The three-week old alliance of the federal Liberals and NDP has generated plenty of comment by the media’s talking heads. It’s not difficult to predict that the NDP will get some clear wins out of this agreement – pharmacare is a big one, but others cover health, climate change and affordability legislation. These should all aid the population as a whole, although paying for these new programs seems to be the second big question. But, after Covid’s expenses, what are billions more?
The NDP has already claimed the “We Made Them Do It” Trophy for most positive measures by the Liberal minority; but the Grits will certainly claim all popular measures as their own. The Liberals won’t give the NDP credit, and our mainstream media will follow along. In the end, Canada could get the best of the NDP’s program, but without any credit to the NDP. That makes the agreement noble, I guess.
Interesting note: this agreement seems not to cover foreign relations, and that’s another big problem. Whenever the US does cobble together an open intervention in, say, Venezuela, Canada will be there on the front line – and the NDP will have to swallow being a partner.
Every popular policy which results from this agreement will be claimed by the Liberals, even if the policy has been mainline NDP territory for years. The Liberals will grab the NDP’s steam …. and the NDP will be left explaining its support of American interventionist foreign policy (or similar measures). But the NDP has to do this, we assume, because they aren’t going to form the government in the near future.
So pharma-care and a universal basic income may actually come about, even though they’re claimed by the Liberals (who have been in power how many years without broaching either?) OK, the NDP may get some muttered credit.
The other side of this coin is that the NDP will now he weighed down by the unpopular policies of the Liberals. Take one of the worst, the nuclear waste dump plan for Chalk River, or the spread of small nuclear reactors (and their waste) across our isolated communities. Once that radioactive dump, eight-stories high, is constructed just upstream from Ottawa, Gatineau, and Montreal, that dump will become “an NDP accomplishment” …. how to explain that, Mr Singh?
Our Monument to Future Disasters — slowly being planned for the Upper Pontiac — will list the Chalk River radioactive dump’s creators, and thus those responsible for creating this monster; must it now include Mr Singh and his party’s name, despite the NDP containing many anti-dump militants? Once the Future, say an earthquake or massive forest fire, has opened the radioactive-dump’s “bag” to the environment and atmosphere, creating Chernobyl-on-the-Ottawa, that monument will have to mention the NDP as an enabler.
But there could be good news here. The NDP could insist the agreement with the Liberals include no radioactive dump near waterways. Why give the Liberals all the advantages (while their opponents are in disarray) from this agreement? Pontiac’s monument may read: “The radioactive devastation and death down the entire Ottawa Valley before us, resulted from the considered decisions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his parliamentary supporter, Jagmeet Singh, plus their supporters.”?
At minimum, couldn’t the NDP insist that radioactive waste problems be researched and solved before billions more are given to SNC Lavalin and the US corporations to create more nuclear disasters-in-waiting? This would obviously be a winning bargain, one which would benefit not only the Liberals and NDP, but, most of all, the several million Canadians living downstream from the mega-dump.
