Too soon for a movie about Jack Layton?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 9:13 AM - 0 Comments

There is nothing else on television that compares with politics. Nothing in sports or entertainment comes near to matching the humanity, ego, power, celebration and conflict of it. As drama, it is perfect. Not only because there is so much at stake for society, but because there is so much at stake for the principal participants. How we govern ourselves is both our most fundamental construct and our greatest spectacle.

The latest attempt to make a film of this real show is Jack, a fine rendering of Jack Layton’s life, love, last campaign and final days. As much as can be conveyed in 88 minutes about a life spent practicing politics is neatly laid out. Rick Roberts does an admirable and impressive job in the title role, particularly in his grasp of Mr. Layton’s inherent goofiness. Sook-Yin Lee is quite good as Olivia Chow. Mr. Layton’s faithful aides—Brian Topp, Brad Lavigne, Anne McGrath and Karl Belanger—are well drawn. (Although it’s easy to quibble with the depictions of people you’ve actually met and spoken with at length—Brian Topp is more interesting a personality than is shown here—I’ll say that there is some real semblance of them on the screen.)

There seem to be some concessions made to dramatization—the Ottawa bar where New Democrats tend to hangout isn’t quite as nice and spacious as depicted—but the essence of Jack Layton is there. In some cases explicitly. After Mr. Layton’s defeat in Toronto’s 1991 mayoral election, he is consoled by Ms. Chow, who hugs him and says, “It’s not personal, Jack. It’s politics.” Mr. Layton quickly corrects her. “No, no, no, it is personal,” he says. “Win or lose, it has to be.” Later, in the hospital, dying from cancer, he explains to an admiring nurse that politics is just a trade like any other. I don’t know whether those conversations happened precisely as portrayed, but they might as well have. Jack Layton was thoroughly and entirely a politician. And so here is a movie about a politician.

Is it perhaps too soon for a movie about Jack Layton? It might feel that way. Pierre Trudeau was dead two years and it had been 18 years since he last held office when the CBC portrayed him in a miniseries. John A. Macdonald had been dead for 120 years when the CBC gave him a movie. For the most part, a certain period of time must pass before we feel it safe to pay tribute to a politician. They are not to be admired until we feel we can do so without thinking about all of the things we thought were silly and despicable about them. It has only been a year and a half since Mr. Layton passed and he had only just stepped away from politics. But then his passing was remarkable in that it showed we were still able to admire and respect a politician. And not just a politician, but a man who was so completely political. So perhaps here we should allow ourselves to appreciate a politician we knew so recently, even if everything about our evolutionary cynicism tells us not to.

For sure, there is much to appreciate: good causes and important efforts and, over the course of a lifetime, a commitment to the practice of politics. There are no doubt aspects of representative democracy that are grubby and selfish, but then such is life. Politics may not be noble, but it is important. We should not naturally despise it. Or, if we do, we should we still hope to find some good. Jack Layton did some good and found some success as well. Even if some of the appreciation of his life is a result of the tragedy of his death, he is still possibly one of the this country’s great politicians. Or at least one of this country’s great political stories. And in his life are reasons to see the good that can be (and is) in politics.

There are a few moments that might seem hokey—and, yes, not one, but two appearances of Parachute Club’s Rise Up—but the film is not too overly earnest. It is, of course, a bit odd to see an acted account of events you (in this case, me) actually witnessed. Admittedly, I enjoyed a privileged seat for that particular show. The scrum at which Mr. Layton announced he would not support the budget was, if memory serves, approximately twice as crowded as the movie depicts—Mr. Layton looking pale and hobbling to a lectern that was swarmed by reporters. The first week of the NDP campaign was as dismal as the movie suggests—in reality, the quibbles from reporters over the size of the crowd in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia resulted in a rare public flash of anger from Mr. Layton.

