Michael Tandt Race To The Middle Class Analysis

Michael Den Tandt's article: "Race to the middle: Rhetoric aside, the major parties have near unanimity on key policies" discusses the lack of ideological differences that exist amongst Canadian political party leaders in their upcoming election campaigns. He argues that the party platforms of the NDP, Liberals, and Conservatives are similar in that they all explicitly speak of the need to implement policies that support the middle class. The article argues that the votes usually come down to a "relatively small cohort of swing voters who are apolitical, not interested in the process and liable to vote their family's economic interest first." This is why he claims that we see policies on all three sides merging together to gain votes from …show more content…
He then goes on to say the support of the middle class does not represent any of these traditional ideological values of the parties. It is quite disconcerting that the political leaders seem to create a large amount of policy based on gaining a target amount of votes from people who do not really need help or do not support the business needs of the country. The suggestion that all political parties only share a single common interest and that that interest is winning the votes of the middle class is really a quite cynical and depressing way of looking at our political system. The author makes a good point that this conversion of policies intended to target specific voters does seem to be happening to a certain extent, but to go so far as to say that the parties in Canada do not hold ideological values in their policies is a little bit of an …show more content…
Those who have more environmental concerns and left wing views will certainly not receive the policies they want if Harper is re-elected and those who support Harper's right-wing views will certainly not agree with the policies that Mulcair and Trudeau have promised to put in place. The article "Policy Attitudes of Party Members in Canada: Evidence of Ideological Politics" by William Cross and Lisa Young suggest, through a series of surveys and research; that attitudes amongst party members on the main political factors of Social Tolerance, Laissez-faire Economic Approach, Provincial Powers and Populism are quite similar among party members that belong to specific parties. It is easy to place each party on a certain ideological part of the spectrum no matter their shared initiatives to help the middle class. The results of this study showed that Canadian political parties do have a structure based strongly on the attitudes of party members. These attitudes are undoubtedly manifested in their policies: showing an ideological system rather than