Jack on the Rocks

As several outlets have noted, today's shuffle in the House of Commons now means that the NDP hold the the power in the current Parliament - crunch the numbers yourself here.

I wrote a month or so ago that the NDP needed to take some action to avoid being blended into a pulp by pressure from the Liberal and Green parties. One might be tempted to suggest that the NDP could now use their newfound clout to make themselves look good on the national stage by propping up some of the relatively scummy (as opposed to plain ol' repugnant) pieces of Conservative agenda, and then taking credit very loudly.

Conventional wisdom says that this strategy would be a good idea, for the NDP if not for progressive Canadians (who are watching the country go down the drain). Sometimes conventional wisdom is even right.

Here is the problem though: the NDP's influence with the Conservative party lacks credibility. I'm not saying it doesn't exist - but its existence reeks of such partisan self-interest that, for a party keen to take the moral high ground, such a dissonance between professed values and how they're put into practice might be too much to for its long-suffering supporters to bear.

Simply: if Jack Layton does a deal with the devil, there are gonna be a lot of people who will be very unhappy, and also very unimpressed. Including, to some extent, the national media. The NDP got a lot of positive coverage when it was playing roadie to the Paul Martin Farewell Tour. But Stephen Harper makes Kurt Cobain look like Shirley Temple. And for the NDP, I'm not sure that the adage that "there's no such thing as bad press" is gonna hold water.