It is easy to forget now, but for a brief moment in the late stages of that campaign, it was possible to believe that Jack Layton might become the next prime minister of Canada. And it is important to remember how truly preposterous it all was. Even after the NDP surge seemed to level-off in the final days, there was something surreal about that final stretch: everything Mr. Layton had spent the previous eight years talking about while the rest of us scoffed seemed suddenly to be happening. And Ruth Ellen Brosseau was about to become an MP. The film skips entirely the final weekend, including the report from Sun News of a massage Mr. Layton received 15 years earlier that seemed momentarily to imperil everything, but also the heady bus ride from Montreal to Toronto on the last day, when the crowds that greeted him made it obvious something was going on and he and Ms. Chow kissed upon his arrival in Toronto. The campaign officially ended in a packed gymnasium in Scarborough. The next day, that riding, where a New Democrat had never finished better than third, went to the NDP by 5,000 votes. To watch the returns come in that night was to laugh—I believe I might have—at how much orange there suddenly was on the map. It was an incredible show to behold.

Less than four months later, Mr. Layton was dead. That was tragedy. And the outpouring that greeted his death was redeeming. And it could all easily be described as cinematic. But then it was all something like real life.

For more on Jack Layton’s life and death, see Maclean’s on Jack Layton featuring our best stories covering the former NDP leader’s remarkable  decade on the Hill. This collection of in-depth profiles and short features delivers a portrait of the man. There’s also a behind-the-scene’s look at the crafting of Layton’s last letter to Canadians, and the influence it had on the nation. Olivia Chow also shares her thoughts on what inspired her late husband.

Thomas Mulcair on cap-and-trade

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 17, 2012 at 1:26 PM - 0 Comments

As part of last week’s conversation with the NDP leader, I asked a few questions about cap-and-trade and putting a price on carbon.

Are you ready, are you prepared, to fully engage a debate on carbon pricing?

It has to be part of the equation. When I talk about including the price and polluter pay, that’s part of the equation, of course. And that’s a basic principle of sustainable development.

Do you worry at all that you’ve lost that debate already by the fact that they can throw the phrase “carbon tax” at you?

When you watch Jacques Gourde being replayed in English, because he did one of his stupid stunts in English, you realize that the average Canadian commentator just looking at this is saying, these guys have lost their marbles.

This is a serious subject. Global warming is not a joke. It’s not a theory. It’s not somebody’s idea. It’s measurable. The disappearance of the polar ice cap is not a fiction, it’s measurable. They don’t want to measure it anymore, but it’s actually happening. If we have the two degrees centigrade temperature increase that we’re fearing, then we will have an extraordinarily damaging effect on life on earth and ecosystems and their ability to adapt that rapidly to that type of change. There are climate change deniers, but the jury’s already rung in on that. We can have different solutions for how to deal with that, we can have different analyses of how we got there. But the basic fact of the matter is if we don’t reduce greenhouse gases, then we’re in trouble. The way that works, the way that I’ve seen this work, because I was a minister of the environment and I was able to work on these things … I remember there was a big debate in 2008. We, like the Conservatives, were saying cap-and-trade. There was a strong reason to say cap-and-trade. By the way, we got pushed back strongly by some environmental groups: why aren’t you backing the Green Shift? And my answer was always forthright and straight and strong. I said, look, when it wasn’t CO2, it was SO2, which combined with H2O was producing S2HO4, acid rain. It was raining sulphuric acid on our forests and on the American forests in the northeast. We got together with the Americans, and companies like Inco, that had steadfastly refused to put in the scrubbers in their stacks, when faced with a lowering ceiling and the obligation to trade within that closed market, the year that it finally became more expensive for them to purchase the credits than it would be to put in the scrubbers, they put the scrubbers in. They had refused to put in the scrubbers, they had threatened to shut down and this was in the face of a Conservative Bill Davis government in Ontario, they had been pig-headed about it. The landscape up there was so rough that that’s where the Apollo astronauts trained. Go back to Sudbury today, you see millions of trees have been planted, the place is coming back, they’ve done the responsible thing.

So a cap-and-trade system will lower your ceiling, force people to come up with choices, get creative. If you look at the three years I was a minister in Quebec, you’ll see drops in greenhouse gas production, we were applying a plan. The Liberals, on the other hand, signed Kyoto and I can give you three words that you can google “Eddie,” “Goldenberg” and “galvanize” … it says so much about who the Liberals are. He admitted that they signed Kyoto as a public relations exercise. With no plan to meet any of those goals. That’s why Canada went on to have one of the worst records in the world … The Liberals have a history of flashing left and turning right on this sort of stuff. We’re going to try something new that’s never been tried before in Canadian politics, we’re going to tell people what we’re going to do and then once we’re elected, we’re actually going to do it.

