The NDP's campaign disaster was much more than a failure to communicate [View all]

By Michael Laxer

According to the NDP and its leader it is now official -- what we've got here is a failure to communicate.

In a note entitled "Personal Reflections" that was posted to the NDP's website and emailed out to those on its email list, NDP leader Tom Mulcair made a show of appearing to "take full responsibility" for the debacle of a campaign he ran and accepted the predictably tepid conclusions of the "Interim Report" of Rebecca Blakie's Campaign Review Working Group that he had appointed to allegedly look into what went so very wrong.

"I agree with the over-arching assessment [of the report] that our campaign came up short," Mulcair writes, in one of the great statements of the obvious in recent political memory.

While one might note that a leader who accepted full responsibility for such a totally catastrophic result would actually generally do the right thing by their party and resign to leave its stewardship in abler hands, as always with the NDP, the devil is in the details when it comes to both the report itself and the mea culpa on Muclair's part.

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2016/02/ndps-campaign-disaster-was-much-more-failure-to-communicate