Let’s see. You are a member of the NDP’s national organizing committee. Your party has just been creamed in a national election, reduced in the House of Commons to seven members out of 343 members. In fact, for the purposes of parliamentary proceedings, you’re not even a ‘recognized party’ any more.
Your last leader lost his seat (if not his pension) and has gone home to BC where Conservatives hope he will reincarnate himself as an advisor to BC’s NDP government…
And here you are the party's organizing committee, and today is the day you start looking for a new leader for a party that can't afford wages or rent, and above all can't repay the bank loan it took to run the election you just lost.
So, how to rebuild the party’s broad appeal?
Hmm.
"Well, why don’t we look at the Democrats in the US, and do what they do?"
"Great idea, let’s do that."
The conversation had to be something like that.
For, reproduced below is what the committee has come up with
Unbelievable.
The party that makes even the US Democrats look like winners, starts by asking its leadership candidates not for the backing of a representative sample of Canadians, but to set limits on who can get involved.
For example, the committee wants half the people signing a leadership candidate's paper to be women or sexual minorities. Or as they put it, 'people who don't identify as a CIS man.'
You're CIS by the way, if you identify as male or female, according to the sexual apparatus you were issued at birth. You can still be gay, but 50% CIS is enough, anyway. Heaven forbid the leadership should go to successful CIS men like Jack Layton or Tom Mulcair. Or the late Ed Broadbent.
(No point in going back any further. The very CIS Tommy Douglas, also a Baptist minister, would have wanted no part of today's NDP.)
Taking it one step further, the committee wants 20 percent of the signatures to come from people who want to get ahead on the basis of their claim against society.
That would be the 'equity-seeking' people they speak of, the ones who get an advantage when the job ad, usually at some government or academic venue, says something to the effect that 'white men need not apply.' As with this recent example (above,) from my friend and erstwhile colleague, Jen Hodgson.
This is dreadfully sad. It's just the reverse of the equally wrong policy of choosing people only because they're white, which as we all know, was once commonplace.
This is not better and frankly, if the whole world knows you got your job after qualified white people were excluded from consideration, it's a somewhat diminished prize for somebody of colour who actually might have won in an unrestricted competition, as did... well, Jagmeet Singh.
Changing the subject then, the NDP leadership, whatever's left of it, should review the tapes of Prime Minister Mark Carney delivering remarks at the Hamilton steel mill recently. They should ask themselves whether this is really such a great idea. Those are the kind of people who voted for Pierre Poilievre in large numbers in April.
In fact, I am inclined to think the NDP has been infiltrated by undercover conservatives, tasked in one last act of spite to make mischief. And where better to start than in helping the party pick a leader who's a caricature of a wokester from central casting?
Go for it. Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your last seven seats.