The one issue that has come up … even, I think, within the NDP, is this question of revenue and whether revenue from cap-and-trade should be used strictly for environmental purposes or whether it could go into general revenues.

I think that there has to be an equivalent amount that goes into environmental purposes. It has to be concentrated in those provinces, those areas where that money is being generated. One of the things that we can do is displace some of the coal that we’re burning and we should be heading for that. That’s why I was the only Quebec politician in the 2011 campaign to back loan guarantees for the Lower Churchill. We took a hit on it a couple weeks ago. The Bloc was out there lighting their hair on fire. The National Assembly had its umpteenth resolution against those loan guarantees. And I stood up four-square in favour of those loan guarantees because you can’t be in favour of green renewables and then be against them the minute somebody wants to build them in another province. So this is actually a part of the vision of sustainable development that we’re going to be putting forward, a grid, a system of green renewables across Canada to displace a lot of the heavy oil, the coal that we’re burning to create electricity.

I don’t want to split hairs too much, but would you rule out using cap-and-trade revenue for social programs?

Yes. Somebody will tell you that at some point there’s a vases communicants, but what I’m saying is that you would have to have an equivalent amount that would go to those environmental purposes.

The revenue question goes back to a point of debate raised by Brian Topp during the NDP leadership race. For the sake of comparison, the Liberal “Green Shift” would have seen new revenues from a carbon tax matched by cuts to personal income taxes, cuts to corporate taxes, deductions meant to assist northern and rural Canadians with energy costs and measures to assist those with low incomes. In that last way, it was not a straight tax swap, nor a shift that was pitched as strictly environmental: it was also meant to deal with poverty.

The NDP’s 2011 platform attempts to match cap-and-trade revenue with spending on “green initiatives” (though it shows a fairly large surplus in year four). What I should have also asked Mr. Mulcair about last week was whether revenue from cap-and-trade would be used in any way to reduce costs on consumers through tax cuts or breaks. The party’s 2011 platform includes measures to reduce home heating costs (removing the federal sales tax from home heating and an extension of the home energy retrofit program), but there is also money set aside for “Helping Canadians Adjust.” In the discussion about costs, and when comparing the Conservative and NDP approaches to carbon emissions, it is obviously necessary to know how any increases in costs for consumers will be handled.

It is also interesting to note Mr. Mulcair’s insistence that revenue from cap-and-trade “has to be concentrated in those provinces, those areas where that money is being generated.” The idea that cap-and-trade could result in money being transferred from one province to another is a concern that Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has raised.

A rough guide to the Conservatives’ carbon tax farce

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 21, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Herein, everything you need to know to understand the Harper government’s latest attempt to attack the NDP.

So what is the basic issue here?

In terms of public policy, this is a debate about putting a price on carbon. There are two ways to do this. You can directly tax major emitters for the carbon they release into the atmosphere. This is generally referred to as a “carbon tax.” Or you can set a limit on the amount of carbon a company can release into the atmosphere and then issue permits to exceed that limit which companies can sell amongst each other. This is generally referred to as “cap-and-trade.” Either way—either set by the government or the open market—a price on carbon is established. And if it costs money to release carbon into the atmosphere, companies will have an incentive to produce less carbon. That incentive will presumably encourage companies to find ways to pollute less (consumers will also presumably have an incentive to seek more environmentally friendly options). And that will presumably help counter the problem of climate change. If the government takes in revenue as the result of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, that revenue can be used to fund green energy and emission-reducing policies and initiatives, as well as reducing income taxes to counter the impact of the higher costs that impacted companies might pass on to their customers. Here is the Pembina Institute’s briefing on carbon pricing, here is the OECD’s briefing on carbon markets and here is the Environmental Protection Agency’s guide to cap and trade. Here is Wikipedia’s rundown of countries and states that have considered or implemented carbon pricing. And here is Stephen Gordon’s guide to the economics of pricing carbon.

What has the NDP proposed?

In its 2008 and 2011 platforms, the NDP proposed a cap-and-trade system. When he was seeking the leadership of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair presented his own cap-and-trade proposal. (Brian Topp quibbled with Mr. Mulcair on one aspect of Mr. Mulcair’s proposal.)

