In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the NDP leader’s options now that the Confidence and Supply Agreement has been “ripped up”:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announces the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement.
Screencap from the NDP official video via The Line,
… I’m starting to consider the possibility that Jagmeet Singh is bad at politics.
I mean, think about this.
We at The Line have long pointed out that CASA was a bad deal for the NDP. It earned the party only a few piecemeal spending concessions like two-treatment Pharmacare and a half-baked dental program. It’s the Liberals who will, and have, taken full credit for both.
Meanwhile, Singh has lost all credibility as a government critic. What blows he can level at the Liberals are fatally undermined by the fact that he’s supported them for years. If the Liberals are complacent in enabling corporate greed, then Singh is demonstrably an enabler of a government that is “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interest to fight for people”?
I realize that nobody in Liberal-land is going to take this advice seriously, but I’m going to offer it anyway. On its current trajectory, Canada is heading toward a two-party system. Either the Liberals are going to eat the NDP, or the NDP is going to eat the Liberals. Until Wednesday, I put my money on the latter. Now, I’m not so sure.
If the Liberals maintain any existential instinct at all, they’d call Singh’s bluff. Drop the writ on a party that’s demonstrably unprepared to fight the battle it’s proclaimed. Eat the left, and survive to fight on another day. The meal is right there for the taking.
Singh’s big announcement about “ripping up” CASA — meep meep — gains him absolutely nothing. What additional leverage can he expect to acquire in a post-CASA parliament that he didn’t already possess?
Perhaps Wednesday’s announcement was merely a gambit to soothe internal problems, or distance himself from the Liberals. Okay, fine. This might be a viable strategy if it buys Singh a few months to trash Trudeau and raise funds off the effort while frantically trying to wash off the stinky stain of hypocrisy.
But what’s going to happen when the Liberals face their next confidence motion, presumably as soon as the Conservatives can arrange one? What happens at the next one, and the next one after that?
What credibility can Singh possibly hope to maintain if he votes for the Liberals, again? How in the world is the NDP seriously going to claim to have ripped up CASA while effectively acting as if it is in a CASA? The NDP cannot credibly distance itself from the sitting government while spending the next year propping up said government again and again and again in successive confidence motions. Especially after such a brazen display of pulling out of the deal.
No. They’re going to have to pull the trigger, and soon. Obviously. Clearly.
Singh sees this.
Right?
