Getting there in one piece

One of the reasons we wanted to return to Canada was to be as politically active as I think every citizen ought to be. We haven't cornered the market on morals or ideas, but our ideas and our sense of what is just and right should be part of the political conversation. When we live in the United States we have to be pretty mute since we are not citizens.

The political party we align with, the New Democrats, was the government here in Nova Scotia when we got back to the province last year. And of course it promptly got walloped in an election about a year ago. The premier, who was also leader of the NDP, was defeated in his riding and resigned hi leadership.

Now we are starting to move toward a campaign to select a new party leader. The actual electoral convention won't happen until 2016, but folks interested in offering for the job are already starting to position themselves. This is right and proper: it's a big challenge and should not--cannot--be taken up on a whim.

So what I've been thinking about is how potential candidates should position themselves. The temptation must be to find the most inclusive and least offensive descriptors ("renewed leadership", "put the province on the right track", "end inefficiencies") so that people can gather under your banner even if they might not agree with every single thing you have ever said or thought.

The problem is, this seems to be what the NDP government did as it crashed and burned after only one term. There are some core principles of the NDP, and the government seemed unable either to articulate them or show how their actions harmonized with those principles; and so a lot of folks who might otherwise be assumed to support or at least be open to the NDP sat on their hands or voted elsewhere. (There were other factors at play, of course, including an incessant megaphone of negativity by the corporate media against the "socialist" government.)

It's a standard trope: you have to make compromises to get ahead in the world, and you can end up getting to, or near to, where you wanted to go having abandoned as ballast all the things you once stood for and worked for. And then you have to wonder, was the trip worth it?

Tomorrow night I go to hear one potential candidate, and then I meet with another on Sunday. There is a third who is testing the waters, and I bet there will be a couple more candidates who appear once the rules of the campaign are sorted out. I hope every single one of them stands up loudly and proudly for the party's core principles:

I'll revisit the campaign in future posts, to let y'all know what I'm seeing.