The NDP Leap Manifesto was released in Toronto, on Tuesday, September 15th, 2015 with Stephen Lewis, former leader of the NDP. The Leap Manifesto was written in the spring of 2015 with its beginnings at a two day meeting in Toronto with representation from environmentalists, Indigenous Rights, social and food justice, and labour activists.
In the National Post on Sept. 16, they ran a picture of Steven Lewis. In the article they state, “Stephen Lewis put his signature to a plan to overthrow capitalism”. In the article Lewis said that signing onto the Leap didn’t mean that Tom Mulcair’s centrist policies weren’t good. Now it seems that even though Mulcair pretends to be middle of the road or maybe even a little conservative at times, we should take a close look at the party he represents and who will create the policy that would define his government if he were elected.
One such policy would be the end to the use of any and all fossil fuels within a generation, the end to all trade deals and the conversion of big farms to small organic ones. They claim that by going to renewable energy from wind and solar, they will save the world from climate change and redistribute the wealth.
They want to expand economic sectors that are already low carbon; like caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts, public-interest media and start a national child-care program. These jobs, mostly performed by women, are the glue that builds humane, resilient communities they claim. It seems to me that mothers who stay home to raise and teach their children create a much more humane world than any that can be promoted by state run baby sitters spewing the state approved morals.
In other interviews Naomi Klein, the author of “The Leap” and Lewis’s son Avi Lewis, suggested that the far left (Trudeau and Mulcair) should unite in a coalition government to out the conservatives if there was a minority and insist we must change our 1st past the post system in favour of proportional government. Greece and Italy are prime examples of how well that worked.
David Lewis, Stephen’s father, came to Canada in the early 1900’s, fleeing communist Russia, and eventually becoming the leader of the NDP before the Ed Broadbent years. Although he claimed that he was not a communist and politically, actively fought against having a communist party in Canada, he in fact could never separate most of his so-called NDP philosophy from the basic communist theory. He son Stephen, has now signed “The Leap”, which has been quickly tagged on twitter as the “Tommunist Manifesto”. The call from the new Manifesto is to make government the power and control over entrepreneurship by private citizens, controlling what they produce in their factories, what they grow on their farms and where they sell it. They would remove private property as we know it and make it communal. This would be done by removing fossil fuels to transport product, forcing local production to feed local communities. The world had to come to the aid of the Russian people when this experiment failed; Let’s be careful who we vote for folks, the change we get may not be what we expect.