34. There has never been a modern civic table without legs

Published
September 14th 1995

Re: Editorial, NDP offer little new, September 13th. When editorially suggesting the stalled intellectual project of the NDP please at least acknowledge the NDP and its past and present ideological peers as your own bête noir .
In mourning the left’s lack of inventiveness you helpfully suggest that “practical and effective” adjustments to liberal capitalism are still feasible. Surely you miss the point: we will have to wait and see if liberal capitalism survives after re-privatisation and the promised dismantling of the welfare state. Taking the ‘liberal’ out of liberal capitalism is neither risk nor violence free.
The fact that pending left or right coalitions now have no ‘natural’ political party affinities should - if only for reasons of sheer self-interest in stable governance - be cause for more considered reflection.
The arguments and language surrounding collective versus individual rights, property and occupational rights, social equity, social assistance and getting ‘the government off of our backs’ is strongly reminiscent of a late 19th century European struggle for which the welfare state became the political compromise solution.
Therefore perhaps of more long-term structural significance than the NDP’s immediate woes is the recently successful neo-conservative and libertarian interventions that - while gathering support for the dismantlement of the welfare state - fail to recognise the need for any updated, equivalent political compromise. The American right in particular is engaged in a reckless gamble: there never has been a modern civic table without legs.
Affected Canadians are well advised to remind those who seek continued de-regulation, tax cuts, and corporate autonomy that first we must address increased poverty, unemployment, no pensions, and diminishing access to child care, education, medical aid and legal assistance. As the oilman, Bob Blair from Calgary proposes: the corporate sector as the acknowledged prime beneficaries of our collective wealth are better positioned to help pay down the deficit.