The TorStar is reporting that the campaign mgr for the Kenora, ON NDP candidate is also running in Toronto. She also does not campaign for herself as she is too busy in Kenora. This is the party that was bragging re the number of female running.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/04/29/kelly-mcparland-ndp-readies-for-experiment-in-government/#more-36743
Scrutiny something new for the NDP
Scott Stinson - Apr 29, 2011
All eyes will be on Jack as we head towards election day.
Jacob Larkin, the NDP candidate for Labrador, did not begin campaigning in earnest until this week. As the school principal explained in an interview with local CBC Radio, “having a full-time job brings its own responsibilities, which you can’t just drop and go out on the campaign trail. Things have to be seen through.”
Asked why he decided to carry the party banner — or, at least, carry it for the last week of the campaign — Mr. Larkin said, “I believe in social and fiscal responsibility. I think the NDP does as well.”
So, he’s batting .500 there. Could be worse.
Mr. Larkin’s late entry into the business of campaigning and his somewhat uncertain grasp of party ideals are similar to stories emerging about many of the NDP’s candidates. There’s a standard-bearer in Quebec who went on a Las Vegas vacation for a week because she didn’t want to lose her deposit. She also reportedly spoke French so poorly that a local radio station had to scotch an interview rather than air the exchange. Another candidate went to the Caribbean and one travelled to France. There’s a Toronto candidate who has not campaigned at all, can’t be reached, and, judging by a Toronto Star report, quite possibly is an apparition. There are all kinds of students who, presumably, did not have the pesky constraints of full-time work that weighed down Mr. Larkin.
None of these things are unusual — third-place parties usually have a fair bit of cannon fodder — but it is unusual for anyone to be asking about them. And that’s what’s happening to the NDP. People are asking about them, and about the party and its platform, far more than they were last month, or even early last week.
It’s what naturally happens when an also-ran finds itself suddenly very much in the running. The key question for the NDP is: Can it manage four days of impromptu scrutiny?
Scott Matthews, a political science professor with Queen’s University, has studied the effects of media coverage on Canadian elections.
“A surge for a party creates a positive tone,” he said in an interview. “But as a surge becomes a lead, or even close to a lead, there’s evidence that the tone becomes negative.
“I think it’s very obviously happening right now with the NDP, and they’re not even leading.”
On Thursday alone, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was calling on the public — and the media — to put the NDP “under the microscope.” (He even said it was “darn necessary,” cleaning up the potty mouth a little from a day earlier when he said the Conservatives could “go to hell.”)
Conservative leader Stephen Harper, meanwhile, is now decrying not the prospect of a Liberal-led “coalition of losers,” but one guided instead by the NDP. It would be, he said Thursday, “a ramshackle coalition … that will not last but will do a lot of destruction.” He noted that the party’s view on international trade, for example, has “not changed since the Cold War.”
Jack Layton himself is also now facing a different sort of question about his own policies from reporters travelling with him. He was asked on Thursday about how his platform, which calls for a price on carbon, would affect gasoline prices. One analysis says the NDP plan would add 10¢ a litre at the pumps. Mr. Layton insisted that an ombudsman would be able to keep oil companies from raising prices for consumers, but he disagreed that he was proposing to regulate gasoline prices. Reporters described the exchange, which included questions about the AWOL candidates, as “testy” and “heated,” which has been rare for the NDP leader thus far. And testy exchanges lead to stories about how a leader is “on the defensive” or “responding to critics.” Eventually they can become “embattled.” (In the case of Mr. Ignatieff, a report on Thursday referred to him as “beleaguered.”)
“Tone matters,” explains Prof. Matthews. “People do respond to the media. Not everyone, of course, not the partisans and not the people who aren’t paying any attention, but there are people who take their cues from the coverage.”
Meanwhile, a headline on the CBC website late Thursday afternoon: “Layton defends against ‘stop-gap’ candidates.”
Welcome to front-runner — or close to it — status.
