Singh should just send Notley a cake shaped like a middle finger

Burnaby byelection the latest gaffe of hapless leader, writes Kelly Mcparland.

Jagmeet Singh’s days as federal NDP leader have been so illstarred you almost feel sorry for the guy.

That’s not a good thing. Politicians want to look bold, decisive and successful, not confused, unlucky and accident-prone. Singh can’t get a break. The last good thing that happened to him was winning the New Democratic Party leadership race 10 months ago, and so much has gone wrong since then you have to wonder whether he wishes he’d never entered.

He’s young, articulate, and has a pleasant personality. Yet so hapless has his tenure become that the embarrassments are coming in pairs. Friday was meant to be a good day, in which he revealed he’d finally settled on a site to seek election to the House of Commons — Burnaby, B.C., where the local MP is quitting. Yet the announcement only sparked new questions. Lots of questions.

Why run in Burnaby? Why not seek a seat somewhere in Ontario where he’s better known and might stand a better chance of victory? Why choose a seat his party barely carried in the last election, and where the risks of failure would be so significant? His promise to remain as party leader if he loses was just odd: first, speculating about failure is never a good idea in politics. Second, what makes him think the party would want to keep a guy who can’t win for losing ?

But the byelection announcement wasn’t even the worst event of the day. That prize goes to an interview Alberta Premier Rachel Notley — a fellow New Democrat, by the by — gave to the Edmonton Journal’s Graham Thomson, in which she made clear she’d rather stick needles up her nose than have Singh lecturing her about pipelines from a seat next door in British Columbia.

Notley is arguably the most successful NDP politician in Canada. She’s one of only two NDP premiers and the only one to hold a majority. Does she get any help from her fellow leftwingers? Not on your life.

In choosing Burnaby as his entry point to the House of Commons, Singh might as well send Notley — and by implication Alberta — a giant cake in the form of a middle finger. He’s running as a national leader, on a platform evidently dedicated to kneecapping the economy of one the party’s leading figures. If he wanted to scare away votes in Alberta, he couldn’t do better if he tried.

Just in case this wasn’t clear enough, Singh addressed the issue of pipeline politics long enough to display a callowness of surprising proportions. Asked about Ottawa’s spat with Saudi Arabia over human rights, he suggested Canada find another source from which to buy oil.

When Notley heard this, she laughed out loud. “I am a New Democrat that comes from the part of the party that understands that you don’t bring about equality and fairness without focusing on jobs for regular working people,” she said. “To forget that and to throw them 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.”

Rather than improve the bank balance of other exporters, here’s another idea: maybe we could cut back on imports altogether and buy our oil from Alberta. Kind of like Albertans have offered, time and again. Until last year TransCanada Corp. was planning a $15.7-billion pipeline right across the country, shipping Alberta crude to New Brunswick, where the Saudi crude now lands. It would have created jobs, helped Alberta and been a godsend to New Brunswick, but when Notley went looking for support in Quebec and Ontario she got a polite but noncommittal reception, and a distinct lack of enthusiasm from Ottawa. Singh, then a leadership candidate, declared himself against it.

Singh’s latest remarks suggest he still hasn’t quite grasped the issue. He’s not against oil, it appears, as long as it comes in enormous ships floating halfway across the planet, from countries lacking Canada’s strict approach to environmental and safety regulation. He just opposes pipelines, even if it would mean oil moving eastward on a much shorter journey via a pipeline over which Canada exercises full control.

How did he reach this conclusion? Don’t ask Notley.

“It struck me that that was a thing that maybe he should have thought through before he said it,” she told Thomson.

It’s good advice. And Lord knows Singh could use some.