[lbo-talk] Canada election

[ken hanly]

The Liberal party is hardly left though there are leftists within the party. You omit the 50 seats that the Bloc Quebecois won in Quebec. They are mildly leftist and they managed to stop the Conservatives from getting a majority by beating them soundly in Quebec where there was at first a Conservative resurgence. The Green Party also increased its vote but did not win any seats.

  The NDP is a successor to the CCF which was actually quite socialist but over the years it has turned to the right as most social democratic parties have and is more or less a third way type of party now. However, compared with the Democrats in the U.S. it is much to the left, particularly on foreign policy. The party is for immediate withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan for instance.

Blog:  http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html
Blog:  http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html

--- On Wed, 10/15/08, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Canada election
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 11:47 AM
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7668738.stm
> 
> So it looks like the left got its ass kicked, after all. 
> Liberals lost 27 seats, NPD gained 8, and conservatives
> gained 19, which is a net loss to the left.  Does the
> current economic meltdown have any effect on Canadian
> voters?
> 
> Who is 'New Democrats" anyway?  Politically, that
> is.  Their website is awfully vague - they look leftish,
> but more like Clinton 'new Democrats", no?
> Wojtek 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> "When a candidate for public office faces the voters
> he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose
> chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite
> incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any
> save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done
> in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of
> what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate
> must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the
> odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious
> and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the
> notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency
> tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
>       
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