Conundrum: Niki Ashton and the NDP leadership campaign

Given the truly inspiring turn of events within the Labour Party in the UK under Corbyn over the last couple of years it is not at all surprising that leftists in Canada are hoping that perhaps these conditions can be recreated here and within the country's mainstream social democratic party the NDP.


With the examples of Corbyn and also, allegedly, of Sanders in the United States, some have even gone so far as to state, as in the case of Rick Salutin "Forget about starting new left-wing parties. You can actually work within corrupt cadavers like Labour and the Democrats, aspire to take them over, and move on to power. I’d never have believed it but the evidence is there."

Except, of course, the "evidence" is not really there at all, a point to which we will return. This is even setting aside the fact that the "evidence", such as it is, entirely ignores what is occurring in Western European countries outside of the UK as well as ignoring what is happening right here in Quebec, where it has been completely due to the creation and emergence of new parties that we witnessed a revival of a socialist and communist left.

For now, though, what is left of the NDP's left is coalescing around the interesting campaign of Niki Ashton. This includes a variety of formations from the newly minted Momentum to the entryist Fightback. Meanwhile, yet another grouping called 'Courage' has been added to this mix that also comprises the long-standing Socialist Caucus. (While Momentum and Forward have endorsed Ashton, to date Courage and the Socialist Caucus have not.)

Historically formations of this type within the NDP have been anything but effective and there is little to indicate that this is changing.

Ashton did not (unlike Corbyn) come from any dissident activist thread within the party and is not the actual candidate (other than by the endorsement of some) of any of these groups. In fact, initially two of the groups actively tried to recruit a different candidate, Sid Ryan, and did so after Ashton had already announced.

Unlike both Sanders (who was not even a Democrat until his run for the nomination) or Corbyn she was an uncritical member of the caucuses of her leaders Mulcair and Layton as they shifted the party to the right and she went along with any number of Third Way and Blairite positions from the catastrophic Libya intervention to the ludicrously reactionary balanced budget pledge without saying anything about them at the time.

If we are to be told that she had no choice but to do this then really that says a great deal about the undemocratic and insular nature of the NDP none of which is good. Will she have no choice again should she lose?

Her first campaign for the leadership in 2012 showed little of the leftism of this one which does leave one wondering if it is in its own way opportunistic. While she speaks in terms of building a 'movement' now she has not made it at all clear that she would continue to fight for the leftist positions within the party should she lose and has, like Sanders did within the Democrats, essentially promised to get totally on board with the new leader in that self-defeating faux-collegial way New Democrats always do. We also have to take her at her implied word that she will re-democratize a party that has been run completely from the top down.

In must be noted that largely due to a relatively unfair and somewhat rigged system, Sanders did not actually achieve anything like what Corbyn did, the Democrats have not shifted left, Sanders has now integrated himself into the upper leadership of a dreadfully right-wing and stridently Wall St party and by doing so has led his "revolution" to dissipation and defeat. The notion that the Democrats in the US are going to become a vehicle for leftist or socialist change and that the "evidence" -- as cited supposedly by Salutin -- is there that this can or will occur is the purest tilting at windmills and farcically idealistic and not in the good sense of the term. It would seem that Sanders' very attempt to work within the Democratic Party has fatally undermined all that he originally was ostensibly fighting for.

Sanders has squandered the energy and enthusiasm of his campaign that would have been much better spent trying to construct a new political formation with other parties and movements. Sanders' campaign is a lesson to Canadian leftists, but not in the way it is generally represented.

In the case of Labour even during the Third Way era it remained relatively democratic compared to the NDP and, more to the point, had open and overt dissenters within its caucus and Corbyn was one of those. He also built a genuine movement during his leadership run (Momentum) that would have carried on even had he lost initially. His campaign was not simply about him winning-- he was not expected to win by anyone -- even though he ultimately did.

Nothing remotely analogous to this is occurring within Ashton's campaign to date. Unlike either Sanders or Corbyn, Ashton has not generated anything like the mass enthusiasm (as evidenced by huge rallies, a penetration into popular consciousness, etc.) among the broader public that was not simply essential to their respective phenomena but is also crucial to the very basis of a long term anti-capitalist project. In part this has to be because she does not even appear to be really attempting to do this.

