By Alan Wai Kiat Tang

On September 3 2011, the Ontario New Democratic Party (ONDP) rescinded the candidacy of Barry Weisleder, who had won the provincial nomination for the riding of Thornhill.

This action generated ripples of controversy amongst left-leaning New Democrats. Weisleder, a party member for over forty years and current chair of the self-styled NDP “Socialist Caucus” has a long and storied reputation as an agitator for state-socialist policies within the NDP, and has often served as a thorn in the side of the party's increasingly centrist leadership.

Re: NDP leaving ‘socialism’ behind
June 14

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/1010319--ndp-revision-rea...

I have to “admire” the honesty of the federal NDP in signaling that it is a garden variety pro-capitalist party that is on its way to becoming a full-fledged capitalist party. It is not making any pretension to being a socialist party.

It is the trade union bureaucrats in Canada who need to wake up to the ideological reality of the party that they are supporting. If the members of the unionized working-class get the opportunity to vote in a referendum on giving their resources to the NDP, would a majority of them vote “Yes” to doing so?

The federal NDP is now a government-in-waiting so it must appear “responsible” to the captains of industry and commerce and the media. Yet progressive opinion is trying to convince the wretched of the earth that the NDP is our only option for real change.

By Chris Shannon

For those who were around during the early to mid-nineties, a familiar pattern may be emerging. Ontario was then, as it is now, in an economic crisis. The province was bleeding jobs and the coffers at Queen’s Park were short over $10 billion.

Bob Rae, Ontario premier and New Democratic Party (NDP) leader at the time, decided that public sector workers were the answer to saving money. He ripped open union contracts and imposed forced unpaid days off. Union leaders were incensed. The newly termed “Rae days” marked a split between labour and the NDP. Sid Ryan, head of the Canadian Union of Public Employees - Ontario, and a perpetually failed NDP candidate for election, said he would “Never forgive Rae for what he had done.”

As usual Toronto's free cultural weekly NOW carries some articles of interest to readers of this blog. First up is a rather telling sequence of articles advocating some rethinking within the NDP.

Mainly the pieces address a problem of image rather than leadership or politics, arguing they should "spent less time at the Labour day march at the CNE and more at VFest on Centre Island" as well as oddly advising a turn to the sort of on the edge workers being organised by the IWW in NYC - "those long suffering franchisers" - this it seems will be done best by ignoring their condition as labourers and increasing the party's work on consumer rights.