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!

Elizabeth May

Some interesting bits from the Macleans write-up include her consulting psychics to determine weather conditions, her use of crystals and visualization ("I used to put Premier Vander Zalm in a love light"), and her comment "I represented all the poisoned innocents of the world".

More good sense from David Chernushenko:

May's constant criticism of Harper is "a blind spot," says Chernushenko, one that's problematic for the party in Alberta where polls show Greens running second to the Conservatives. "When you demonize Harper you demonize everyone who voted for him. But really, in what way is Harper more evil than the Liberals, who promised they'd do something on the environment and climate change for 12 years and didn't, than someone who says, 'I don't believe the science and it's not worth doing' and then says 'I kind of believe the science and we're going to do something'?

One has to keep in mind here that May combines her antagonism for Harper with praise for Dion.

Thomas Goodman, a Winnipeg lawyer who supported May's leadership bid, left the party in November after he and May disagreed over direction. He recommended a moderate course that excluded extremists whom he found "dangerous"; she endorsed a big-tent approach. May consulted him over a press release advocating that every Canadian worker should be given four weeks' paid holiday; it said that currently, Canadian workers were being treated like serfs in the Middle Ages. "I wasn't sure it was constitutional, in that paid holidays are provincially regulated," Goodman says. He also found the language inappropriate. "To call workers of Canada serfs suggests employers are feudal lords." When he told May so, he says he received flippant reply: "I think Elizabeth's a good person, a sharp person, a wonderful orator, but she's politically naive."

If Chernushenko were Green party leader right now, I'd be seriously interested in joining the federal Green Party. But that didn't happen and apparently won't happen. "In July, Chernushenko announced he was leaving, frustrated his talents weren't being used fully. ... Chernushenko says he tried to work with May but found it difficult."