All of this means that like Sanders this is less a 'movement' than a social democratic version of what used to be called a cult of personality, only a not terribly effective one outside of the confines of leftist activists. As long as Ashton is running the inorganic "movement" she personifies exists. The second she loses, if she does, it will cease to.

Many of us predicted it would with Sanders. It seems likely to in Ashton's case as well.

I think it is also reasonable to say that leftists outside of the party are being asked to take a "leap of faith" and to rejoin a party that has been more directly harmful to the socialist idea in this country than any other in the last few years as it has directly repudiated its very connection historically with even a cursory anti-capitalist stance.

It can, of course, be argued that it has been so for many years, but by taking such steps as removing the very word from the constitution and running on explicitly Third Way platforms as both Layton and Mulcair did the party has become a liberal party in every meaningful sense of the term. The silly slogans or rantings of some of the NDP's more demented partisans to the contrary, any resemblance between the NDP and a socialist party is purely in their own minds.

This leaves us with a serious conundrum. Given that Ashton is the only candidate to have even rhetorically embraced an anti-capitalist narrative and given the limitations of both this narrative and her campaign to what degree does this represent a serious opportunity and to what degree is this simply another possible detour?

The trouble is the real danger that we are encouraging people to mimic an already existing approach in Canada's case that has failed since the 70s and even more so since the victory of Layton which some at the time foolishly saw as a victory for the party's left (it was quite the opposite). This strategy would have us simply go along with the new leader whoever it is for the foreseeable future should Ashton's bid fall short and pretend that this is somehow part of trying to create a "socialist" movement.

What events in the US, the UK, France and elsewhere have shown us is that the collaborationist 'social democracy' and liberalism of Blair and the French Socialist Party, etc., is collapsing due to its internal contradictions and bankruptcy and that candidates running on left platforms in general elections can win. But they have not at all shown us that the parties that were the vehicles for this Third Way bankruptcy can be vehicles for its overturn in conditions as varied as Canada is from the UK.

As long as Ashton' s campaign exists there is at least something of an argument to temporarily join the NDP to support her and see where it leads.

But when and if it fails this argument is gone and becomes but a new echo of an old and tired refrain that serves as little more than an excuse to not organize something that could be a vehicle that would actually represent an anti-capitalist electoral political path forward.

Update: Since this piece was first published the Socialist Caucus has made a "critical" endorsement of Ashton, while the group Momentum has apparently withdrawn their endorsement of her.

Other Readings: Resolutionary Socialism: Why a leftist agenda within the NDP is futile

See also: Niki Ashton releases strongest Canadian federal social democratic tax platform in a generation

See also: Saskatoon NDP debate sees testy exchanges and a strong outing from Angus

NDP needs to remember that it is really the centrists and 'Third Way' that lost in the US and UK

In what can only be read as a rather defensive and bizarre apologia for the NDP's election strategy catastrophe in 2015, former National Director of the NDP Karl Bélanger has penned an op-ed (in the Toronto Sun no less!) called "NDP needs to remember that Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders lost". It is the saddest attempt that I have seen to date from a Canadian 'progressive' to downplay and minimize exactly what it is that Corbyn recently accomplished in the UK.

By doing so he presumably seeks to caution against attempts to change course from the more centrist NDP campaigns run by Layton (whose senior press secretary he was) and then Mulcair (for whom he worked as Principal Secretary). He also frames the success (insofar as he is willing to grant it) of Corbyn and Sanders as being primarily about "millennials" with seemingly no sense that was about a lot more than that including more importantly the return of left-wing class politics and the simmering of a revolt against grotesque inequality and the devastating consequences of a generation of neo-liberal austerity.

Bélanger's analysis is deeply flawed in a number of ways.

First, the 'losing' campaign of Sanders is not actually analogous to the UK election or to the next general one in Canada for the simple reason that what he didn't win was a rather unfair and corrupted nomination process against a party establishment that actively worked to stop him. He did not 'lose' the presidential election as he was not given the chance to. The centrist, mainstream candidate Hillary Clinton did that! Whether he would have won the general election or not we will never know but to say Sanders 'lost' in the same way Layton or Corbyn did is simply wrong.

Trying, one assumes, to seem fair, Bélanger draws an analogy between Layton in 2011 and Corbyn, noting "Despite the spin and euphoria created by the Orange Wave, the stark reality was that Stephen Harper won the election while the NDP lost."

