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Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Take back the night, Vancouver!


WEEKEND ROUNDUP

The big decisions

Three days of punditry on remaking the NDP, resisting the goons of Vancouver, the future of Canada Post and the CBC, and, uh, a potentially deadly industry that employs all of 200 people part-time.

The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert post-mortems a weekend of touchy debates at the NDP convention in Vancouver over topics like ruling out cooperation with the Liberals (defeated) and eliminating the word “socialism” from the party constitution’s preamble (also defeated). The Dippers don’t need to figure all this out immediately, says Hébert. But keeping Quebec on board is going to be a full-time job. “Should the NDP turn out to not to have the stomach to go the extra miles to recast itself as a competitive contender for federal power,” she warns, “it will quickly lose the allegiance of its more recent fellow travellers.” After all, as Hébert notes, there were more Quebec delegates at the recent Conservative convention than there were at the New Democrats’.

Mark Milke, writing in the Calgary Herald, doesn’t see how the NDP can continue to appease Quebec nationalists — on language laws, on the Clarity Act, on the province’s over-representation in the House of Commons — without greatly offending supporters and potential supporters in other provinces. “It would be amusing to watch the NDP leader defend his call for more Quebec seats to voters in under-represented British Columbia or in southern Ontario,” he suggests. (Well, people in southern Ontario don’t care about such things. But B.C., we agree, would be highly amusing to watch.)

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