Swerving to the Left

I feel like there's a huge opportunity headed for us, probably about three or four years from now, right here in Canada. It's a sort of confluence of events that might just lead to a national NDP government.

Yep. I meant what I just said. Here's how I see it.

The key event that triggers this chain of events has already happened: the US losing the war in Iran. That happened, I believe, the day that Iran announced they were closing the Strait of Hormuz. That's the day the US lost.

There is only one way, militarily, to force them to open it. It would, basically, mean a massive invasion of southwestern Iran, a mountainous region with very little place for real beachheads. So probably a largely airborne attack, at first. Boots on the ground, in the tens of thousands.

They'd need to take and hold an arc of Iran that could be 50 or 100km in radius, and which has a population of something like 10 million people. Once the airhead is established, vehicles can be lifted in, artillery, and so on.

So that's how you open the Strait. You need to control the land around it tightly. Root out all the prepared positions they surely have in those mountains against just such an assault.

And if you're thinking that sounds like an awful lot of Dignified Transfers for Trump to ignore, you'd be right. It would be a casualty event unlike anything the US has seen in a week or two since...World War II? Conservatively, in the number of thousands.

Does the US have the political will to do that, and sustain such casualties, for a goal that will, by its nature, require more or less a permanent occupation of this part of Iran by a huge garrison of US troops?

I would contend that it does not have that will. That in fact, such a real solution is pretty much unachievable as long as the US remains something of a democracy. An autocracy might manage it.

So they lost the war. And Trump can't let it stop, because if he does, it's going to be very obvious to everyone who knows geopolitics at all that the US lost the war comprehensively. And that would be a narcissistic injury that he simply cannot abide.

The next step: the invoice in the mail for the war's cost. Not the money. The food shortage that is now baked into next year, because growing seasons don't wait for diplomacy. In short, the choke of fertilizer supplies from the closure of the Strait is going to lead to a major food crisis next year, and the odds are good that a HUGE number of people are going to die, all over the world. The majority, of course, will be viewed as disposable people from the Global South, who were already in a precarious spot for food because of climate change, and the US withdrawal of food aid.

But people who need specialised diets and so on, that's going to be a problem for them even in the industrialised nations. Specialised foods may not be available at all. Maximum yield will require focus on common staples.

Meanwhile, the economy, staggering from the fuel crisis and shock, will, in Canada at least, be given a hard push in the back toward the ledge by the Carney government's austerity budget. We are likely already booked for a recession next year. Adding a government austerity budget at exactly the wrong time - governments traditionally spend MORE when in a recession, to counterbalance the weakness of the private sector - will deepen the recession.

In four years, we will be legally required to have an election. I think it very, very unlikely that Carney will call for an early one. As we approach that date, the recession will be going on, the people squeezed hard by inflation and food prices, and Carney's government pushing "it's good for what ails you" austerity.

At the same time, Pierre Poilievre shows no sign of beginning to understand his role as an anchor on a short line, as far as the Tories' electoral chances go.

So we move toward 2030 with a staggering economy, people struggling hard in an economy that Carney made worse.

It is in that space that I see the gap the NDP can aim to fill: the Liberals looking like they'll be smoked for Carney's mishandling and his right-wing security agenda of anti-privacy and pro-corporate and surveillance powers. And after 15 years of Trudeau's corruption and cronyism along with Carney's Tory platform...time for a change, right? That's a real historical pattern for Canada.

The Tories still led by a guy who has a steel helmet attached to his boots...and the helmet makes him stoop to just 30% of the vote nationally.

Into that gap walks a personable, knowledgeable, smart-talking democratic socialist, an outsider from a family of NDP stalwarts who mostly never achieved office. His wife is very popular on the left and centre.

If he brings an economic populist agenda - tax the rich, institute a wealth tax (maybe a one-off? maybe a repeating thing on a longer-term basis than yearly?), stop subsidising fossil fuels, nationalise the tar sands, and stop exporting it. Use it only for our country, and return the money to the government to fight the effects of that oil being burnt. We've given away enough of the natural resources of our (collectively-owned) country to obscenely rich people. End pipeline use and building.

Return the land to its owners. Do a landback on treaty land: define the boundaries as the treaty says, and give the Indigenous nations the right to safeguard their treaty land - ownership of land is not generally a right within Indigenous cultures. People living on those lands would need to pay their local taxes to the nation whose land it is, and follow the nation's laws and guidance on allowable uses of the land.

With that agenda? And the Liberals ripe for a kicking, and the Tories not seen as a viable federal government...that looks to me like opportunity on the hoof.

Maybe a UBI? Maybe lots of things.

Does any of this sound familiar? Because what I just said also basically describes Zohran Mamdani's election in New York City. Yes. I am seriously proposing that Avi Lewis is capable of generating an NDP that can win that election, with a leftist populist economic agenda. Something where social justice informs the choices of government, rather than "Does Line Go Up Faster?"

Anyway. That's what I see coming. Inevitably, other things will happen, but I don't see any sudden large sources of good news on the horizon. I'm literally just sighting along the events we already have seen, to look at the places where they lead.