While this is true (though, ironically, you would never have thought it listening to Layton on election night that year or to NDP partisans for the next four) it also fails to continue with what then happened next with the NDP's centrist approach which was the relegation of that party back to third party status, the loss of over 50 seats, nearly 11% of the popular vote, and a Liberal majority! The story did not stop in 2011 for the NDP. And I have little doubt that had the NDP instead managed to hold Harper to a minority while picking up seats and increasing the popular vote as Labour did that Bélanger -- and other NDP insiders or columnists -- would have been beside himself in his triumphalism.

(One might also note the result in 2011 led Canada from a Conservative minority to a Conservative majority government while in the UK Corbyn's Labour did exactly the opposite.)

As to the notion that "in Canada, it is Justin Trudeau that is still the millennials’ champion" even if true it is only true as the NDP has ceded to him this ground. That is actually an argument for a new approach and a shift, not against one.

In Canada the centrist approach was supposed to deliver the goods but did not.

The same cannot at all be said of Corbyn and Labour's left shift. As Lee Brown noted, "Jeremy Corbyn just made history with the greatest increase in Labour’s vote share since 1945."  Never mind that, as Jonathan Cook noted (among other things) in his must read "The facts proving Corbyn’s election triumph":

In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. But let’s recall the price Blair paid for that very small margin of improvement over Corbyn’s vote. Behind the scenes, he sold Labour’s soul to the City, the corporations and their lobbyists. That Faustian pact secured Blair the backing of most of the media, including Rupert Murdoch’s stable of papers and TV channel. The corporations mobilised their entire propaganda machine to get Blair into power. And yet he managed it with only 2 percentage points more than Corbyn, who had that same propaganda machine railing against him.
Also, unlike Corbyn, Blair did not have to endure a large section of his own party trying to destroy him from within.
That is the true mark of Corbyn’s achievement.
Another point. Blair’s 1997 landslide was the peak of his success. As Labour members realised what he had done to achieve victory, support ebbed away relentlessly until he was forced to step down and hand over a profoundly damaged party to Gordon Brown.

But perhaps more importantly, and what lies at the heart of the push back from those like Bélanger in my opinion, is that Corbyn has shown definitively that it is not necessary to bury principles to seriously vie for power for the left. He has relegated the horrible bankruptcy of that approach to the proverbial dustbin of history. As former Corbyn critic Owen Jones put it:

Blairism, New Labour, whatever you want to call it, is dead. It owed its hegemony to, frankly, despair: the idea that socialist policies were electoral poison, and offering them to the British people would invite only landslide Tory victories. The idea that technocratic centrism in this election would have mobilised voters as Corbyn’s Labour did is for the birds. No, Labour didn’t win, but it won its biggest increase in vote share since Clement Attlee in 1945 and is far closer to government than it was, despite being hobbled with disadvantages such as the loss of Scotland before Corbyn assumed Labour’s leadership. The idea, therefore, that centrism is the only possible route for electoral victory is buried.

That is his even greater triumph. Corbyn has shifted the discourse and not just in the UK.

And this is what the centrists wanting to maintain their ideological hegemony in the NDP really cannot stand.

See also: Corbyn's triumph is a triumph for the socialist left

See also: What victories? -- Why the NDP's right is wrong...and DiNovo has a point!

No, it is not a good thing if 4 NDP MPs all pat themselves and the party on the back in a leadership "debate"

In the wake of the almost unbearably boring opening 'debate' in the campaign for the NDP leadership a number of narratives emerged from those seeking to somehow cast this descent into the doldrums in a positive light.


These articles/posts were along the lines that it was a good thing for the debate to be "civil" and that this contrasts positively with the Conservative leadership debates, that trying to work together to build consensus is a part of 'movement' or 'party building', and that it was all about "introducing" the candidates anyway. These were usually accompanied by a variation or another of 'no matter who wins the party will be in good hands'.

What total nonsense.

First, while it is important for debates to be respectful, that only applies when they still remain meaningful debates. Disagreement and some level of division and contention is inherent to debate and is not a negative. To point to the Conservative's low level of gutter debate and imply the two alternatives are this and what passed for debate at the first NDP contest is absurd. Simply communicating vague talking points with slightly different emphasis and laying out a scant number of ill-defined policies all while frequently saying how much everyone agrees with everyone else is not a debate.

Even when Caron appeared to say that the NDP had been mistaken in opposing the push on the part of some politicians in Quebec for a niqab ban none of the other candidates challenged him on the point.

