Hard Truths for the Canadian Left, Advocate, 12/04/2016

I think this week is going to consist pretty much entirely of blogs about the future of Canada’s New Democratic Party. It’s pretty easy for a guy with a blog to talk about issues of national politics. In most cases, bloggers just kind of blow smoke out their asses about it.

Unless we’re published on fairly well-trafficked forums like HuffPo, VICE, Brietbart, the Atlantic, or something of that ilk. Then at least we’re pressured to have done some research before blowing smoke out of our asses.

But when it comes to the future of Canada’s official social democratic political party, I actually have some skin in the game and a little minor influence. I am the Vice-President of a district association, after all. Not exactly a major leadership position – but I have a little institutional grease along my wheels.*

* That sounds really dirty for some reason.

I see two issues that are going to cause some major splits and problems for the NDP and for Canadian progressive social movements more broadly. I’ll talk about the most obvious one first, the one that the two actually important speeches at last weekend’s convention threw into sharp relief.

Rachel Notley threw down the gauntlet regarding the LEAP
Manifesto, dismissing its calls for a petroleum-free
economy and industry an utter disaster of naïveté. The
NDP won't literally split as an organization over this,
because it will never literally adopt LEAP, only use it
as a launching point to build a more ambitious
environmentalism platform. But we're already in
danger from some problematic optics simply for
talking about it.

Workers vs The World

For quite a few years, I had a feeling this fight would appear among Canadian progressives for a while. It’s a tension that exists in all alliances generally called left-wing. The NDP is now in open conflict between its commitments to workers’ rights and the environment.

Everyone is talking about how Rachel Notley slammed the LEAP Manifesto as nonsense that’s purposely designed – at least in part – to destroy the entire economy of Alberta. As Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis would say, they’re worried about Earth, which is both bigger than and includes Alberta.

But the best quote of the whole affair so far goes to Alberta labour activist Gil McGowan, who the CBC is so glad to have caught on air. “These downtown Toronto political dilettantes come to Alberta and track their garbage across our front lawn.”

Other sources have spent more time analyzing this split already, and I’m sure it’ll be a major part of the philosophical debates that will energize the NDP over the next two years. 

It even has the angle of each side’s leading spokespeople including members of New Democrat political dynasties: Rachel Notley, daughter of Grant, who carries the prestige of having won government in Alberta; and Avi Lewis, son of Stephen and grandson of David.** Starting their dustup at a convention moderated by Rebecca Blaikie, daughter of Bill.

** And great-grandson of Moishe, who pre-dated the NDP’s existence. I mean, holy shit, this family of activism goes back a ways.

Avi Lewis, youngest heir of a four-generation dynasty
of political activism from Russia to Canada, with his
wife Naomi Klein, who is a much better writer and
philosopher than he is.

Icelandic sagas aside, this fight expresses a tension that has always existed in the Western left since its modern social movement started. Environmentalism is fundamentally about the radical transformation of industry so that it doesn’t produce pollution or irreversible planetary damage anymore. And a lot of workers’ jobs and livelihoods depend on industry staying just the way it is.

Now this tension has exploded all over the Edmonton convention, and we can finally get it all sorted out in the open. Providing we’re actually creative enough.

We Need to Talk About Quebec

As I said yesterday, Tom Mulcair’s central role in organizing the NDP’s massive victory in Quebec in 2011 gave him the political capital to lead and win the race for the federal party’s leadership. Well, it was the loss of two-thirds of those Quebecois NDP seats that helped send him packing out of the leadership last weekend.

And we should be clear about why. There was one central issue that crippled the NDP’s and Mulcair’s support in Quebec last year: whether women can wear a niqab in their citizenship ceremonies. 

There were only two places where this really had traction: the Conservative party’s own base of hardcore nationalist supporters, as expected, and among the general population of Quebec, especially outside Montreal, as was terrifying. 

If you thought racist nationalism in Quebec was on the way out just because the Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois were humiliatingly defeated over the last few years, you were dead wrong. 

Racist incidents against Muslims and Jews has risen in Quebec recently. This is a dangerous social problem that Canadians have to face as an important aspect of preserving and improving our institutional and social unity and ethics. 

Blatantly anti-Semitic graffiti discovered earlier this
month in the Montreal suburb of Laval.

We cannot let racism remain part of mainstream culture in any part of Canada. Quebec must be a central vector for anti-racist activism from the NDP and all other related movements in the future.

