“Great discussions and great debates – that’s what it’s supposed to be about”.
Advertisement
A bare-minimum 50 per cent plus one vote would have been necessary for Mulcair to stay on, let alone have anywhere near enough support for a confident mandate – a threshold some had pegged at closer to 70 per cent.
Also on the weekend, delegates repudiated the work of Leader Thomas Mulcair and voted for a leadership review. As bada as the election was for the Conservatives in losing office, it was even worse for the NDP who believed they would gain office.
Despite seeing Muclair, who plans to remain as leader until a replacement is elected, removed, Stetski had nothing but good things to say about the man who, just eight months ago, had a shot at becoming Canada’s first New Democrat prime minister. I was part of that team.
“Everything did not go the way I thought…”
“There is 500,000 people that depend on a paycheck from this industry and market access is critically important”, Mark Scholz with the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors said. Benson is confident he’ll continue to push for change until the new leader can be chosen at some point in the next 24 months.
Then came the result of confidence in Tom Mulcair’s leadership.
July 31, 2015: Elections Canada data on political donations shows the NDP collecting $4.5 million from 48,314 donors in the second quarter of the year, its best quarterly showing ever, both in terms of money and the number of donations.
“I have not made up my mind yet on this question”, he said. We have no lessons to learn from this honourable member who accomplished nothing while in government on this issue, and what the member is now asking us to do is to return to a policy of science denial and climate-change denial and do nothing for another 10 years. Delegates said much more needs to be done, but the practical details vary wildly.
While it doesn’t mean the NDP has embraced this policy, they will keep talking about it.
Pay for it all by ending fossil fuel subsidies, imposing financial transaction taxes, increasing resource royalties, hiking taxes on corporations and the wealthy, introducing a progressive carbon tax, and cutting military spending. “I share your deep disappointment in the election results”, Mulcair told the convention floor near the beginning of his speech, but proceeded to laud his party’s performance during the campaign, and double-down on many of its core policy positions that had been put forward during the election.
Premier Rachel Notley has come out swinging against the federal NDP’s consideration of the so-called “Leap Manifesto”. She asked everyone to think of the tens of thousands of Albertans thrown out of work due to the oil price plunge.
The manifesto proposes a shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, no new infrastructure projects that increase extraction of non-renewable energy sources, and an “energy democracy, ‘ where energy sources are controlled by communities instead of private companies”.
Benson had a short stop at home in Saskatoon and was expected to be in Ottawa today as parliament resumes.
“The motion that was approved at the convention was to send the Leap Manifesto to every NDP riding around the country for discussion and debate, so it was not an outright endorsement of the Leap Manifesto because elements in that suggest that we need to be moving to renewable energy right now and not necessarily supporting the oil and gas and other forms of energy, which, in my mind, we absolutely need to get to a green and renewable energy future, but it does need to transition”, Stetski said.
Advertisement
“I feel really energized”, Benson said.
