Why I Quit The NDP

Winnipeg NDP member Pat Martin was recently asked by Paul Wells in Macleans magazine what the NDP game plan was. Martin replied, "We want to do to the Liberals nationally what we did to them in Manitoba: remove them from the game board."

Take that in.

The New Democratic Party, which has never won more than 43 seats in a Parliament where more than triple that number is required to form government, thinks they have what it takes to remove from the game board the political machine that has governed Canada with only a few interruptions since 1896.

I don’t know what Pat Martin is smoking and I don’t want any. With the Harper led Conservatives lurking and smirking in the weeds of the government side of the House now is no time for wacky tabacky illusions.

But this illusion, or delusion, expressed by Pat Martin appears to be shared by Jack Layton.

This eventually could mean that Jack Layton is handing the Harper Conservatives a majority government.

About 3 years ago I rejoined the NDP, after an absence of almost thirty years. Today, April 25th, 2006 I placed a stop payment order with my financial institution to terminate my automatic monthly contribution to the NDP. I’ve cut up my membership card and dropped the shreds in the wastebasket.

The Harper Conservatives pose significant enough perils to the future well being of this country that foolish hubris and bravado like Pat Martin’s or narrow partisan triangulation like Jack Layton’s have no place.

Over the past few months some small windows have opened into the processes and aspirations of the Harper Conservatives in power.

Harper hates the press, the eyes and ears of the people, whom we can thereby infer he would rather keep in silent darkness. Harper is as contemptuous of those who expected he would be a politician to keep his campaign promises as he is of those who did not expect he would. Harper has constructed his centrepiece Accountability Act in order to give himself cover for his Defence Minister, who himself appears to want nothing more than to emulate Donald Rumsfeld. Harper’s centralization of power in his own office is in near diametric opposition to what he has led us to believe his governing style would be. His aping of the tactics of the Bush Republicans are now fully exposed and we can expect more, including the rhetorical contortions and protestations of the Bush-lite Harper fanatics. (I fully expect they will be showing their ruddy, puffy, spittle-flecked faces not too long after I make this post.)

This is the crowd that Pat Martin, and by his silence on Martin’s comments, Jack Layton and the rest of the NDP caucus wants to legitimize in order that they can exercise their delusion that they have the electoral clout to remove the Liberals from the board.

Jack, I will not participate. The old place commands my affections too much to allow me hock it to the Conservatives in exchange for your fantasies.