There are currently 6 NDP members in the house, and the NDP leader isn’t even one of those six.
If this were anything other than performative, they’d be working with the government on a law.
I really wish the Canadian 2-party duopoly was broken and a third party (ideally the NDP) had a realistic chance of winning elections. But, IMO, performative stuff designed for social media likes isn’t going to convince anybody that the NDP should be in charge of the country.
Of course it’s performative and the audience of the performance is potential NDP voters as well as LPC and CPC voters. Why do you think this performance is worse than any other campaing method? To me it’s Avi using whatever platform he’s got to beam the message we voted for, whch we think others would find compelling.
On the value of talking to people, I think building popular support for policy is very important. If you get 60-80% of Canadians to want a policy, whoever’s in power would be pressed into implementing it. I think the technocratic approach we’ve practiced over the last several decades where we outsource policy to politicians who we vote for every few years isn’t working too well. In some areas it’s even undermined democracy by creating wide disparities between what people want and what ends up being done by the elected politicians. Cough … voter reform … cough.
Focusing on laws alone did not work too well for the previous NDP. Avi’s looking to create a bottom-up approach where we get policy from people and socialize them to the ones who aren’t as engaged in order to create demand for this policy, offer ourselves as implementer of this policy. But if the demand we created is strong, it wouldn’t matter much if we’re the ones implementing it. Bottom-up democracy as opposed to top-down.
There are currently 6 NDP members in the house, and the NDP leader isn’t even one of those six.
If this were anything other than performative, they’d be working with the government on a law.
I really wish the Canadian 2-party duopoly was broken and a third party (ideally the NDP) had a realistic chance of winning elections. But, IMO, performative stuff designed for social media likes isn’t going to convince anybody that the NDP should be in charge of the country.
Of course it’s performative and the audience of the performance is potential NDP voters as well as LPC and CPC voters. Why do you think this performance is worse than any other campaing method? To me it’s Avi using whatever platform he’s got to beam the message we voted for, whch we think others would find compelling.
On the value of talking to people, I think building popular support for policy is very important. If you get 60-80% of Canadians to want a policy, whoever’s in power would be pressed into implementing it. I think the technocratic approach we’ve practiced over the last several decades where we outsource policy to politicians who we vote for every few years isn’t working too well. In some areas it’s even undermined democracy by creating wide disparities between what people want and what ends up being done by the elected politicians. Cough … voter reform … cough.
Focusing on laws alone did not work too well for the previous NDP. Avi’s looking to create a bottom-up approach where we get policy from people and socialize them to the ones who aren’t as engaged in order to create demand for this policy, offer ourselves as implementer of this policy. But if the demand we created is strong, it wouldn’t matter much if we’re the ones implementing it. Bottom-up democracy as opposed to top-down.