Ottawa

On the applicability of Tony Blair analogies

At the outset of his campaign, Thomas Mulcair brushed aside a comparison to Tony Blair and instead invoked Gary Doer and Lorne Calvert. One of his supporters, NDP MP Dan Harris, explicitly refuted the comparison to Britain’s Labour party.

Thomas Mulcair, who has officially joined the NDP leadership race, wants to transform the party to appeal to more Canadians, but he’s not moving rightward like Tony Blair, the former British Labour leader who famously sought a “Third Way,” his supporters say.

“The Third Way would be a compromising of our values and principles just to open the door” to more people, said Dan Harris, a first-time MP from Scarborough-Southwest who was in Montreal Thursday backing Mulcair’s candidacy. Blair embraced privatization and hiked tuition fees, Harris said. Mulcair, on the other hand, “is trying to talk about the economy and to be fiscally responsible and (say) that we are going to live within our means. I don’t think Tom is going to compromise our values.”

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