Let’s be clear about the main causes of the 2011 NDP Quebec victory: Tom Mulcair’s ground game organizing throughout the province, and the public love of Jack Layton after his appearance on Tout le Monde en Parle. 

We can now add one important condition: nobody talked about the NDP’s commitment to multiculturalism, diversity, and cultural-ethnic integration to the point of miscegenation. Indeed, its embrace of miscegenation, with inter-ethnic marriages and relationships being utterly normal and a point of pride in modern Canada. 

Inter-ethnic marriages like Jack Layton’s with Chinese-Canadian Olivia Chow and Tom Mulcair’s with Sephardic Jew Catherine Pinhas. 

The NDP achieved something amazing in Quebec, helping break the dominance that nationalist separatist political parties have held on that province’s politics for two decades. 

The good news is that, even though the NDP lost many seats in Quebec last year, no one political party dominated its representation. Many NDP seats remained, and while the BQ won several more, the Liberals and Conservatives also made gains. Quebec’s time of mass-scale political allegiance seems finally over.

The bad news is that virulent, violent racism remains quite popular in Quebec. At least a sizeable minority of Quebecois are disgusted at the prospect of integrating their society with non-white ethnicities and (despite widespread secularism and contempt for the Catholic Church) non-Christian cultures. This hatred must be fought.

The NDP must be on the vanguard of anti-racist activism in Quebec. In purely mercenary terms, NDP support will grow with the end of racism in Quebec. In ethical and moral terms, racism must end. Full stop.

Mulcair Became Leader Because We Actually Liked Him, Jamming, 11/04/2016

I couldn’t make it to the New Democratic Party’s biannual policy convention this year. That’s the difference between travelling from Hamilton to Toronto in 2012 for the post-Layton leadership convention, and travelling from Toronto to Edmonton for the post-election leadership downfall.*

* The difference was between a multiple-hundred dollar plane trip and hostel booking versus a ten dollar bus ticket and crashing on my buddies John and Ally’s couch. And the party still spent the next year always calling me for donations because they registered my conference fees as a donation-in-kind. I only did it for the tax refund.

So while I didn’t get a chance to see this weekend’s convention on the ground, I did see it through my public and personal social media accounts. And I’m even deeper in this conversation this year than I was four years ago. 

Back then, I was just a member of the party hoping to get more involved in the rush of optimism after Jack Layton became one with the Force. This year, I'm a riding association vice-president slowly taking part in the creation of policy and philosophy of the party.

It largely amounts to encouraging more people to get on the progress train on the modern left – combining hostility to the military and security functions of the state with the organization of common forms of wealth. Right now, I’m kind of a Negri pusher. Eventually, I’ll push my own books. I kind of already do.

Because the most important part of developing Canada’s social democratic party for the current era of politics is that continued process of change in our activism after the conference. The slow-burning leadership race will let the NDP work out its issues and adapt to where the left has to go.

I’ll talk more about those ideas later this week. What I want to do now is make a single observation about Tom Mulcair himself, since he was the infamous man of the hour this weekend.

The general narrative – in the media and in the party’s own society – is that Mulcair embodied a radical transformation in the NDP to become a centrist party that developed its policy by triangulation. 

That shift failed for a ton of reasons that have already been analyzed to death by any blogger or journalist who's ever farted a mild observation about Canadian politics. And now the NDP will return to their roots, choosing an embrace of their ideals over the cold heart of electability that comes from chasing the Liberals.

Mistake number one in this master narrative is equating “electability” with the smiling conservatism of the political centre’s inoffensive embrace of the status quo. 

Let me tell you about another master narrative. Mulcair was a key organizer of the NDP’s destruction of the separatist banner as the only progressive front in Quebec’s federal politics mobilizes all those enthusiastic new Quebecois members as the largest block of loyalists in the 2012 leadership race.

Mulcair’s francophone newbies were the largest group of New Democrats dedicated to a single leader going into the last leadership vote. They were bigger than Brian Topp’s union men, Nathan Cullen’s west coasters and Occupy gang, Peggy Nash’s Torontonians, Niki Ashton’s Socialist Caucus, and Paul Dewar’s weird singing cult.

After 2011, Quebec was considered the new leading edge for the NDP. Quebec’s embrace of the NDP would win them their first federal election. Mulcair being the most prominent organizer of what was literally the party’s new largest base gave him a visibility that no other leadership contender had. 

It became popularly taken for granted that Mulcair was the frontrunner. Only longtime NDP members and supporters were suspicious of him. Having been an architect of the sweep of Quebec, his NDP bonafides were not questioned at all by any new members. That only occurred with time, as the 2011 generation** grew wary of Mulcair’s tendency to campaign against his ideals.

