Die Politik einiger NDP-Spitzenkandidaten sei „nicht besonders tragfähig“, sagt McPherson, die bestreitet, dass sie eine zentristische Kampagne führt

>Introduce a **National Renters’ Bill of Rights** to cap annual rent increases, stop unfair evictions, and guarantee fair leases, while ensuring provinces that undermine tenant protections cannot access new federal housing funds.

This is neat. I am almost certain they slightly changed her campaign policies. Previously, her platform mentioned National rent controls, but there is no explicit mention of that policy there anymore. I had previously criticized the NDP and McPherson for running on this, so it’s nice to see them take a slightly different approach.

I think this is an interesting idea because it can provide some background for making some housing policies a human right, likely under section 7. In other words, it appears her campaign wants to argue housing is a Charter right. However, the courts have not recognized any sort of obligation from the government to provide economic/positive rights, but things might change when governments obligate themselves (i.e., it’s harder to pull away a service someone needs for the protection of and their security of the person after the government has obligated themselves to providing whatever necessary service). That being said, I still don’t know if this works. I don’t know if the federal government can impose an obligation through the Charter onto provinces with legislation that is otherwise out of their jurisdiction. I don’t think this has been tried yet.

Nevertheless, it’s 1000x better than Lewis saying he will do it by implementing backstop legislation because it sounds like he just repeated the instrument used in the Carbon Pricing legislation but doesn’t understand how POGG or its national concern doctrine works. I have much more hope for McPherson should she somehow pull this off.

>“I think some of the proposals that have been brought forward are not terribly viable,” she said in a Feb. 27 interview with The Hill Times. “I also feel like there is some lack of understanding on how Parliament works, on how legislation works, you know, the way that you get things done within Parliament.” 

Yes, she is correct. However, I’m thinking it doesn’t look like the membership is going to listen to her. There are some massive problems with Lewis that repeatedly fall on deaf ears.

* Being against oil and gas development and new pipelines when it requires us to continue our export dependence to the US is problematic and pretty easy to argue against.
* Being anti-military in the current geopolitical context is an almost impossible sell with a belligerent US and angry allies who expect us to start pulling our weight, especially with the US pulling back.
* Welfare state expansion is typically not popular during times of substantial economic uncertainty (don’t use the great depression and WWII as an example because there was no welfare state during those periods in time; think late 70s, and the 80s and 90s with inflation/OPEC and budget crises).
* There are numerous proposals that amount to unilateral expansion of social programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Unless provinces want a program and are asking the federal government for money, it’s really hard to get them to cooperate on new programs. Due to past retrenchment from previous federal governments in areas of health and social transfers, provinces are rightfully hesitant to expand social services when a federal government runs on greater funding for new or existing services. Trying to leverage existing funds for programs in provincial jurisdiction without citizen demand will only cause fights with provinces, which the feds are almost certain to lose.
* People won’t trust political rookies to implement public options when they’ve never ran a business anywhere near the size of a national company or had a seat in the house of commons. You have to prove you can manage and understand the economy before you try to reshape it.

>“And the gigantic momentum—the hundreds of people we’ve had at events, the fundraising we’ve had, smashing all previous NDP leadership fundraising records, and signing up new members in 338 of 343 ridings—that’s showing that these ideas are resonating. And our momentum is proof that ideas and solutions are how we win.”

The Lewis campaign is deluding themselves with these fundraising numbers because they aren’t that good. They’ve been massively out-fundraised by the two major parties. At the end of the day, Lewis thinks he can win, but those fundraising numbers don’t even suggest he has the party back to official status yet; if there’s one thing that is certain, those fundraising numbers don’t suggest he has a winning campaign in a Canadian election. Lewis is not a very realistic person, which doesn’t surprise me given how idealistic his platform is.

Colour me surprised that the NDP leadership race is devolving into the modernist/socially democratic camp vs the democratic socialist one. I was a part of the NDP back in the Layton days and I distinctly remember this debate during the Topp vs Mulcair leadership debates.

Don’t focus on ideologies; focus on ideas. A good idea from either camp of the NDP will go further without infighting.

Given the way elections go, most NDP policies aren’t terribly viable.

Which isn’t to say that some of them aren’t good and are viable, but generally speaking, the NDP policy agenda has been and has remained DOA at the federal level.

If this wasn’t the case, the NDP would have formed government by now.

That being said, some great NDP policy positions have been implemented and I think that that is why the NDP are of great value to Canadian politics and have improve our country a lot over the years.

“I’m not running a centrist campaign – I just have the backing of the same segment of the party that thought Singh was on the right track; have shown no intention of pushing hard on real worker’s issues as top priority; am an NDP’er that still thinks power has eluded us because we’re not enough like the LPC; and (by her quote) believe how things currently get done in Parliament isn’t part of the problem at all.”

Yikes. 

I’m not saying her opponents have the clearly superior policy plan, and they certainly need better messaging/optics, but McPherson is outing herself as the “we’ve tried doing nothing and we’re all out of ideas” candidate.