DOBBIN: NDP Needs Big Ideas to Win

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DOBBIN: NDP Needs Big Ideas to Win

[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/02/24/ND ... Big-Ideas/ ]

Here's a $40 billion one waiting to inspire the Canadian citizenry.

By Murray Dobbin, 24 Feb 2014, TheTyee.ca

Budget days should be days when Canadians are encouraged to imagine the possibilities for one of the richest countries in the world. Not the possibilities of the shopping mall or the offerings of Netflix, but the possibilities of building -- or rebuilding -- community.

At its best, that is what government is supposed to be about.

But the last eight budgets have been about smothering the national dream of prosperity and equality by systematically starving the federal government.

The outrageous tax cuts of the Harper government (and the Liberals' before that) have had one purpose: to dramatically reduce the role of government while redefining Canadian citizens increasingly as consumers.

It doesn't have to be this way. We know from years of polling and focus groups that Canadians have a strong and resilient attachment to the idea of activist government -- of doing things together. By significant majorities of two-thirds or more they even say they would pay more taxes to get the things they want and need. But only if they can get the elephant out of the room -- the elephant being the profound level of public distrust of government.

Ironically, a good deal of that distrust comes from the erosion of public services that is rooted in cutbacks caused by tax cuts.

It seems abundantly clear that no political party at the federal level has any stomach for taking on the elephant by engaging Canadians in a conversation about Big Ideas and the need to fund them. As it stands now, whichever party wins the next election will adopt the current impoverished state of our federal government as the new normal.

On February 22nd, in the aftermath of a “boring” budget Thomas Mulcair’s NDP undertook a National Day of Action – [ http://www.ndp.ca/action?e1=c2RlbGFjb0B0aGVzdGFyLmNh ] a welcome idea that’s been long in coming and has the potential over time to be a political game changer. If developed more and replicated at the riding level it could be the beginning of moving the NDP away from being simply a campaign machine to being, like its CCF predecessor, a movement party engaged in communities year round.

And yet the potential in this first experiment of engaging Canadians between elections seems to have been squandered by the focus of the day of action. How is it possible that the NDP would finally understand the importance of this kind of engagement and at the same time completely abandon any substantive ideas with which to start a conversation? The whole day of action is one huge political contradiction – engaging citizens but only after you have redefined them as consumers.

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[ http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/02/24/ND ... Big-Ideas/ ]