Monday, May 24, 2010

Can Stephen Lewis be recruited to lead in Ottawa?

So we learn that the rumours are true. Jean Chretien and Ed Broadbent, at least, are talking about the need to bridge the flailing Liberal and the fledgling NDP forces in Ottawa. Whether or not such talks would have as their goal the union of the two parties, it would seem logical that union would be a reasonable step.
The Liberal Party appears rudderless, virtually engine-less, map-less and so amorphous as to be, on its own, dysfunctional. The NDP, while somewhat more coherent, struggles to catch the imagination of the country.
In the lifetime of the current generation of political leaders, there is little prospect that either party can or will lead the government.
And, crazily, Harper is not providing much that Canadians can take pride in, by way of a vision of the country. His support for the corporate interests is virulent, constant and unbalanced.
It was in 1991, while speaking to a national reporter, that I asked the question, "When are the NDP and the Liberals going to join forces and become one party?" to which my reporter friend replied, from what I considered an inside perch, "Never! That is not going to happen ever!"
Nineteen years later, it appears that something of that magnitude may be necessary to restore the political balance in the country.
And, winning back support from voters in Quebec would be at the top of a list of priorities for the leadership of such a new political party.
Can Stephen Lewis, or someone of his stature, be recruited to lead such a party?
The country cannot wait much longer to end the vaccuum that exists in the leadership of this country and each of us has a responsibility to speak out for solutions, for action and for leadership. These are hardly simple, and non-challenging times in the world of national and geo-politics.

1 Comments:

At February 15, 2014 at 6:08 AM , Blogger acorncentreblog.com said...

Stephen Lewis himself has answered this question in a television interview with CBC's Peter Mansbridge. He did not consider himself a candidate for leader of the NDP because he does not speak French, a qualification for the position in Lewis' mind and most others.

 

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