** The generation that created Occupy and that now has made Bernie Sanders a contender for President.

The social status of the Quebec victory made him the number two of way more people than had him as their number one. We voted by mail on a single-vote-transferable ballot. Only those physically voting at the convention itself could change their minds during that weekend. That’s why SVT won’t work for electoral reform – the second choice of the majority always wins.

Mulcair had the biggest single block of dedicated supporters in 2012, but he was always a compromise candidate among a ton of different perspectives in the NDP. It took him four elimination rounds to whittle the field of seven to the winner. 

Eight and nine, Robert Chisholm and Romeo Saganash, never even had enough support to make it to convention.*** Ashton and Dewar were first to drop out on the day. Then Nash. Then Cullen. Then finally a fourth round of voting and transfers in the final head-to-head between Brian Topp and Tom Mulcair. And he only got 57%!

*** Saganash was always going to be my number one. My ballot would have read 1) Saganash; 2) Cullen 3) Mulcair.

And Tom said he’d only stay on as leader with 70% of the vote this week? He’s never had that much support in the party. 

The NDP never had any major cultural changes or shifts. The most successful organizer in the most recent election made for a good compromise candidate at the time because of that success. 

He had a bad election because he was a good party organizer but a bad campaigner – with his staff, he misread the times with a platform that felt disconnected from people’s real concerns, like the groupthink of a room full of Ottawa nerds. Which is what they were.

I'm not about to advocate that Tom Mulcair should have stayed leader. That would have been disastrous. This election completely ruined his national branding. He will never be able to build himself a new image for the Canadian people. And much else has changed in Canada. 

The NDP needs a leader who is actually in touch with the concerns of real people. As Tom Mulcair was when that concern translated into kicking out Stephen Harper. But once you defeat the enemy, you need to let your idealism guide your actual political program. 

That idealism – the strength of a new vision for your country – is what inspires people to elect you.

There’s Just No Way to Come Back, Advocate, 08/01/2016

So originally, I was planning to talk more about Antonio Negri’s political philosophy today. Maybe the analysis of colonialism in Empire. It’s a solid one, and doesn’t conform to a lot of the platitudes that today lend themselves to the perversity of camp politics.

But a Facebook conversation with my old friend the Madman made me lay that to the side. Instead, I want to lay some political chips on the table. I’m the Vice-President of the Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding association of the New Democratic Party. And I have something to say about the upcoming leadership convention and review. 

Thomas Mulcair looking optimistically toward the
future. Ironic, I know.

I’ve already laid out my position to my colleagues, so this is nothing new to them. But the debate over the future of Thomas Mulcair as leader of the NDP has finally begun in public. 

I probably won’t make the convention because of work commitments,* but I’ll lay out a case among the NDP activists of Toronto that he should step down. Here’s why.

* I can only ask for so much time off from my service job, and I’m not yet sure how flexible my contracts’ schedules will be. And I’m prioritizing my panel at the Canadian Philosophical Association about Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity and how to continue philosophy outside the university system.

I already laid out the problem in these two articles that I published during and shortly after Canada’s federal election last year, on the NDP leadership’s fear of the “Bob Rae Hangover” in riding-rich suburban Ontario, and a general diagnosis of how the party choked like a Canadian NHL team in the finals.

For the rest of 2015, the New Democrat membership generally kept its talk among itself. It was a mark of respect, I think. No matter how much you may have opposed Mulcair and his campaign communications team, you had to give him the basic respect of a defeated contender.

Even if you opposed him from the beginning, which many in the NDP did. I went to the 2012 leadership convention where he was chosen as leader. It was a contentious vote, and I faced a lot of criticism (and even a little condescending bullying) from supporters of traditional Big Union man Brian Topp.

And I didn’t even support Mulcair myself. In our ranked ballot system, I actually ranked him second** after Nathan Cullen, whose involvement with Occupy and Idle No More impressed me more than Mulcair’s career as a moderate left Liberal Quebec cabinet minister. I did greatly respect Mulcair’s environmentalist politics, though.

What would Canadian politics have looked like if Romeo
Saganash had become NDP leader in 2012? I'm not
even sure what the conditions of that possible world
would be.

** Ideally, I’d have ranked him third. Romeo Saganash, the Cree MP representing a district that’s two-thirds the land area of Quebec, was my top choice. But his leadership campaign couldn’t attract enough support or donors, and he had to drop out before the vote.

