[lbo-talk] Canada's election

[Marv Gandall]

It’s a measure of how far the political centre of gravity has shifted to the right that even a modest nod to fiscal stimulus by Canada’s victorious Liberal Party evokes hosannas from mainstream commentators, and even the odd reactionary like Conrad Black, exhausted by the failure of austerity policies to revive economic growth. 

And it’s a measure of just how ossified Canada’s New Democratic Party, with its roots in social democracy, has become in belatedly embracing the conservative dogma of balanced budgets when it no longer has any resonance with the public. The federal Liberals won the Canadian election this week by outflanking the NDP on the left on the issue of deficit spending, exactly as their provincial counterparts did last year to the NDP in Ontario. 

The question still to be answered is whether diffuse rank-and-file disappointment with the NDP’s dismal performance will find organized expression against the party’s leadership and direction as it has in the European, British, and US left-centre parties.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/canada-and-the-anti-austerity-movement