It’s the start of the Labour Day weekend, so where better to start than with the brewing battle amongst NDP leadership hopefuls about the role its “affiliate groups” will play in the upcoming vote to replace Jack Layton?
For those unfamiliar with the concept, it basically means that if you are a member of a union affiliated with the NDP you have the opportunity not only to vote twice, but also to ensure that one of your votes that you cast as part of your “affiliate” is pooled with those of your brothers and sisters to always be weighted to 25% of the outcome of any ballot. To cast the second of your two votes, you don’t even have to join the party.
As George Orwell so aptly put it, “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others”. (Readers be forewarned, you will get a heavy dose of Orwell quotes throughout this exercise…)
It’s causing a bit of a rift today amongst Leadership hopefuls, with Thomas #iamnotrunning Mulcair and Pat Martin suggesting (sensibly) that the accommodation of the NDP’s elite to the detriment of its rank-and-file is a concept from a bygone era.
Party President and leadership front-runner Brian Topp, suggests otherwise. What is striking about Topp’s very public intervention in support of rules which extend extra voting privileges to union members is that it comes mere days after his insisting as President he would recuse himself from the establishment of convention and leadership rules until he ruled out a run of his own.
Today’s media splash is a pretty strange way of recusing oneself.