But Ontario provincial MPP Cheri DiNovo is the first to declare publicly that Mulcair has to step down. She articulates many of the same reasons I have for thinking so: his brand as a leader is ruined.

The contention that most Canadians were conservative-leaning people, or at least that the best tactic to win the 2015 election*** was to win over soft conservative voters, informed the NDP’s campaign strategy.

*** And the 2014 Toronto mayoral race and Ontario provincial election, and the 2013 British Columbia provincial election.

Despite his stands on social democratic principle throughout Harper’s majority government, Mulcair tailored his messaging accordingly. We saw the result. 

You can talk all you want about the current caucus being the second-largest in the federal NDP’s history. We still lost more than half of our MPs, and some of our best leaders. Every seat in Toronto. Every seat in all of Atlantic Canada.

All the messaging that in only a few months cost the NDP its reputation as Canada’s progressive party, all that rests on Mulcair’s image.

Now, it’s also on that of his staff and internal leadership. But Anne McGrath and Brad Lavigne didn’t have their name on subway ads and TV spots. Thomas Mulcair did. I know he’s a committed politician and activist for many important causes. I want him to continue that work. But he can’t do it as leader of the NDP anymore.

After this election, nobody believes him, and nobody will anymore.

Losing the Base for Empty Gains, Jamming, 23/09/2015

The other day, a Facebook friend of mine called Thomas Mulcair a neo-Thatcherite, and the New Democrats an anti-worker political party.

This is only one – slightly cartoonish – voice among many people among the populist urban left who are traditionally a major base of the NDP, but it reflects a growing feeling in this pillar of the party’s support. 

The major popular force of support for Mulcair's NDP
came when he stood against Bill C51's repressive
security measures, but his campaign's focus on the
message that he'll consistently deliver balanced budgets
is losing the support of what could be a dedicated base
among the anti-austerity young left.

Dissatisfaction with the NDP’s balanced-budget messaging this election season is growing enough to inspire VICE think pieces and, I hope, a change of course for the party I support. 

But I don’t think that change will come. The reason why lies in the peculiar nature of the NDP’s growing pains into a big-tent mainstream party that can compete realistically for state power at all levels of our government pretty much anywhere in Canada.

This disaffected activist and middle class urban left is plugged into social media for their major sources of news, and it has also become their public square. 

They may be denounced as slacktivists at times, and there are many among us who do no political activity except tweet and post. But conversation is still a political act: even the slacktivist argues, complains, and occasionally convinces.

This is the class and generation who plugged into the ideals of Occupy and carries that enthusiasm into the contemporary liberation movements that have organized through social media: they’re the allies of Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, Idle No More, and Yanis Varoufakis’ Syriza. And they’re relentless opponents of austerity politics. 

The rhetoric of balanced budgets is the demand of Tea Party Republicans, Hayek and Rand inspired libertarians, and the European Central Bank leaders who brought the Greek people and Syriza to heel with the humiliation of deepening austerity. It’s a political priority that, in our fragile economic times, frequently brings mass poverty as social services and supports for the middle class are destroyed.

So why the hell is the leader of Canada’s progressive, social democratic political party talking about how his top priority is balancing the budget above all?

This is the myth of the rightward turn of the NDP. It is a myth, but understanding why takes a little history, and a little theory. 

Nathan Cullen, pictured here hanging out with one of his
sons at the 2012 leadership convention while I sit in the
row behind him, was my favoured candidate to lead
the NDP. Don't worry; he knows I was there and we
spoke many times.  I supported him primarily for
his dedication to  environmentalism and a new,
fairer relationship of Canada's settler populations
with its indigenous. Mulcair was number two on my
preference ballot,  so after Cullen was knocked
out on the third round of voting/counting, my
(and many others') second-place vote put
Mulcair above Brian Topp.

A quick history. Jack Layton removed the references to socialism in the NDP’s constitution and central documents, and lessened the direct influence of large unions’ leadership over the party’s policy. 

Thomas Mulcair is a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister in Quebec, who has overseen the toning down of anti-Israel sentiment among rank and file. During the 2012 leadership convention, he saw off several opponents challenging him from his left: Nikki Ashton, Peggy Nash, Nathan Cullen, and Brian Topp. Topp’s support was almost entirely from the old union network of the NDP, and he’s the only one of the four challengers without a prominent, visible place in the parliamentary leadership. 

