Ed Broadbent led the New Democratic Party (NDP) for 14 years, from 1975 to 1989, succeeding David Lewis and stepping down after the 1988 election, making him the most successful NDP leader at the time by securing 43 seats and positioning the party as a more legitimate national force.
Some years ago here in my files of blithering, I posted my A.R.M. Document. At that time, I suggested intentionally voiding one’s ballot, as a protest against the rigged money system of voting. Those must be counted, at least in many, if not all jurisdictions within Canada. Who knows what the legal protocol is in other countries?
Despite my former allegiance to the NDP for many decades, plus my adoration for Ed, the man and his stand for justice and equality, my gut sense is that with the reversal of governance through Inverted Totalitarianism; i.e., the corporations now tell governments worldwide what’s trump, (vide: Sheldon Wolin) voting will not get the societal change needed to reverse this spiritual deficit humans are mostly completely blind to.
55 years ago at 20, I was a boy in a man’s body, still wet behind the ears, as far as what could be achieved through overt political action.
Truth is a matter of fiction, since in war, and make no mistake, the working class has been in an information war long before the digital age began. Truth is the first wartime casualty; an old line. What we are all experiencing now is the classic Marxist class war between those who own and those who work, the employing class and their employees; yeah, you wage slaves; ‘cept you don’t know that, let alone admit you are one. hahaha
- Truth depends upon where we access information.
- Who the investigative journalists work for and their lineage of analytic coverage.
- What filters we apply as individuals as to the veracity of those statements?
- Who benefits from decisions we are all asked to implement?
Also, a little while ago, the good American liberal Bret Weinstein with his dear wife Heather Heying interviewed by Tucker Carlson, theorized that the West has already fallen, since, we have entered the unemotional intellectual territory of amorality, not knowing nor discussing the diff between right and wrong, such as Germany and AmeriKa sending munitions to Israel to support their genocide of the Palestinian people. Reminds me of yet ‘nother dictum: “What is our oil doin’ beneath your sand?” The so-called bombing campaign by the Zionists is only ’bout land. I digress…or due eye? hahaha
The following is my memory of an earlier and far simpler era, where politics and voting may have had a chance outta the gate, at placing the human within the natural world, without which, he cannot take our next breath.
I remember Landslide Ed well, as he was then nicknamed from my earliest recollection in 1968, when he first ran for the Federal NDP in Oshawa, my hometown. I was barely 20, finishing a 5 year part-time school job as assistant caretaker at the Oshawa (McLaughlin) Public Library. Trudeau-mania was sweeping the country. And so it was that Canada too, developed a hero-worship of a kind, based upon the shallowness of looks and athletic agility, not to mention a gift for gab; as if one man could fix all that ailed any country.
Ed came as a green poli-sci prof from York U, if memory serves. He was severely chastised by UAW 222 president Abe Taylor for wearing a tweed jacket and drivin’ a Volvo, of all things. Abe told Ed that if he wanted to be elected, he’d better buy a Chevrolet and nix that sport jacket. Ed ran against Mike Starr, (Labour Minister in Dief’s PC cabinet) who was for a time earlier, known by his Ukrainian surname of Mike Starchewsky. Mike was told to Anglicize that. He concurred. Such was/is the pressure for political office. There were two ballot counts in the Oshawa riding in June of 1968, with Ed winning each time; the second recount was slightly larger in single digits (8 vs 11 or 15…not much anyway). Memory fades after 55 years in this elder adult genre.
I met Ed several times while in my first year of University at the then Waterloo Lutheran U, now Sir Wilfrid Laurier U. My best friend at the time was Bill Rutherford Jr. Together we made over 2000 hand silk-screened Bristol-board lawn signs for Ed’s 1968 campaign run, using the ole squeegee method and building supply store 1×2’s for the stakes. Bill was son of Bill Rutherford Sr., the union president of Houdaille Industries, manufacturer of automotive bumpers and bathtubs.
The workers loved Bill Sr., a known Communist Party member, as he won for his workers the best benefit packages and biggest pay contracts in that industrialist city, over and above what Abe’s 222 local won for the blue collar workers at GM. It’s interesting in how the office white collar workers got pay increases only after the union won for their blue-collar workers raises. So much for corporate largesse and benevolence. Do you know the real diff between blue and white collar workers? We blue boys shower and bathe after we work in the evening; while the white collar dudes and dudettes wash and bathe in the AM before they herd in to do the man’s dirty work. Imagine that, eh?! hahaha Oshawa is now a bedroom community for Big Smoke commuters, since GM is a fading shadow of its once marketplace dominance, sigh.
