[LINK] "Thomas Mulcair would bring Harper’s dream of Liberals’ demise closer to reality"

[rfmcdonald]

At the National Post's Full Comment blog, Michael Den Tandt makes the plausible point that the Conservative Party might well want Québec NDP MP Thomas Mulcair, front-runner in the NDP's leadership race, to win. Why? Mulcair might be a good enough leader to help eviscerate the remains of the Liberal Party, and his leadership would strengthen the NDP position in Québec, but Mulcair might also be unable to pull the NDP close enough to the economic centre to let it challenge the Conservative Party.

(Of course, the mention of Tony Blair and New Labour is something that should make people worry. Right, Britons?)

The Harper Conservatives are already training their cannons on the New Democrat front-runner, some say, because he is the one they most fear. Mulcair’s combativeness, experience and brains make him a formidable foe. Moreover, he’s the New Democrat best placed to pull a “Tony Blair,” and shift the party further to the centre, where conceivably, it might contend for power.

But there’s another line of thinking, which suggests a Mulcair victory would suit Prime Minister Stephen Harper just fine. It gets back to Harper’s lifelong dream of destroying the Liberal party. Mulcair, it is believed by those who’ve seen him work in Quebec, has the capacity to wipe out or to absorb the Liberals. A Liberal-Democratic Party would necessarily position itself left of where the Liberals stood in their small-c-conservative period in the late 1990s. And that would at last leave the economic centre unobstructed, which is precisely what Harper wants.

[. . .]

Mulcair has taken great pains to avoid open comparisons with former British prime minister Tony Blair, who held power in the U.K. from 1997 to 2007, after jettisoning the most impossible of the British Labour Party’s socialist policies. But the parallels are clear. A couple of weeks ago, I asked Mulcair about the NDP’s reputation as a party that doesn’t understand kitchen-table economics. “To concede the point,” he said, “we’ve always been very conscious of the fact that a majority of Canadians share most of our goals and values. It’s been difficult in the past to convince them that we can provide good, competent, confident public administration.”

His solution, he said, would be to demonstrate while in Opposition that “we’re capable of running a G7 country.” Reading between the lines, in my judgment, that means he intends to pull a Blair.

Small wonder then, that there’s more than a whiff of fear, in Liberal ranks, at the prospect of a Mulcair victory. Should he transform the NDP into a mass-market party, as Blair did to New Labour, what remains of Liberal support could easily bleed away, permanently. In that event, a merger — say in 2014, after the smoke of the Liberals’ own leadership race has cleared — would be more akin to a takeover.

How would this benefit the Conservatives? Gerry Nicholls, a conservative consultant who worked alongside Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, holds that this PM would love nothing better than to do politics in a two-party system. That’s because, in a standup fight between a socially moderate party of the centre-right and a party of the centre-left, this PM believes Conservatives will win every time — because most Canadians, while socially moderate, are economic conservatives. The Liberal party, because of its chameleon-like ability to mould its ideology as needed, will always be a threat to the Conservatives. But a Liberal-Democratic Party, with the history of the NDP embedded in its DNA? Perhaps, not so much.