Beyond Mulcair himself, NDP leadership in last year’s major elections in Ontario – the provincial election and the Toronto mayoral race – have seen humiliating NDP defeats, caused largely by triangulation-style communication strategies that tried to appeal to Conservative voters on their own terms. 

Olivia Chow and Andrea Horwath centred their campaigns on promises to do right by taxpayers and rule by prudent fiscal responsibility, saying nothing of doing right by the people and ensuring the prosperity of a more equal society.

Mulcair’s talk of balanced budgets appears to be more of the same. As I write, the Liberal Party has just climbed a few percentage points over the NDP. 

The roots of Mulcair’s message about balanced budgets lie in a strategy born of NDP anxiety, and a ghost that haunts the party in Ontario. Bob Rae.

I volunteer with the NDP campaign in my riding. That’s Phil Trotter, the candidate for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, a riding with a diverse population, but an overall suburban geography. We usually encounter friendly smiles and support from working class and immigrant folks, but the more affluent upper-middle class remains skeptical of the NDP.

Speaking of ghosts whose rattling chains and wails of
terror horrify even the strongest of people.

The first reason they usually give is that they don’t trust the NDP because of Bob Rae’s NDP government of Ontario, the accompanying economic collapse, and Rae’s complete incompetence in dealing with it. I call it the Bob Rae Hangover.

Conversations that Phil and I have with voters convince them that the NDP has rejected Rae, and has a much stronger tradition of good governance and smart policy from its provincial governments in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and now Alberta. But we can’t talk to every skeptical voter in the whole riding.

The balanced-budget message was designed to appeal to these people. They’re messages in the mass media that are intended to calm the anxieties of Ontarian voters who still suffer headaches from Rae Rum and delerium tremens from Harris Vodka.

Ontario is rich in ridings, and the growth of NDP support since Layton’s era that continued under Mulcair means that many of those contests are three-way races. Many of those are close to statistical ties that will likely be decided by desperately thin margins on October 19. 

Given the state of our current horse race, every vote counts everywhere. In Atlantic Canada for the blue-red races and three-ways, the west and Quebec City for its blue-orange races, Montreal for its red-orange, and the rest of Quebec for its teal-orange. But southern Ontario will likely carry the victory on many tight, three-way races.

The federal NDP’s communications and campaign strategists have decided that curing the Rae Hangover is the key to winning urban Ontario. Or at least enough of urban Ontario that gains elsewhere in the country can bring the party more than 170 seats.

Occupy is the revolutionary movement that began in
New York, spread throughout the world, and continues
in social movements against entrenched elites all over
the world. A left-wing party that doesn't embrace its
values will die, because they're the people's values.

The balanced budget message is how they think they’ll do it. The problem is that this message is costing them a lot of support from the anti-austerity social movement that has revitalized left-wing politics around the West, from Bernie Sanders to Jeremy Corbyn, from Podemos to Syriza. 

The NDP should be on that list. Instead, many in that social movement are abandoning the NDP as a party hijacked by the neoliberal consensus.

The irony is that the NDP leadership doesn’t actually plan to deliver balanced budgets above all else. 

All their other messages describe the actual priorities of a Mulcair cabinet: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, restoring environmental protections, real engagement with climate change, a national daycare strategy and pharmacare plan, higher taxes on the rich and multinationals, more power for the Canada Revenue Agency to break down overseas tax havens. 

All of these are incompatible with an overriding priority of balanced budgets. Their social services won’t run deficits forever, but it will take time for greater revenue of their truly progressive tax plan and enforcement to deliver the adequate government income. 

The balanced budget message is a lie to win over Ontarians still suffering from the Rae Hangover.

The question is whether the NDP can still win the election if they continue to haemorrhage support from the most energetic leftists in the country today. 

The Dirty Fighting of Canadian Politics, Jamming, 01/07/2015

There are days when I feel like I want to just walk into the communications office of an organization I support and start work immediately. I’m exactly the kind of person that a political party should hire if they want to avoid the cultural corruption of office and the accompanying growth of yes-men (of all genders and gender identities) without authentic principles.

I will, when I see it, always call bullshit.

The word of a notable sleazebucket is no reason for me
to abandon my belief that Mulcair is a man of principle.

Today’s bullshit: Martin Patriquin’s recent article in MacLean’s about how the Conservative Party courted Thomas Mulcair in 2007 to advise them on environmental issues and eventually run as a candidate in Quebec. Mulcair had just left the provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest over environmental issues, and he was being courted by the New Democrats, the Conservatives, and a large private law firm.

