By this fall, Liberal and New Democrat riding activists were beginning to feel like aging singles, sullen at the endless prodding by boozy aunts at family dinners and cottage barbeques: “When? When are you lot going to finally grow up and get married, ferchrissake! You’re being bloody selfish, you know. Your sulky dithering is abandoning Canada to Harper forever!”
Paul Adams is merely the latest aunt to wag his finger at recalcitrant Canadian progressives. Like the determined yenta in a 19th-century Polish shtetl or the grim nakoudo in a small Japanese town, he pounds the appeal, the inevitability and the desperate need for a marriage between the anti-Harper tribes. Wisely, he does not so clearly tout the prospect of marital bliss, for what the Manitoba activist-turned-journalist fails to understand is that such an arranged union would fly apart at the first tough political choice.
A better approach to the creation of a common progressive front in...
Robin V. Sears was national director of the NDP for seven years and managed three national campaigns. He is a principal of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a fellow of the Broadbent Institute.
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