What do the Conservatives say about what the NDP has proposed?

The Conservatives say the NDP proposal is a terrible, ruinous thing.

That sounds very serious. But your use of the word “farce” seems to suggest something silly is going on here.

You are very perceptive. There are at least three parts to the farce. Continue…

Jack Layton tribute in Toronto

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, August 23, 2012 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

The square in front of Toronto’s city hall was packed for Dear Jack, a tribute to mark the one-year anniversary of NDP leader Jack Layton’s death.

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‘Jack would have liked that, a lot’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp considers the last 12 months for the NDP and looks ahead to the next three years.

Which gets us to a final point: what to do about the federal government’s crisis of relevance? Recent Liberal and Conservative governments have worked together on a common agenda to make Canada’s national government largely irrelevant to the daily lives of most Canadians. Today’s federal government is a Parliament, it is a public service, it is an army and police force, and it is a largely unconditional bank machine for provinces.

Small wonder that Canadians increasing tune federal politics out. Small wonder Parliament in recent times has been about embarrassing squabbles over trivia. What else was there to talk about? Here is the fundamental mission of the New Democrats: to demonstrate that the Liberal/Conservatives are wrong, and that there are indeed important projects and priorities that Canadians can and should work on together. Not symbolic issues, designed to get us angry and to divide us from each other. The real stuff: Equality. Jobs. Health care. Economic security. The environment. Reclaiming our good name in in the world. New Democrats need to find a way to give Canadians hope that we are more than the sum of our parts, and that there is much we can do together to make a good country a much better one – carefully and prudently, one practical step at a time, without reigniting the old federal-provincial wars that separatists and conservatives build on, each in their own special way.

‘He had some remarkable things to say’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 20, 2012 at 5:05 PM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Mitchel Raphael

For my piece in this week’s magazine, I spoke with Olivia Chow, Anne McGrath and Brian Topp about the writing of Jack Layton’s last letter, as well as Marna Nightingale and Jennie Worden, who were the first two people to put chalk to concrete at Nathan Phillips Square after Mr. Layton’s death.

Below, several excerpts from those conversations. Continue…

Spending, cutting, voting and chicken analogies

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Agenda convenes a panel—including Brian Topp—to discuss austerity and democracy.

Person, party, Parliament

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 30, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Greg Fingas considers Bruce Hyer’s defection in the context of Thomas Mulcair’s hopes for regional outreach. Brian Topp considers Mr. Hyer’s defection in the context of the “bozo eruptions” that apparently hurt Wild Rose’s chances in Alberta.

Our political system tends towards hyper-centralization, and imposes a discipline on elected representatives that, at least some of them sometimes believe, disrespects and disempowers them. A “crisis of surplus consciousness” can result, in which the few at the top end up with too much to do (and therefore cannot do it well), which the vast majority of other team members end up with too little to do (and aren’t happy about it). This, to be precise, used to be said with reference to the hyper-centralized system in place in the Soviet Union. It could also be said of a number of poorly-led, hyper-centralized private corporations. It may be what parliamentary systems inherently drift into.

But as the Alberta election testifies, our political system also brutally punishes political teams who fail to maintain the tightest possible order in their ranks – at least as far as anyone can see – at every stage of proceedings including elections. “Bozo moments,” policy disagreements, strategy debated in public: Any chink of light is seized on as evidence of unfitness for office.

It seems to me there’s a distinction to be made between a candidate saying something that a significant number of voters find offensive and a candidate expressing a different opinion on policy or strategy, but it’s certainly the case that any break in unity is first and foremost discussed as a potential crisis of leadership.

Brian thinks “it is possible to have a respectful, deliberative, democratic political team that then presents a united front,” but the question remains, what does that look like? Continue…

The popularity of taxing the rich

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 20, 2012 at 2:06 PM - 0 Comments

Further to this post last week, a new poll in Ontario finds massive support for a proposal of the province’s NDP.

Ontarians overwhelmingly favour NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s proposal to raise taxes on people who earn more than $500,000 a year, a new poll suggests. Horwath has put forward the wealth surtax as one of her party’s conditions for supporting Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty’s budget, which will be voted on next Tuesday.