It was already common knowledge that Mulcair turned down the Conservatives to join the New Democrats, even though they were (in popular perception at least) a complete non-entity in Quebec politics. The narrative of Mulcair becoming a beachhead MP in Montréal who led the organizing effort that saw the orange sweep of the province in 2011 is central to the NDP’s cultural myth-building for their current leader.

Patriquin's article breaks from the established narrative by claiming that Mulcair only turned down the Conservatives because they wouldn’t pay him enough. The Conservatives could offer only $180,000 salary, and Mulcair asked for $300,000. So says Patriquin’s source.

That source was Dimitri Soudas.

Some background, to explain why this makes me call bullshit.

Some of Jim Prentice's remarks before and after he lost
Alberta's election to Rachel Notley's NDP showed that
he actually couldn't conceive of the (relatively)
progressive left provincial party as a real threat.

It's no secret to anyone who reads my blog that I don’t support Stephen Harper, and that I hope Canada has a New Democrat federal government by the end of this year. As recent polls show, I’m not exactly alone here. 

With this in mind, I’m fascinated to see how the lines of attack between our three main parties will shape up. One thing I notice about the Conservative way of thinking is that they seem weak on confronting the NDP, pouring more of their efforts into attacking Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, their traditional arch-enemy. 

I think this is a cultural problem among Conservatives and conservatives in Canada: because their social circles include few if any people who support the NDP and their own culture considers the NDP a laughingstock of hippies and communists, it’s genuinely difficult for them to understand why anyone would even conceive of the New Democrats as a serious political party at all. 

With this Conservative cognitive block, the Liberal Party is the most threatening to the NDP. They’re used to advertising against the NDP, which often takes anti-right-wing support from the Liberal fold. So their publicity machine can easily understand that the NDP can be a danger to them, especially now that the Liberals no longer hold the advantage of being Canada's "natural governing party." 

The main NDP narrative against the Liberals is that they're a party without true principle. The fight against Bill C51, the “anti-terror” legislation that stamps on many Canadians’ civil rights, is the perfect focus for this narrative. The Liberals supported it when C51 was popular, as the national mood was still trembling from Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's attack on the Parliament buildings. 

Mulcair's NDP took a principled stand against C51, and as the unsavoury details of the bill entered the public conversation, benefited from their uncompromising stance. The NDP is the party of principle, the Liberal the party of poll trackers, self-interested functionaries who desire state power for power’s sake alone.

I do enjoy it when nationally prominent people notice what I have to
say, even when they're just responding to a Twitter rant. This is
what I like about Twitter: if you have something worth saying, it
can be very rewarding.

Speaking of which, Dimitri Soudas, a reject from the top echelons of the Conservative Party for corruption: using the power of his office as the party’s Executive Director to advance the parliamentary career of his spouse Eve Adams. 

Adams tried to parachute herself into the nomination for a safer Conservative seat, the redistricted Oakville-North Burlington, after her own Mississauga district's new borders made it more of a battleground. The Conservative Party forbade her from running for any seat in 2015 because of the nomination shenanigans. She crossed the floor to Trudeau's party, and was parachuted to the Liberal nomination in a north Toronto district. 

Soudas became an operative for the federal Liberal Party after Adams became their most notorious Toronto candidate. At the time, it was suspected that he’d take his valuable knowledge and secrets from his Conservative career to use against them. But it seems the Liberals are also using his knowledge against the NDP, since the smear that Mulcair only cared about money when choosing his political allegiance came from what he told Patriquin.

Soudas and Adams are two figures in Canadian politics who suit each other well, because their primary reason to advance their careers is the advancement of their own careers. Soudas' abuse of his office and Adams’ nominations shenanigans, as well as their easy pass to the Liberal Party show that what they care about most in politics is themselves. 

Dimitri Soudas hasn't done much to establish a reputation
as someone whose word we can trust to be truthful.

So it would make sense that Soudas would interpret Mulcair’s dealbreaker in his negotiations with the Conservatives as the salary, rather than the party’s firm opposition to greenhouse gas reduction and environmental protection. The whole reason Mulcair was a free agent in the first place was because the Charest government set aside parts of Mount Orford provincial park for condo development (a contract for Quebec’s entirely corruption-free construction industry).

Mulcair burned his bridges with Charest’s government and the Quebec Liberal Party because of his environmentalist principles. Soudas, as a man incapable of making a decision on any principle other than egoistic self-interest, would never be able to understand that.

Happy Canada Day, everyone.