Reflections on Thomas Mulcair, new leader of the NDP

This weekend (March 25-26), the New Democratic Party (NDP) elected its new leader, who instantly becomes Leader of the Opposition. For those unacquainted with Canadian-style federal politics, several important qualities distinguish it from both the American and the British schemes. In some senses, it is a mix of both those forerunners. In Canada, we elect parties rather than the individuals who lead them. Any party is entitled to replace its leader simply by holding a leadership convention.  Canada, unlike the United States, has several political parties, not just two.

In the case of the NDP, the leadership convention was held because its former leader, Jack Layton, died of cancer last August. Before he died, when he was too sick to continue, he appointed Ms. Nycole Turmel as interim leader. She held the reins until this weekend, when Thomas Mulcair was elected after four rounds of voting and several hours’ delay thanks to some cyber-attacks on the voting software. (This has been traced to two IP addresses, but so far no fingers have been pointed.)

Jack (everyone calls him Jack, not Mr. Layton) achieved something historic in Canadian politics. Although it won the right to govern in several provinces, the NDP had never before become the Official Opposition at the federal level. This was in part because Jack was born in Montreal; his command of French was not fluent, but very good, good enough to satisfy Quebecers. Of particular note is the fact that the NDP had never before won so many seats in Quebec. In part, this was due to the widespread loss of faith in the Bloc Quebecois, a party consisting solely of Quebecers and at least in theory dedicated to the eventual separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada.

Another thing distinguishes the NDP from the other parties in Canada. Every member of the party gets one vote. There are no backroom brokers. In the other parties (and in the past, also in the NDP), losing candidates could cross the floor and throw their supporters’ votes to another candidate. No more, in the NDP. Granted, Mr. Mulclair was endorsed by Ed Broadbent, the elder statesman of the party, but that is a far cry from backroom politics.

Another remarkable thing about the leadership convention was the proportion of young people. Jack used to say that when he was contesting the party leadership, he often found himself the youngest person in the room.

What of Thomas Mulcair? First, he is from Quebec and is fluently bilingual. He was also the first NDP candidate to be elected within Quebec. Under Jack’s leadership, Mr. Mulclair played the pit bull to Jack’s conciliator; more than a few within the NDP believe that it takes a pit bull to fight one, and if anything is certain in Canadian politics, it is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a pit bull with an agenda and is willing to ride roughshod over anyone who stands in his way, and over anything, including the Constitution and criminal law.

Yet Mr. Mulcair’s speeches contained much about moving toward the political centre. Some candidates and party members heard this as an abandonment of traditional core values within the party. In my view that is not the case; rather, given the collapse of the Liberal party (which was traditionally either the government or the Opposition) in the last federal election, Mr. Mulcair sees this moment as the opportunity to bring thousands of former Liberals into the NDP tent.

Prime Minister Harper, meanwhile, has moved steadily further and further to the right, alienating a sizable number of what we call soft-Conservatives. The next election is not for three and a half years, which in my view is a bad thing for Canada but probably a good thing for the NDP, in the sense that it will have time to get its sea legs, dream of actually winning the next election, and ponder what to do in the event of a minority government. (A majority government, as we have now, is a situation in which the governing party holds more seats than all the others combined, and thus can pretty much do whatever it wants. A minority government can be tossed from power anytime the other parties outvote it, although in practice there is a distinction between critical bills (votes of confidence) such as the federal budget, and less critical bills, whose failure to pass will not trigger an election.

There has been some talk about the NDP and the Liberals forming a coalition next time around. This could be a formal coalition or just a strategic one, in which both parties agree not to run candidates in ridings considered to be shoe-ins for the other party. On the other hand, some NDPers feel that since 1994, there has been almost nothing to distinguish Liberals from Conservatives. I would hold that while this may well apply to the Liberal leadership, there is no reason to believe it applies to the rank and file.

Today (March 26) is Mr. Mulcair’s first day in Parliament as Leader of the Opposition. Whether he comes out like a pit bill or in the always-polite and genteel mode of Jack remains to be seen. Nobody, especially his opponents, disputes Mr. Mulcair’s masterful debating skills and sharp wit. My own opinion is that he should hand off the pit-bull collar to someone else in the shadow cabinet, and shift to Jack’s mode for himself. Still, I do expect him to hit the Conservatives very hard in their weak spots – the RoboCall scandal (in which thousands of voters who stated to canvassers that they were not going to vote Conservative received erroneous phone calls allegedly from the offices of Elections Canada, telling them their voting polls had changed and directing them elsewhere); the G20 diversion of money away from security issues and into ludicrous projects in Tony Clement’s riding, that clearly had nothing to do with security; forcing Air Canada pilots back to work when they were in a clearly legal position to strike (the justification for which was the travel plans of students and families during Spring Break); and a host of others.

