Two of my very favourite bloggers, Norm Farrell and Laila Yuile, (and bloggers are an important source of information since the press, both print and electronic, have so precipitously dropped the ball) have made much of the need to abandon the traditional right/left dichotomy in our politics and, eventually, our governance, an idea with which I would wholeheartedly agree but for what I’ve seen happen in efforts to bridge that gap.
Norm Farrell@lailayuile@McdonaldMcdo54@vanreport@Bay_St_Wiseguy People should worry about right & wrong instead of right & left. #bcpoli
As I answered to the above tweet from Norm Farrell, our current situation is based on how wrong the Right has been since the early hours of their administration in May of 2001, and how consistently they have been wrong. Both Campbell and Clark have subscribed to the cover ideology of fiscal restraint, a false financial conservatism based loosely on the Washington Consensus idea of austerity, generally based on falsehoods served up to the press, and generally aimed at enriching their friends and corporate sponsors. The very fact of the protracted and ongoing damage that this group has inflicted on both society and the environment is cause enough to seek the most immediate and credible alternative.
The hitch lies in what is perceived to be a very flawed record on the part of the official opposition, and a lack of willingness (I care not on whose part) to form a cooperative union of all the opposition. I personally feel very cheated of what should have been a decade of social progress from 1991-2001, but it looks, from all the evidence I’ve seen, as though the New Democrats of the day bore much more resemblance to Tony Blair than to Jeremy Corbyn, and that they had adopted the same stance as the Federal Liberal Party of Canada, shamefully campaigning from the Left, only to govern from the Right, embracing some Lite version of the corporatism and cronyism that characterizes the current rascals in the Rockpile.
As in many jurisdictions, including the aforementioned Tony Blair’s UK, the U.S. under Clinton, France under Mitterrand and now Hollande, Germany under Schroeder, Spain under Zapatero, Portugal under Costa and lately Greece under Tsipras, what is supposed to be the social alternative turns out to be pretty much more of the same slash and burn, corporatism-in-the-guise-of-trade, trickle-down crumbs-off-the-edge-of-the-table kind of administration characterized by our own Stephen Harper and Christy Clark.
This lack of choice is the price we pay for a lack of vigilance and a lack of willingness to put the proverbial foot down when our elected representatives go astray into the fields of pork-barrel politics and cease to govern in the long-term interest of society. The Left and Right are labels that might have outlived their usefulness in the current context, because what we’ve really seen is Right and Right-Lite. The chances of our ever getting a sample of what a real leftist government should be look to be ephemeral at best, and even leaner as we see the possibility that our current mores will lead to a very short future, but that ought not preclude the effort to work for something genuinely better than that under which we currently labour.