Firmino of the 909 said:
It's also not like people don't have the choice to vote NDP. Which is what they should do. When you have two parties led by racist morons it would seem that you don't vote for either of them.
The problem with the NDP is that as a political party, they really tend to get in their own way.
For example, I was reading recently that for this Federal election, the NDP is running the fewest amount of candidates they ever have in the entire party's history, because they have been so disorganized under Singh's leadership that they simply weren't ready in time when the election was called, even though they knew it was coming. By this past spring, 12 current NDP Members of Parliament had announced they would not be running for reelection. For a party that was only holding 40 seats, that's a big damn chunk of your experienced candidates that won't be running again, and that's not good...especially if you don't have anybody qualified ready to take over for them.
Look at New Brunswick for example. 80% of the NDP candidates there quit the party en masse and announced their intention to run for the Green Party. Why? Because they were tired of the lack of attention from the Federal party - and they pointed out that Jagmeet Singh hasn't even visited the province in over two years. We all know how well a candidate pretty much ignoring part of the country worked for Hillary Clinton when she did it. Now the NDP is scrambling to try and find replacement candidates to run in that province, and in a lot of cases they won't be running any candidates at all. Hard to win an election or even win the opposition when you aren't running candidates.
More than any other Canadian political party, the NDP always seems to be suffering from internal dissension and an identity crisis in their ranks. How often have we heard about the NDP grass roots or rank and file members claiming that the party has abandoned their true left wing roots, and are becoming too centrist? Rumors of demands for a leadership review seem to surface far too often within the NDP, both Federally and here on the Provincial level. From my perspective, the last time the NDP seemed truly unified was when Jack Layton was leader. As we speak there is currently a loud and disruptive group of NDP supporters who are vocally questioning Singh's leadership ability and have labelled him "The Rebel Without A Clue." It's bad enough that some people won't vote for Singh for racist reasons, it's almost worse that he is being ham-stringed and sabotaged from within his own party. In some ways it looks like the NDP grass roots are setting him up to fail. It doesn't help that the Green Party of Canada is siphoning away votes and potential candidates and weakening the support from the far left. The NDP needs all the support they can get, and I don't think the Greens are helping them any.
The other problem is Jagmeet Singh appears to be having a lot of challenges as the leader of the party. I am not criticizing him as a person at all. In fact, I think that Jagmeet Singh is the most honest and sincere of all the leaders currently running in the Federal election. I do believe he means what he says and he has the most personal integrity of all the Federal Party leaders. However, I think he has surrounded himself with some inept advisors. There has been more than one occasion where I've seen Singh caught flat footed when questioned about something in an interview or media scrum. This is not his fault. He needs experienced advisors to brief him, and I don't think he has any. The way the Christine Moore and Erin Weir scandals were handled didn't help him, nor did his very public battle with the governing New Democrats in Alberta over pipelines, or the public dispute with Saskatchewan Federal New Democrats over the handling of the aforementioned Weir scandal.
The final problem with Jagmeet Singh and the Federal NDP is that they really delayed issuing their platform and policies to the public, or were really vague and non-committal when they did. It took forever for the NDP to publicly take a position on carbon pricing, which is going to be a big issue for a lot of voters and you'd assume would be a no-brainer for the NDP. Jagmeet Singh has gone on record opposing pipelines but he has flip-flopped on Natural Gas pipelines and his literally given two different answers at different times when asked about the issue. Like I said, he needs experienced advisors.
Aside from the fact that I don't agree with some of their core policies, I could never see myself voting NDP because the party seems to be in disarray and rife with internal dissension a good deal of the time. They are poorly managed and disorganized, unclear on even their own policies. If they can't organize or govern themselves how can anybody expect them to govern the country? I don't like Andrew Scheer at all, he's managed to make himself unpalatable to both sides of the political spectrum, which is quite the accomplishment, when you think about it. But I'm not going to vote for somebody like Singh purely on the basis that he isn't Scheer.