In 1969 I was elected VP of Education for the Federal NDY, the youth branch of the party, at a small national convention in an Oshawa union hall. We were all quite radical in those dayze; a few of us remain so, alas. I wear a t-shirt with the words “UNAPOLOGETICALLY AUTHENTIC” emblazoned upon it. Yet ‘nother says: “MAKE 1984 FICTION AGAIN”. Usually, I am looked upon with eyes rolled backwards when sayin’ or sporting those words on my clothing.
The Federal NDY supported the Waffle group led by Laxer and Watkins, whose sole intention was to shift the party back to its socialist origins with the X-tian ministers from the Prairies like Douglas and Woodsworth, through discussion and democracy at the local riding level. Check out Tommy’s YT video of Mouseland, the speech he gave in 1969 at the Oshawa Ukranian Hall. Ed did not support the move to affirm the essence of the Waffle’s manifesto. He could not. There were other powerful players that swayed many; principally the Lewis brigade (David, Stephen and Michael behind the scenes), alas.
Ed believed in and promulgated the notion of Industrial Democracy. This is where workers at factories, (in the dayze before the West made the enormous tactical error of giving away our industrial base to China), had a duty, indeed a gawd-given right to own: A) a say in how consumable items were made, B) how the profits from the sale of those widgets would be distributed and C) a fair distribution of seats at the boardroom table on how the company was run. All of that was capitalist heresy then, nowadays perhaps even more so. The term Industrial Democracy could be and was to some extent, used interchangeably with ~ socialism, social democracy, participatory democracy, democratic socialism (by definition this phrase is redundant) and oft-times by the uninitiated ignore-ant as Alan Watts uses the term, as a form of communism (Marxian, not to be confused with Stalinism or State Capitalism). Industrial Democracy was a decent attempt at soft-peddlin’ phraseology, for the sake of injecting true democracy into the workplace.
In my second year, I moved up the street to the so-called engineer’s palace, “the plumbers’ school”, Waterloo U, where poli-sci became my major. Ed loaned me his Ph.D. dissertation on the social democracy of John Stuart Mill, a liberal English writer, philosopher and political theoretician. In October of 1970, after True-Dough the Sr, invoked the country-wide WMA (War Measures Act) for a local Quebec insurrection, I dropped outta university, yet, have never ceased learning, as my curiosity as to how the human + natural world functions, is as avid today, as it was then. Professors at Waterloo were being arrested by police alongside the then undercover army boys for entertaining radical left-wing viewpoints. Wow, imagine some folks not towin’ the propaganda of our governments. Or even having’ a different opinion, based on government published stats, such as the correlation, of excess deaths with the injections of the so-called vaccines during the scamdemic. Only then, eh?! hahaha! Few recall that the WMA exercised no habeas corpus, no phone call to a lawyer, or a parent/spouse/next of kin plus internment for an undisclosed time period without charge. Chief among the analytical metaphors, that has been for this scribbler then, as it is now, as it has always been: Follow the money!
I’ve yet to meet anyone who remembers the excellent Quebec news magazine of the day called The Last Post. Its tagline was Publish-it and be Dammed. As an aside, recently, Tucker Carlson, of whom I had no love when he was gainfully employed by Foxy Entertainment, masquerading as a NEWS outlet, gave a speech in Al Freakin’ Berta where he said (paraphrasing…) ‘Canadians won’t talk ’bout anything!’ Duh, now how did he know?! I’m still in love with interrobangs. My fondness for this country is not lost on my own yuk yuk that: Canada is the biggest island on planet E-air-th (spelling courtesy of David Abram in his tome: Becoming Animal) everyone’s livin’ here on permanent vacation.
Ed wanted Canada to move beyond the social welfare state. There’s a good link here in Jacobin to describe that essence from Ed.
I never met Ed again, as he went to Ottawa as an MP; I got married, raised 3 offspring as a product of me own protoplasm, with my then spouse near Belleville and Brighton ON-Terrible (expats only allowed), heartily entered the world of vulgar materialism as a woodworker, using the many guises in that profession (sawyer, carpenter, cabinetmaker, furniture maker, veneerist and finally high-performance loudspeaker manufacturer under the brand of Waveform) to earn a living. One should not entertain the notion, that the words capitalist and entrepreneur are synonymous, as they diverge qualitatively.
Thanks so much for this opportunity to remember a fine human being, an early mentor of mine in the man of Ed Broadbent, who served his riding constituents and the citizens of Canada proudly and honourably. Many blessings Thy departed, but, not forgotten by those who remember.
The above image was posted on the passing of Ed Broadbent at their site: Broadbent Institute .
The bulk of this storey was sent to the Broadbent Institute for publication, since they solicited such ramblings.
I sincerely appreciate your reading down this far. 🙏
I AM John Gabriel Ötvös, aka jayöh.