what they’re doing so that the government can create an image of fiscal responsibility,” he said.