Moson Breweries executives will tell you that they merged with Coors, and old Progressive Conservatives like Peter Mackay will tell you that the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada merged with the Reform Party of Canada. Sometimes, a merger is a pure thing, a marriage, and a new thing with a new name is created. Other times, however, what you get is one thing swallowing up another thing entirely. In the words of the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, speaking after the ‘merger’ of the PCPC and the RPC, that instead of the union of two families, a merger can produce “the death of a family.”
Political parties are binary things. They thrive on unity, and their leaders enjoy tremendous power. Unlike companies which have directors, shareholders, auditors, and other stakeholders who balance out the power of the CEO, Canadian political parties broadly speaking have only one authority, its leader. Even in situations where the leader no longer enjoys the support of a majority of caucus or the party’s table officers, we’ve seen cases where they have stuck around for years, bending silly constitutional rules about how often leadership reviews must be held, etc. The leader of a party, in my view, represents a constituency of one, whereas companies by comparison are more widely held.
A political merger, therefore, is completely impossible. Just as Reform acquired the Progressive Conservatives in its ‘merger,’ so would the Liberals acquire the NDP in a similar ‘merger.’ Liberals are fooling themselves with silly questions about common culture when determining whether a merger is appropriate. A better question to ask would be, “as a Liberal, do you think we should eat the NDP, their caucus, their national organization, their bank account, and run in the next election with no serious opponents on the left?”
We should also discard the myth that the acquisition of the NDP by the Liberals is something that is only considered since May 2nd’s poor election result. In one way or another, the Liberal Party of Canada has always sought to acquire parties to it’s left. Martin lured Layton into a loose agreement on confidence issues. Chretien always favoured a merger. Trudeau offered cabinet positions to Mr. Broadbent and a few others to show support for the National Energy program. Even Mackenzie King extolled the idea of “no enemies on the left.” The “merger,” as so many political commenters call it, is not a product of recent defeats. It is a grand idea and part of almost a century of Liberal strategy, you know, back from when we used to win. Something about a battle on two fronts, whatnot.
Do not doubt either that the Big Red Machine would eat Team Orange for breakfast in a leadership contest. The vast majority of their constituency in Eastern Quebec is so shy of organizing that Thomas Mulcair has asked his party to delay their next leadership vote. I am supremely confident that a Domenic Leblanc or a Justin Trudau could deliver more leadership votes than a Peter Julian or a Brian Topp, making the leader of this new Liberal Democratic adventure a Liberal. What’s that you said? But they have more seats? Well, my friend, ask yourself, are you in Australia? Do the political parties in your country have intra-parliamentary leadership selection processes? No? Very well then. let us not discuss this silly irrelevant nonsense of seat counts any more.
As for another argument which completely fails to miss the point, I feel like Jamey Heath should have dispelled any notion that the LPC and the NDP have exclusive cultures. In his recent column he notes that both M. Mulcair and Mr. Rae are party switchers who have either in the past or future been accepted as legitimate candidates for the leaderships of their respective parties. For those just tuning in, Rae was the NDP premier of Ontario, and Mulcair was a minister in the Charest Liberal government. For a third, I’m willing to tell you all that my first day in politics was on the Jamey Heath Ottawa-Centre NDP campaign in 1997. That’s right, at the ripe age of 13, I was an Orange envelope licker. There was a girl. Long story. All jokes aside though, both parties seem tremendously accepting of each others members, so what is this incompatible culture so many are parroting? Why doesn’t it preclude people like Rae and Mulcair? And why does culture matter so much when what we are really discussing is the Liberal Party eating M. Mulcair and all his friends?
Further on this point of culture, political parties are supposed to be broad coalitions representing a diversity of viewpoints and interests. It is actually a good thing, therefore, to include more people in your political party, even if you disagree with them. Chroniclers of the LPC often have noted the conflict between the “Red Tory” or “Business Liberal,” the right wing of the LPC and its left wing. Why then, can we not include in our left wing a large group of people (talking about the NDP now) who believe in the virtue of government, that governments exist to provide justice, that governments should fight poverty, that Canada should be one country, and that it should have two official languages? Because they’re “socialists?” Please. I’ve heard fifty people say our “cultures” are too different. I’ve heard zero people articulate why.
My position is simple. We should merge as soon as possible, yesterday in fact. We should merge quickly, and the sole condition of that merger should be that after the merger is completed, an open leadership contest must be held. If we do that (which you think would be easy, since neither party actually has a leader), Then we can seal the fate of the NDP
We should acquire them. We should acquire them now, and besides your pride that keeps you from sitting down with some people you don’t like, give me a reason why we shouldn’t, please.
If we don’t, well, you know what happens then.
