Correcting the many faults of the NDP.

Layton & Co. will be getting lots of advice from armchair political strategists over the next few months. An early offering from the Globe's Jeffrey Simpson upbraids the NDP's for a supposed preoccupation with spreading the wealth rather than creating it, and its disdain for Big Business:

The federal NDP has always been better at talking about redistributing wealth than creating it. Mostly, the federal NDP sees job-creation coming from subsidies. It longs for some kind of industrial strategy, deeply dislikes free-trade agreements, and harbors a suspicion of corporate size. Very few of its MPs have ever been prominent in the private sector.

Corner stores, family farms, co-ops and small businesses are fine, but the federal party has this thing about corporate size. Big oil. Big banks. Big telcos. Big agribusiness. Big mining. Corporate big is bad; labour big is good.

 
NDP Leader Jack Layton at last weekend's annual party policy convention in Vancouver. (CP) 

At least under Layton, each election platform has showcased entrepreneurial and job-creation schemes based on green tech - a multi-trillion dollar industry this century - medical research, manufacturing prowess and more exporting initiatives, especially beyond the tried-and-true U.S. market.

As to subsdizing such businesses, well, that's how both Harper and Obama have been trying to get the ethanoll business off the ground - a dubious effort, that, given how it takes more energy to produce most forms of ethanol than it gives off, a diverts corn production from food and livestock feed, driving up food costs. (Corn derivatives are in everything.)

Conservatives scorn national industrial policies. Yet every nation has one. It's just not labelled as such. When a non-French company tied to take over French drug giant Sanofi, it arranged for a reverse takeover with the French managers and investors coming out on top. Phamaceutical research is, for the French, a keystone industry with indelible links to a network of French universities. So, was that protectionism (Simpson) or sound industrial policy.

There's only one reason Canada has one of the world's few centres of excellence in aerospace, in Montreal. And that's lavish federal and provincial subsidies to Bombardier, world leader in commuter aircraft, and Pratt & Whitney, a rare U.S. branch plant that actually makes things (jet engines) in the Great White North. Each of those firms, in turn, relies on scores of suppliers, many of which have growun up around their operations in Montreal and, in Bombardier's case, Downsview and Thunder Bay as well.

The U.S. Congress subsidizes the military-industrial complex and the oil industry, and I'd be surprised if there's single Fortune 500 company that didn't receive tax breaks, grants or subsidies from federal, state and local governments last year. Boeing is America's biggest single exporter; Illinois, Kansas and Nebraska are grain exporters to the world. Each is subsidized to the hilt by Uncle Sam - as Airbus incessantly complains about, even after the corporate welfare it receives from Paris and Berlin is drawn to its attention.

These folks who favour letting the private sector go it alone have my assent. Gosh, I'd love to see GE, which paid not a dime in taxes on its U.S. operations last year, so adept was this colossus at manipulating the tax code, truly go it alone. Especially since that's what so many of us think everyday people who've fallen on hard times believe they should do. Pull themselves up by their bootstraps!

Very few Tory MPs have been prominent in the private sector, either. The closest the PM himself came was heading up a far-far-right pro-business think tank. As for disdain with Big Business, I'm a fan of honest, strategically gift and community minded big businesses. And rumour has it there are a few out there. But Enron, Exxon, WorldCom, Bank of America, Citigroup, Livent, the oligopoly of Canada's Big Five banks whose proliferating fees will soon have them charging admission to their branches...well, I think suspicion of the big things - including Big Labour - comes naturally to most of us. (Big Labour is by now an oxymoron, of course, since union membership in Canada's workforce is down to 30% and in the U.S. it's a mere 12%.)

The story I want to read is how Canadian progressives - 60% of the electorate - for the first time in history decided to put all their chips on the NDP, relegating the Grits and BQ to observer status. That would take some legwork, a lot of interviews with riding presidents and kids who were drawn into putting up NDP lawn signs. With scant help from Big Labour, ever since Buzz Hargrove counseled his members to vote strategically for the Grits. (A gambit that failed, of course, to the Tories' benefit.)

Instead of that story about how Canadian politics works I'm to endure a few months of gratuitous advice for the NDP and the Tories as well, I'm sure. Sound and fury signifying not much.

   

Comments

[Wascally Wabbit]

LOL David!

[Rob]

The NDP is a government in waiting.......
Waiting to take the working person's money, that is.

[André C.]

With respect, David, I am not an economist, but it seems to me that classifying party policies as either pro-wealth distribution or pro-wealth creation is a false start. Common sense tells me that if you put a million dollars in the pocket of one person that money is not as likely to generate as much consumption as if it had been distributed to 10 people.

An economy has two interdependent components: production AND consumption. They go together like love and marriage. You can't have just one.....

[Darwin O'Connor]

Many Canadian's already supported the NDP's ideas, but the voted for the Liberals because they assumed the NDP couldn't win. When the NDP surged in Quebec that assumption was no longer valid, so they switched.

I suspect more could switch as the less politically aware figure out what is going on and progressive groups who once supported the Liberals because they could win (and where frequently betrayed by the Liberals) start supporting the NDP.

[Rob]

There are too many faults with the NDP to correct them. They are a scary bunch. The NDP would decimate the econmy. The NDP would end up taxing working people a lot more than today. Have you ever seen a commmand economy? It does not work that well; that is, it takes money and goods out of the hands of people.
It's all about control for the NDP. Controlling the economy and ultimately the people.
The Capitalist System has provided more food, lodging, wealth and health care that world has ever known. Capitalism is the reason so many people live on this planet and have a great life on this planet.
Also, there are many Liberals who voted Liberal in the last election that are NOT progressives. To say that this 60% of the electorate are all progressives, is I believe, not a statement of the truth. These Liberrals are centrist, bsuiness friendly and NOT progressives.
SO....if the Liberals went away then the Conservatives would get a lot more than the 40% of the vote obtained in the last election.

[Darwin O'Connor]

"The Capitalist System has provided more food, lodging, wealth and health care that world has ever known."

The Capitalist System has failed to provide health care in the United States and doesn't provide it in Canada.

Wealth should not be an end in itself.

It has provided food and lodging in excess, but fails to account for the environmental and health problems they cause.

"Capitalism is the reason so many people live on this planet and have a great life on this planet."

It is also the reason so many more people have a terrible life of this planet. We have enough resources to bring people in the 3rd world (and the 1st) out of poverty. It is Capitalism that prevents it from happening.

[Rob]

Darwin, there is not a better system that would provide more goods (food, lodging, etc.) for more people than Capitalism.
Look at the Socialist systems, crack a history book. Lets' convert over to Socialism world wide and see how that works out!
History tells us it would be not too kind to those very people you claim to want to help.
Look at the countries that have embraced Capitalism (from a Socialist system). The people are much, much better off. And people have a means to improve their lot in life. As they say in Cuba: We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.
Capitalism creates the wealth. That is the key , that is the "thing". Capitalism creates the wealth.

[Darwin O'Connor]

The so call Communist countries where Communist/Socialist in name only. In fact they where the antithesis of Socialist. Without real democracy it can not be Socialist by definition.

Aren't the people of Russia worse off since embracing Capitalism?