More than three-quarters of people surveyed — 78 per cent — like her idea with only 17 per cent opposed and 5 per cent unsure, according to the Forum Research poll. “It’s hugely popular. You never see that — that’s huge,” Forum president Lorne Bozinoff said Wednesday.

Ms. Horwath would tax those earning more than $500,000 at a provincial rate of 13.16% (up from 11.6%).

There are no such proposals presently on offer at the federal level. During the NDP leadership race, Brian Topp proposed a tax rate of 35% for those earning over $250,000 and Nathan Cullen suggested a rate in the “low 30s” for anyone earning over $300,000 per year. Thomas Mulcair questioned the wisdom of those proposals.

Three years ago, the Bloc Quebecois suggested taxing those earning more than $150,000 an additional 1%.

Winning the weekend vs. Winning the race

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke reviews the detailed results of the NDP leadership vote.

Nathan Cullen narrowly won all of the real-time voting he appeared on during last weekend’s NDP leadership contest, but his rival Thomas Mulcair’s victory was already a foregone conclusion by the time the convention started, detailed vote breakdowns show.

Unfortunately for Cullen, the convention-day round-by-round voting never accounted for more than 17.5% of the total ballots counted, and he had too big a gap to catch Mulcair in the preferential ballots cast in advance.

Mr. Mulcair effectively had 28,683 votes before the weekend began, more than Brian Topp ended up with after weekend voting.

From the magazine

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 5:30 PM - 0 Comments

From this week’s print edition, the inside story of the NDP campaign, as reported by John Geddes and I.

The last thing anyone expected from Thomas Mulcair in the race for the NDP leadership was a charm offensive. Sharp debating skills, sure. Divisive messaging, more than likely. But the Quebec MP routinely characterized as a tough customer was hardly thought likely to better his rivals in a contest of interpersonal skills. Yet there he was on the last Saturday of January, a couple of weeks before the watershed point when his dominance of the campaign became clear, winning a potential key new backer over breakfast at Halifax’s venerable Victory Arms Pub.

I’ve got a bit more from my notebook that I’ll post here next week. My notes on the Topp campaign are here.

Behind the scenes of the NDP leadership campaign

By John Geddes and Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 30, 2012 at 6:45 AM - 0 Comments

Photoraph by Cole Garside

The last thing anyone expected from Thomas Mulcair in the race for the NDP leadership was a charm offensive. Sharp debating skills, sure. Divisive messaging, more than likely. But the Quebec MP routinely characterized as a tough customer was hardly thought likely to better his rivals in a contest of interpersonal skills. Yet there he was on the last Saturday of January, a couple of weeks before the watershed point when his dominance of the campaign became clear, winning a potential key new backer over breakfast at Halifax’s venerable Victory Arms Pub.

His quarry that morning was Nova Scotia MP Robert Chisholm, who had entered the leadership race, then dropped out early when he realized his inability to speak French was a fatal shortcoming. A former NDP leader in his home province, Chisholm looked like an obvious high-value target for all the main leadership aspirants. His background as a union leader might have suggested an affinity with fellow labour-movement heavyweights Brian Topp and Peggy Nash. But he told Maclean’s that he received just two “casual” calls from camps other than Mulcair’s. “Really, it was only Tom who reached out,” Chisholm said, “and was interested in following up on a regular basis and seeking my opinion.”

The two had barely known each other before the race, but Mulcair now struck Chisholm as “warm, friendly and engaging.” Not adjectives often publicly associated with the hard-driving Montrealer. On that winter weekend when all the leadership contenders rolled into Halifax for the second of their series of six televised debates, Mulcair and his wife, Catherine Pinhas, arranged breakfast with Chisholm and his wife, Paula Simon. They settled in for a relaxed hour at the pub restaurant on the ground floor of the gracious old Lord Nelson Hotel. “We found them both quite charming,” Chisholm said. After mulling his decision, he announced on March 1 that he was endorsing Mulcair.

Continue…

Towards Stornoway: The Topp campaign

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

In this week’s print edition—on newsstands tomorrow—John Geddes and I co-author a few thousand words on the NDP leadership race. The piece is based on numerous interviews with those in and around the campaign and hopefully provides some insight into what happened and why. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we ended up with way more material than could be squeezed into the magazine. So that such testimony and explanation doesn’t disappear into my computer’s harddrive, I’m going to detail much of what I have here.

