Dobbin spares no rhetorical flourish in his piece and makes a point of tying "true democrats" with the NDP, but he also makes a lot of interesting points.
Like the fact the Conservatives seem hell-bent on catalyzing a movement against them and spitting sparks on our convoluted electoral/democratic system. All because they've gotten it into they're heads that they are an empire now and therefore entitled to a Divine Right of Government.
I find it interesting, though, that like most commentators Murray is focusing on the aggressive, noise-making critics like Idle No More. There's copy in this because such groups already have traction, but there's a broader shift in public consciousness that, thanks to social media, is fundamentally changing the way the political game is played.
People who sell and those who profit by highlighting them are not paying attention to the emerging notion of UGC - User-Generated Content. This is something businesses have started capitalizing on and bureaucracies are proactively starting to harness through the Open Data movement.
What's the opposite of a functionally-fixed government pushing policy that works for it, but nobody else? A conscious and engaged public/public service collaboratively designing the policies they want and demanding government to implement them.
2014 is going to be an interesting year in terms of various threads weaving together - Open Data, Civic Disengagement, Social unrest and of course, elections.
Making this summer a perfect time for a Road Trip to explore and connect these various movements and populations through collaborative discussions and social media promotion of OpenGov.
Should the political big dogs be paying attention to this? Probably not - they have bigger fish to fry.
But more on that later.
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