We shall soon see.

Retro Programming Skills

Recently I have received several emails from headhunters with whom I have done business previously, and the nature of said emails nature provokes me to write about this. In recent days I have received the following:

1. Six-month contract for PowerBuilder expert. I don't think I qualify as an expert, but I've spent some serious time wrestling this pig to the ground, and I hate this language.
2. Three-month contract for Access 2003, for the government of Ontario. Who remembers Access 2003? It was so buggy that MS released Access XP a year later, and everyone I know immediately moved to it. Apparently the government of Ontario did not; call it Software Gravity or something; why any organization would prefer to stick to a version known to be riddled with bugs rather than migrate is beyond me. This is not to be interpreted as suggesting an eager adoption of any technology not suffixed by "SP1" or better.
3. Contract for a Clipper developer (6 months anticipated duration, perhaps longer, depending on performance). Ok, I wrote a couple of books about Clipper programming and created a company to sell a few libraries for Clipper programmers, and yes, we sold enough copies to pay the rent and the hydro and the employees, for a few years basking in the sun. But we under-anticipated the adoption of Windows, and missed the boat on transition to this new world, and although we never had to declare bankruptcy, we were forced to close the doors. Although I think that I can claim serious expertise in the world of Clipper programming, I do NOT want to return to the world of DOS, except in a VM and only then for reasons of nostalgia.
4. An offer for a contract specifying a minimum of 4 years' experience in VS C# 2010. Basic arithmetic would deem this requirement impossible, but to mention that is to invite immediate discard into the pile of Rejections.

All this is pretty much OK with me. Most of you may not recognize the name "Jack Layton", a Canadian politician who passed mid-last-year. He was Leader of the Opposition, having won a landslide in Quebec (thanks to his bilingualism and much to the shock of the Parti Quebecois, but that's another story).

Back when Jack and his soon-to-become wife Olivia Chow were City Councillors in Toronto, and the leading software at the time was DOS on IBM-PCs or clones, I wrote the campaign-management software for Jack and OC (that became her nickname). The software was not especially complex; just a couple of dozen tables and a lot of time-sensitive reports. But it did the trick, and in some small way helped Jack and OC hold their positions. I did all that work gratis (free), and took pride in helping, in my small way, the advance of two people who I felt would enhance the political landscape in Canada. I am proud to have made this small contribution to the advance of the NDP agenda within Toronto, and Ontario, and Canada.

The saddest part about this story is that less than a year after Jack's triumph (and the NDP's triumph), Jack passed away from cancer. This might rank as the saddest event in the history of Canadian national politics. Jack redefined the political landscape in Canada, and sadly didn't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his triumph. This fills me with profound sadness. We go back to the days when he and Olivia were City Counsellors in Toronto. I have known them both since then, even before they were married, and when a departed friend called Dan Heap was still part of the equation.

I began with Jack in the days of DOS. I fondly recall a day in his office. I was the DBA guy and was allowed entry to his office. His DOS computer was passworded. It took me all of three minutes to get past that, and to update his campaign software. When later that day, he arrived at his office and found me working on his updates, he asked, "How did you get in?" And I replied, "Who do you want to keep out? Your average user, or me? Two different levels of protection are required."

This was decades ago, and penetration was easier back then. It remains easy, given certain knowledge, but back then all it took was a reboot from a floppy; now it is (slightly more, but not much) more complicated. Unless you're seriously into computing and programming and security, I venture that I can get in within an hour -- not that I have that intention, but it's not very complicated to penetrate almost every allegedly secure site. Rocket science is not required, in many cases I have investigated.

Most people use immediately-remembered identities such as birthyear, birthmonth+day, surname spelled backwards, nickname of first-born-daughter + initial of one's surname. All such passwords are easily grabbed, knowing even a trite of data about the target. Hence, you are a target. I confess that my own account (too easily deduced) has been compromised, and that's when I learned my lesson; and my lesson is this. Make sure that:

1. Your password consists of at least 10 characters.
2, Your password  includes at least a few Capitals, Lower Case letters, and Special Case characters.
3. In case you forget it, that you can deduce it from a Hint or two (for example, My Youngest Sibling; what is not declared is that this name should be entered backwards, right to left, and prepended and suffixed by some special characters. The point is, that if you forget what the password is, you can deduce it from a relatively simple set of rules, known only to you.

A.