No Name Change for Dippers

No change in policy, no change in leadership, just a name change. Like a woman who changes her name after 25 years of marriage rather than changing her husband.

The name changers must have thought: “Let’s start by changing our name and everything will fall into place.”

There’s one problem with changing names – the acronym will trip you up almost every time.

On time Stephen Harper and Preston Manning, in a name-changing mood for their marriage out of hell between the Reform Party and the Alliance Party, came up with the name Canadian Reform Alliance Party. Worked fine until somebody figured the acronym CRAP might not be too attractive for everybody.

Back in 1976 the Comité Organisateur des Jeux Olympiques chose to call themselves the COJO, a word that in Spanish, the third language of the Olympics after French and English, means “lame” which happened to describe the Games organization quite appropriately.

It could have been worse of course had they chosen “COJONES” which needs no translation.

Back to the NDP. Before 1961 they were called the CCF – the Canadian Commonwealth Federation – a name which meant very little to most people and even less in French.

It was also too close to “CCCP” and those guys in red sweaters who kept beating us at hockey all the time. The last thing social democrats wanted to be called was “communists.” So in 1961 there was a good reason to change the name.

But this time it was different.

The idea of dropping the “N” from “NDP” came from a young Liberal MP from Windsor, Brian Massé, leader of a young group in the party who think that after 48 years “New” is starting to sound a little dated.

There was another reason for dropping the word “New” which you never heard the New Democrats say out loud.

It would have brought them closer to the “Democratic Party” of Barack Obama, the leader every Canadian politician wants to emulate. He’s more popular in Canada than Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe.

Even Harper, the Republican Party’s stalwart fan in Canada, twants to be seen and photographed with Obama all the time – at Guadalajara three weeks ago and – wait for it – at the G-20 meeting in five weeks from now in Pittsburgh.

Back to the name-change Dippers. They never figured out ahead of time that dropping the “N” from “NDP” would make them D.P.s – not something particularly pleasing to the pre-war generation.

In French it would have been even worse. Dropping the “N” would have made them “P.D.s” – French-language slang for pedophiles – again not something to be sought after.

Better stick with good old NDP, which they did.