NDP readies for experiment in government
Kelly McParland - Apr 29, 2011
Here’s the prospect we’re looking at if the NDP surge survives the weekend (which would require that Canadians continue to profess support for the party while paying no attention whatever to its utopian platform).
A party with absolutely no experience in running a government, fat with rookie MPs recruited from university campuses and NDP student groups, finds itself suddenly catapulted to Canada’s biggest opposition party, able, with help from other opposition parties, to decide the fate of the latest minority government. Leader Jack Layton’s only related experience was as a major figure in the left-wing faction of Toronto city council. His most experienced colleague, Thomas Mulcair, served as a minister in the Quebec provincial government. He was a secondary minister and resigned when he was offered something even lower.
Their position has any number of precedents. Mario Dumont’s Action democratique du Quebec went from nowhere to 41 seats in the Quebec legislature, back to nowhere a year later when voters realized what a pack of bumbling amateurs they were. Brian Mulroney’s historic sweep in 1984 left him with 58 seats in Quebec, many of them neophytes Mulroney barely knew, who helped sink the party into a mire of scandal over the next several years. John Diefenbaker suffered a similar experience when his Progressive Conservatives, after more than 20 years out of power, suddenly found themselves running the show in 1958. The result in each case: big trouble. No matter what you might think about professional politicians, rank amateurs are no better. Ask Bob Rae, whose NDP famously found itself thrust into power in Ontario in 1990, and limped out five years later with the economy in tatters and the party (and province) in disarray.
Jack Layton isn’t likely to be prime minister, but he will hold the fate of the government in his hands. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives will likely have to temper their budget plans if they hope to stay in power more than another month or so (goodbye corporate tax cut) and make other concessions to their weakened status (goodbye cancellation of party subsidies). But it’s hard to see the Tories agreeing to any of the pie-in-the-sky policies on which the NDP has staked its future. Mr. Layton — who has taken to avoiding questions now that people are actually starting to look closely at his many promises — maintains that he has been very responsible in his campaigning, and that many of the most extravagant pledges will take years to fulfill, and depend in some cases on factors beyond his control (i.e. approval from the provinces, which rarely agree on anything). Sorry Jack — one of the first lessons of power is that people don’t pay attention to nuance, or the caveats attached to campaign promises. Here’s the local report that followed his recent visit to Yellowknife:
In anticipation of his shot at the seat currently held by Conservative leader Stephen Harper, Layton promised Canadian voters to fulfill his campaign pledges within 100 days of an NDP-led government if the party wins in the May 2 national election.
Among the campaign promises that Layton made were to create jobs and help elderly Canadians out of poverty. Layton told students in Yellowknife on Thursday that his campaign pledges are not wild, but modest and reasonable.
The list includes:
Start training of doctors and nurses
Provide incentives for Canadian physicians who have left the country to return home
Double public pensions
Reduce taxes for small businesses by 2 percent
Make available a job creation tax credit
Place a limit on credit card interest rates at 5 points above prime rate
Remove the federal sales tax off home heating bills, and
Unlock mobile phones.
Mr. Layton didn’t really promise to get all those things done in the first 100 days, just a few of the easiest. But you get the picture: people hear promises and expect fast action. Those voters piling onto the NDP bandwagon think they’re going to have their pensions doubled, and fast, and they’re going to be angry when the NDP fails to come through, which it inevitably will.
Similarly, the many Quebecers switching to the NDP in anticipation Mr. Layton will keep his promise to help the province achieve most of the benefits of sovereignty, while the money continues to flow in from Ottawa, will have their illusions shattered. It’s not going to happen, if the rest of the country has any say.
For Mr. Layton and his caucus it will be a learning experience. Unfortunately, they’ll be performing their experiment with the fortunes of the country. People shouldn’t vote when they don’t know what they’re voting for. Hopeless idealists can cause a lot of damage before they begin to appreciate that life is more complicated than they thought.
National Post