First up, Brian Topp’s campaign. Continue…

Brian Topp says thanks

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 26, 2012 at 6:46 PM - 0 Comments

Mr. Topp has sent a note to supporters.

National campaigns are always intense experiences — but they usually last for seven weeks or so. And then we go whew! that was quite a ride. This seven month marathon was of an entirely different magnitude. And so, it was a unique opportunity to see our country, to get to know our party in its deepest grass roots, to get to know my colleagues in the race, and to renew and make friendships I will treasure for the rest of my life.

This really is a remarkable country. It’s an ocean of land. It is an archipelago of communities. And it is something more — a country of citizens who share some powerful communitarian values and principles that our current government does not understand. Canadians are looking for something better. That’s going to be us.

Contained therein: a rather profound compliment to Nathan Cullen.

For those of you keeping score at home

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 26, 2012 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

Drew Anderson, the NDP’s director of communications, is apparently leaving.

And Raymond Guardia, who directed the NDP campaign in Quebec and managed Brian Topp’s leadership campaign, says Thomas Mulcair told him he’d be moving on if Mr. Mulcair became leader.

About that socialism…

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 26, 2012 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

I somehow missed this during yesterday’s news conference.

For example, Mulcair said he backs the idea to update the language of the party constitution remove the phrase “democratic socialism” from the preamble, an effort that caused some division at the policy convention in Vancouver last year.

“We must refresh our way of speaking, modernize our approach and use a language that speaks not only to the initiated and the people who already agree with us, but that can please and attract (other) people who share our vision,” Mulcair said.

The “socialism” clause was a point of debate when New Democrats held a convention last July. A senior party official defended the change at the time, but amid disagreement the proposal was deferred—at the suggestion of Brian Topp, who had been elected president at the same convention—for further study.

Broadbent and everything after

By Paul Wells - Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 11:56 AM - 0 Comments

It’s hard to do one of these insta-bake histories of a complex historical event for the next day’s paper, and Joanna Smith has produced a good one in The Star. Now I’m going to pick away at some assumptions her sources make near the end.

Nothing seemed to stick, whether more details about his flirtation with the federal Conservatives — anonymous senior New Democrats piled on, in addition to the usual suspects — or an eleventh-hour broadside from a bitter-sounding [Ed] Broadbent.

Instead, the attacks backfired.

“Ed is like most politicians, first and foremost a competitive animal,” says Michael Byers, echoing a perspective of many in all camps. “His particular horse was lagging in the race and therefore he did what competitive people do, and sought to bolster Brian’s chances.”

This analysis is solidly in line with the hearts-aflutter concern trolling we heard from just about everybody after Ed Broadbent, a card-carrying member of the New Democratic Party with a demonstrated history of concern for its fortunes, said his support for Brian Topp reflected concern about Mulcair. What followed from some of the graybacks of the Gallery was a familiar two-step: (1) criticize Broadbent; (2) note that Broadbent was “facing criticism.”

Of course there’s not a scrap of evidence for a backlash. Continue…

The Commons: As good a guess as any

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 11:17 PM - 0 Comments

Frank Gunn/CP Images

At 7:49pm Eastern Standard Time in Toronto, Thomas Mulcair had to use the facilities. One last bathroom break before destiny.

On his way to the men’s room, down the second-floor hallway strewn with the bodies of the faithful, everyone so very tired, Mr. Mulcair passed within maybe three feet of Brian Topp, the only other remaining candidate conferring then with his campaign manager in a relatively secluded corner. The two contenders did not appear to acknowledge other.

A necessary amount of time later, Mr. Mulcair emerged from the bathroom and proceeded back down the hallway. Once again the two candidates passed within feet of each other. If they acknowledged each other, it was fleeting. Mr. Mulcair went on back to his headquarters. Mr. Topp sat on a table and talked with one of his aides for awhile. No jacket, right hand resting on hip.

At 8:02pm, from the far end of the hall, the sound of drums rang out and a clapping, gyrating throng of supporters from Team Mulcair emerged. Dancing their way down the hall, they proceeded to the escalator positioned in front of the Team Topp headquarters and then down to the subterranean convention hall on the basement floor. A smattering of Mr. Topp’s supporters watched the heaving mob. Some raised their hands and clapped along as the likely victors marched towards the final confirmation.

