Jack Layton: odd man out

Dear voter:

Do you take anti-corporate rhetoric straight up and strident, undiluted by nuance, and with a chaser of 200 proof anti-Americanism? Is federal NDP leader Jack Layton too reserved in taking the battle to Harper for your taste?

Let me introduce federal Green leader Elizabeth May!

Compare this video of Elizabeth May on North American integration to Jack Layton.

From another clip I found of Elizabeth May:

Stephen Harper comes from a culture ... that Maude Barlow has documented meticuously in Too Close for Comfort. Read Too Close for Comfort and [you won't be able to] sleep at night.... the Alliance Conservative Republican Party of Canada is a horse of another colour...

The fact that Stephane Dion and Elizabeth "read Barlow for the truth" May are cutting deals says a lot about their, shall we say, ideological flexibility. Dion apparently has no reservations about a rapprochement with someone whose left wing rhetoric is so over the top in its belligerence it appears that even Jack Layton would be uncomfortable with it. May, in turn, is apparently more interested in working with a party that could form the government than "the conscience of Parliament" despite the fact that the SPP was a Liberal party initiative! On CBC Radio last August former Liberal Finance Minister, Foreign Affairs Minister, and Deputy Prime Minister John Manley observed that "[t]he Canadian left is very closely in sync with the American right on trade issues, which is to hunker down and keep everyone else out, and ultimately that will impoverish us all." Manley later showed more passion that perhaps I've ever seen him show when he slapped down Gordon Laxer (who serves the Albertans who pay his U of A salary by calling for a new NEP) observing:

Sovereignty is something that you have to exercise in a mature fashion. ... We compromised our sovereignty when we signed the Kyoto Accord, the Geneva Convention, the Vienna Convention. You want a model of sovereignty? The most sovereign nation on the earth today in my opinion is North Korea. They don't do what anybody tells them to do. Their people may be starving, they may be outcasts in the international community, but by God they're sovereign!