New Democrats captive to special interests

Singh has alienated the type of people the party supposedly champions

Since I’ve always been a bit of a commie at heart it’s somewhat odd to find the federal NDP leader so darn infuriating.

Jagmeet Singh is blithely taking his party down the path marked ‘Political Oblivion’ with this earnest and endless zest to latch onto whatever the special cause of the day happens to be.

Included in this relentless blather is urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to scrap any and all expansion plans for the now infamous Trans Mountain pipeline project, which would carry more Alberta crude to the West Coast and thereby provide some breathing room from the financial woes in being tied exclusively to the United States.

Now I’ll take the small hop — rather than any huge leap — in assuming Singh isn’t much of a fan of that current brazen bully boy president in the White House. So why jump aboard the “no-pipeline express” that leads to only one destination, the further enrichment of our southern cousins to the detriment of every level of Canadian society?

Or maybe Singh simply wants to drive a stake through the entire energy industry. Heck, why not. Then deep-six those Ontario auto plants: if the environment is your sacred mission then surely exhaust fumes are in the crosshairs.

The chances of that happening are called Slim and he was last seen in Vegas, wagering an across the board accumulator on any Canadian team winning the Stanley Cup in this fast-receding decade.

What’s infuriating about Singh, who is rapidly becoming the figurehead for a whole industry of special interest groups and aggressively aggrieved minorities, is that the party he leads should actually be representing ordinary working women and men in this country.

But it no longer does, which is why polls show support for the federal NDP dropping like the proverbial stone alongside a dramatic decline in proceeds from party fundraising. Throw in bitter rows with fellow NDPers in both Alberta and Saskatchewan and that’s a witches’ brew foretelling future electoral disaster.

The current pipeline fiasco is a perfect case in point. Granted Singh is hoping to finally get a seat in the House of Commons via a byelection in Surrey, B.C., so in that locale, such opposition to the project is more or less required.

Yet, who are the people involved in constructing such a pipeline and who are those folk working hard in extracting oil in the first place or then shipping it from West Coast terminals?

Yes, they would be those regular Joes and Janes who should be the lifeblood of this country’s New Democratic Party.

The problem with superglueing your party to minority issues is those subsequent minority votes don’t get you near a seat at the table of power, or in keeping it if chance finds a way in the first place.

Premier Rachel Notley learned that the hard way and, while it’s likely too late to stave off electoral defeat next spring, she’s at least challenging her federal NDP buddies on the direction they’re taking the party.

After Singh bizarrely wondered out loud where we might get future oil to supplant any curtailing of supplies from the Saudis following a diplomatic spat with those Sheiks of enlightenment, Notley was withering in her summation; psst Jagmeet, it could have come from the Energy East pipeline project that was nixed, much to your delight.

“To throw workers under the bus as collateral damage in pursuit of some other high-level policy objective is a recipe for failure, and it’s also very elitist,” was how Alberta’s premier put it.

Strange: my dad, a coal miner for 49 years and a socialist to his very core, might have said the same. Well, perhaps a tad more bluntly.