Letters by NDP proponents miss the mark
Two letters in the Sept. 18 edition of the Citizen ought to be of special interest to your readers, but they should not go unchallenged.
The first is by Victoria Sundberg Stewart who claimed that the NDP, in some exclusive way, represents the conscience of the nation. Ms. Stewart needs to consult history. It was John D. Diefenbaker, a conservative P.M., who appointed the first female cabinet minister, drafted and passed the Canadian Bill of Rights, first granted aboriginals and Inuit the vote, stood tall against South African apartheid to get South Africa removed from the Commonwealth and appointed the first aboriginal member of the Senate. I am confused then, as to what she is talking about. Does this seem to her like a lack of conscience?
Decades before him, Sir Wilfred Laurier, a Liberal P.M., opened immigration, promoted “conciliation” defined the term “Sunny Ways” (not J.T. who is too unoriginal to have come up with it) brought Francophones and Anglophones closer together by being our first Francophone P.M. and so on and so on…
Once again, like a previous letter writer I have commented on, she suggests you shouldn’t publish letters she finds objectionable. Is this the “conscience” of an NDPer talking, the party that won’t allow white male candidates to run and seems to want to silence those who disagree with them?
The second letter by Ender McDuff astonishes me. Has Mr. McDuff not noticed that support for the NDP is plummeting? Why would that be? Could it be that they are no longer the party of the working person, but have become, like the U.S. Democrats, the party of far left radicalism? Canada now has three leftist parties, the Greens, Liberals (no longer centrist) and the NDP with their emphasis on far left ideology. It shouldn’t be surprising that they have lost some support.
The concept that the NDP somehow have a lock on solutions leading to the end of opioid use is a false one. Homelessness, the decline of the family and other attendant issues are a result of social breakdown, not political deadlock. The solution hardly lies exclusively in the policies of the NDP who are not the exclusive proponents of love or compassion.
We are not caught in a cycle of Liberal-Conservative disfunction. To date people just do not trust the NDP or other smaller parties to provide good government. It’s as simple as that. They are looking for stable government, not a utopia that can’t easily be achieved. Although they care about the issues Mr. McDuff mentions their concerns are more immediate and they want real solutions.
It is interesting that McDuff mentions his age. It reminds me of that old saying “If you’re not a socialist at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no head.” Something to think about.
Perry Foster
Duncan