The moment was soon at hand. And then, of course, it was announced that the results would be delayed by an hour. Continue…

Fourth ballot results

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 9:24 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair 33,881 57.2
Brian Topp 25,329 42.8

Brian Topp, just short

By Paul Wells - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 7:59 PM - 0 Comments

As I write this, New Democrats are voting on a fourth ballot for no very obvious reason. Basically Brian Topp is doing Jack Nicholson’s “Sure I’ll tell you, but you gotta ask me nice” speech from A Few Good Men. He knows Tom Mulcair is the next leader, but he will not lift a finger to make it easier, and indeed he’ll make many thousand New Democrats do a little extra work to make it official. (If he ends up winning the leadership on the fourth ballot, I’ll sure look silly. Oh well.)

Once again we see that personality is the most salient factor in political division. Topp and Mulcair could, one strongly suspects, have sat together in a caucus for 40 years and never voted differently on any issue. Not that they agree on everything, but all politicians are flexible and if bound by the requirements of ordinary politics, they could have filed off the sharp corners of any differences.

But neither can stomach the fact of the other. Continue…

What now?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 7:18 PM - 0 Comments

It’s fairly simple. Brian Topp needs approximately 75% of Nathan Cullen’s supporters to move to him or Thomas Mulcair is the next leader of the NDP.

Results for the fourth ballot are expected around 8:30pm 9:30pm EST.

On Topp’s decision to stay in for a last desperate try

By John Geddes - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 7:05 PM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp’s decision to stay in the race, if that’s what it still is at this late hour, for a fourth round of tallying up ballots will go down as one of the more controversial moves of the NDP leadership campaign.

The argument for staying in for another round is that Topp’s most fervent supporters would expect him to go the distance. The argument for bowing out is that his chances of overtaking Thomas Mulcair are so poor at this stage that he’d serve NDP unity better by gracefully conceding.

Remorseless arithmetic makes it an extraordinary tall order for Topp to win. He had 19,822 votes on the third ballot, compared to 27,488 for Mulcair. Nathan Cullen must now drop off, so the question is how his 15,426 votes will split. To deny Mulcair, Topp must claim about three-quarters of Cullen’s support, roughly speaking. Not likely.

Considering the anxiety within the party about the tension between the Mulcair and Topp camps, pushing this to the bitter end must be worrying to NDP insiders. The message in some of the earlier moves today—notably Northern Ontario MP Charlie Angus’s throw of support to Mulcair, after Paul Dewar, Angus’s first pick, gave up—is that it’s time to put misgivings about Mulcair aside.

Perhaps one factor here is that Topp is not an MP. He won’t have to sit in caucus meetings with Mulcair as leader.

Third ballot results

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 6:07 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair 27,488 43.8% (+5.5)
Brian Topp 19,822 31.6% (+6.6)
Nathan Cullen 15,426 24.6% (+4.7)

What now?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 3:02 PM - 0 Comments

Third-ballot voting will be open until 4pm EST. Here’s what I’m looking to see from the results.

How much closer to 50% can Mulcair get? Obviously the closer he gets, the better his prospects. But can he get so close as to make defeat seem impossible? And is there any sign that his growth is slowing? His second ballot support showed an increase of 8.1 percentage points, but as much as 5.8 of that could, conceivably, have been Martin Singh’s supporters.

Can Brian Topp narrow the gap? Here’s one way to look at it: There are currently 36.7 percentage points between Peggy Nash and Nathan Cullen. Mr. Topp needs 25 points from that. Mr. Mulcair needs 11.7.

Can Nathan Cullen get ahead of Mr. Topp? If not, obviously, he’s out.

How many people vote? The second ballot turnout decreased to 62,494 (from 65,108 on the first ballot). There are any number of ways to game this out—whose supporters go where and why is subject to myriad possibilities—but the actual number of votes at hand seems to be in flux. (Why? I have no idea. Could be the technical problems that were reported on the second ballot. Could be advanced voters who only listed one choice. Could be weekend voters who have drifted away to Saturday afternoon errands.)