Friday, January 23, 2009

Ignatieff: right wing liberalism, again.

Since Ignatieff believes the Alberta tar sands are the trump card up Canada's sleeve, it is quite evident that he is willing to undo everything Green that Dion attempted to achieve. The CD Howe side of the party has taken over: we're back to Paul Martin liberalism. There is no Just Society in the cards and certainly no green society. He is also so intent on selling out the Liberal Party to buy the favours of the oiligarchy that Canada will have no role to play in the green future that isn't dictated by corporatist ideology. And now the middle class has a second do nothing option. Political opportunism is depressing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The list goes on and on for me why I will likely never ever vote Liberal again because of Ignatieff: his elitism, his tacit support for torture/imperialism, his lap-dog unconditional support for Israel's recent devastating rampage in Gaza, this position on the tar sands... the list goes on. Now he has even reversed his once principled stand he took against what he emphatically refereed to as "Israel's war crimes in Lebanon". Not that having an opinion either way on this issue is necessarily a bad thing, everyone's entitled to their opinions, and this is perhaps the most sensitive and divisive issue in terms of world issues in general, but an uncritical, unprincipled support of anything merely to garner votes is spineless pandering.

The Count is all over the map and flip-flops on almost all of his previous positions like some sort of ideological weather vane. In his moving to the right, just to appease ideologues like Warren Kinsella et al, he is alienating many truly progressive minded people who want and demand real change from the status quo.

I am not the only one who misses the old Liberal party of King, Pearson and Trudeau that has been hijacked by the corporate elite and special interests, and has all but abandoned the consumer and worker (ie, the "middle class") and seems bent on fleecing public assets and selling Canada by the pound to the global oligarchs. Maybe Count Ignatieff could well turn out to be the best friend the NDP ever had.

Anonymous said...

refereed = referred

Jerry Prager said...

I don't think Warren Kinsella is an ideologue myself, to me he is an uber-partisan. It's not an idea or a series of ideas that he defends so much as it is the Liberal Party itself.To him the continuum appears to be the word Liberal, not the idea liberal. The idea 'liberal' is anti-thetical to corporatism, the party Liberal, devalues liberalism in order to achieve power. Which is what Ignatieff appears to be doing. I almost thought I might 'come in from the cold' and vote Liberal, but I suspect I'll simply do what I've almost always done, use my vote as a protest. Voting Green will be a waste of my vote, but at least I derive an extraordinary amount of joy from the act of voting, even if I'm seldom happy with election results.