A road-block to action?

Murry Dobbin is a long-time social activist, journalist and supporter of the New Democratic Party.  He has been associated with groups like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Rabble.ca, and the Council of Canadians, which are to the left of today's NDP. Here he comments about a recent NDP day of action which shows even long-time supporters are upset with their party's rejection of extra-parliamentary action. We reprint a short part of Dobbin's commentary for that reason, which is also discussed by the Young Communist League in its 26th Convention Documents.

On Feb. 22, in the aftermath of a "boring" budget, Thomas Mulcair's NDP undertook a National Day of Action -- a welcome idea that's been long in coming and has the potential over time to be a political game changer...

And yet the potential in this first experiment of engaging Canadians between elections seems to have been squandered by the focus of the day of action. How is it possible that the NDP would finally understand the importance of this kind of citizen engagement and at the same time completely abandon any substantive ideas with which to start a conversation? The whole day of action is one huge political contradiction -- engaging citizens but only after you have redefined them as consumers.