If any campaign has managed to create a slogan that caught on this year, it might well be NDP Leader Jack Layton's refrain that "Ottawa is broken". It is just another variation on the common tactic of playing outsider politics. The mythical white knight who will ride in and clean things up. Just think of all of the governors in the United States who have campaigned for President as the guy who will change how things work in Washington, and then remind yourself how they consistently fail to deliver.
This isn't due to an inherent dishonesty in the candidates, but is instead a reflection of the simple fact that democracy is messy and doesn't change easily. If you need an illustration of this idea, consider how difficult it is to get a group of 20 of your friends to agree on where to go for dinner. You can try to come up with a plan to simplify that process, but nothing will ever change the fact that your friends all have different preferences. Now imagine that this same group of your friends are having to agree on something that actually matters! Like agreeing on exactly where best to spend tax dollars, right down to exact dollar allocations. That is the reality of politics, except without the stabilizing notion that you are dealing with a group of friends.
This is something that Layton knows all to well. After all, despite his outsider claim the reality is that out of the three main federal party leaders he actually has the longest career as a pure politician, serving seven terms at City Hall in Toronto before making the jump to Federal politics. As such, his pointing a finger at Michael Ignatieff as being some sort of member of an old guard of politics is rather tough to swallow. It might also be instructive to ask a Torontonian how much Jack managed to fix local politics before you accept the notion that he is the person to fix Ottawa. After all, didn't Rob Ford just win the mayoral contest as the guy who was going to clean up what was wrong at City Hall? Things, presumably, which have been wrong for as long as Layton collected a salary there?
However that is, indeed, how Layton is positioning himself - running a consistently negative campaign of "Not so great moments" of his opposition while also pretending that it is a positive message that he is delivering. The prime beneficiary of the fact that the Liberals have done an excellent job defining reasons not to vote for Harper's Conservatives (or, at least, pointing out the reasons why Harper has so ably demonstrated the reasons not to vote for him), but perhaps less compelling a job positioning themselves as the best alternative.
Then again, the reason for that might well be due to the fact that the Liberal platform was constrained by the bounds of reality. To believe the NDP platform you need to be willing to believe that he can come up with nearly $70 Billion more for program spending as well as manage to cover the current budget deficit, all without raising your taxes. Instead this is to be financed on the backs of corporations and through a carbon tax that the NDP admits will take years to implement. You also need to believe that the NDP can find a way to train 1200 new doctors for only $25 Million. Medical schools in Canada are already full, the notion that they can find the teachers, prepare the physical facilities to teach them in, and deal other infrastructure required to turn out doctors at that price must be measured against the Conservative budget of $40 Million required to train just 100 doctors. Frankly, the NDP cost estimate is not realistic.
Indeed, the entire costing model of the NDP platform is unbelievable. Take the job creation tax credit, a nice idea but whose costing in their platform seems to count on the NDP first killing off economic growth in Canada. Over the last year, Canada has added nearly 300,000 jobs to the labour market. Based on Layton's promised "Job Creation Tax Credit" which would provide a credit of up to $4500 / per job created - those growth numbers would have generated a tax credit of up to $1.24 Billion. According to the NDP platform costing document, only $625 Million per year is allocated to that tax credit. To make those numbers work, you either have to assume that employers will be getting only half of the tax credit on average, thus vastly diminishing it as any sort of meaningful incentive, or that job creation will stagnate to about half the current growth under an NDP reign. Neither, frankly, is a terribly appealing notion.
You also have to believe that the Constitution can easily be opened up and "fixed" to make everyone happy, because that is exactly what it would require to make the Parliamentary reforms offered. Stephen Harper proved unwilling to risk opening that can of worms just to implement an elected Senate let alone Layton's plan to abolish it. Mind you, after today's announcement that he is also open to reopening the Quebec Constitutional question, it seems like a new round of Meech would be definitely in the cards. Makes you tremble with excitement doesn't it?
So why does Jack Layton strike a chord? Because many people ARE tired of politics as usual, especially as exemplified by Harper's style of government. But it is one thing to claim to be able to set a new tone in Ottawa, and another to deliver it - especially after running a negative campaign that paints the other guys as the problem. So "The Problem" is suddenly going to play nice? Campfires in the House of Commons replete with s'mores and Kumbaya? It is a nice dream for Jack, but the rest of us live somewhere closer to reality.
So no, Ottawa isn't "broken", and Layton isn't going to be able to fix it even if it were.
Is Ottawa dysfunctional? Perhaps. Viciously partisan? Unfortunately so. But broken? Absolutely not.
A government isn't broken because it is uncivil or just because you don't like the laws it has passed or the decisions it has made, it is broken if it can't legislate. Were Ottawa to have been truly broken, it would have been impossible for Layton to work with the other parties to force a return to the electorate to elicit a new mandate.
But if you take a close look at the NDP platform numbers, you can be sure that under Layton's stewardship Ottawa will be broke!
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