Serious debate is fundamentally important to democracy and that is as true within parties as it is generally. In fact, nowhere is it more necessary than within the NDP which has a very long history of stifling it -- a history which has basically made its convention membership policy resolutions meaningless and that goes as far back as kicking out the Waffle. 

This is even more important to point out given that the NDP just came off of a disastrous, highly centralized, profoundly undemocratic (see purges of candidates and 'Fred Checkers') and centrist campaign and that none of these four candidates who were MPs at the time had anything critical to say about it when it might have mattered to the outcome.  After the surprise of Mulcair's ouster, the party also went out of its way to make sure the type of candidates and voices who would be there to be heard in the campaign for a new leader would be limited to a certain type through the imposition of an undemocratic and steep leadership entry fee. 

When they were asked what the NDP could do to increase diversity in the party and in who represents it and gets a public voice within it, a candidate serious about changing things might have pointed to this obviously exclusionary act.

The trouble with 'consensus' within the NDP right now is that it is always the consensus of the party establishment and its sycophants. The idea that it is a positive thing after the 2015 debacle for the leadership candidates -- who are all very well paid MPs who appeared to have no issue with the Mulcair/Layton centrist, centralized strategy when they thought it might mean they could get to be part of a government -- to be patting each other and the party on the back and trying to minimize internal disagreements/debates is totally wrongheaded. While it is perfectly obvious why they might want to avoid opening the can of worms that is their complicity with the party being where it is now, failing to do so is just more of the same and more of the problem

It also has nothing to do with any 'movement' building (the NDP is not a movement at all, it is very much a parliamentary, hierarchical, top-down political party) nor even party building as presumably that would include trying to connect with activists outside the party who have been troubled by its direction and internal culture.

Round one was an 'introduction' that showed four candidates who cannot yet to be taken seriously on shedding the party's recent past. The only one at this point who seems at all willing to take the party in a truly different direction is Ashton. Angus' populist rhetoric is shaping up as only a change in tone (at least until we see some actual polices from him) while Julian and Caron would be a reversion to an earnest pseudo-social democracy that is long on good intentions and generally short on everything else.

The NDP is at a moment, yet again, where it needs to engage in critical self-examination and it should be entirely obvious that this is the case. It also needs to have honest, lively, democratic and real debate internally as to its direction, past and ideology and that is going to be divisive at times as that is the way a healthy democratic debate works.

So far things do not initially bode well that this is going to occur.

See also: The NDP's leadership debate begins not with a bang but a miserable whimper

3 silly narratives that have emerged in the wake of Mulcair's defeat

As everyone presumably knows by now, Tom Mulcair has been ousted as leader of the NDP.

In the wake of this defeat, while some are celebrating, others are very angry that Tom got the proverbial boot.

And, as often happens in these cases, people start saying silly shit and making dumb assertions that are simply not supported by reality.

Given that we are dealing with NDP hacks here, these narratives are especially bizarre.

Here are three of them that I am seeing all over social media that are, frankly, bordering on the inane.

1) The decision is unjust. As the entire membership voted to elect Mulcair, it should only have been by a vote of the entire membership that he be removed. 

Can anybody say sour grapes!

And, please.

One could make a strong case that Mulcair would likely have fared worse in a general membership vote, but regardless the leadership review vote was held totally according to the party's constitution and norms. It would have been held had he won the 2015 election! If you think the system is flawed fight to change the party's constitution,

But, you don't get to say the rules are bad just because you dislike the result or outcome.

What if the vote had gone the other way? Would any of those using this line be saying that all members should have had a say in him continuing on as leader? I think not.

The constitution of the NDP gives delegates this power and oversight ability.

They used it. Get over it and move on.

2) There goes Quebec!

This is a pretty humorous one on a number of levels.

Part of the reasoning for initially electing Mulcair was that he would supposedly preserve the inroads and NDP bastion that Layton had created in Quebec.

Except he didn't. In the election of 2015, the Quebec caucus went from 59 elected members to 16.

For some unknown reason, in spite of this, apologists for Mulcair continued with this line even after it had been disproved by, you know, reality, and used it as a case for keeping him on.

They continue to persist with it now. Give it up.

3) The party has chosen the Leap Manifesto over electability! The radicals are taking over!

Oddly, the party's left is also partially responsible for perpetuating this one.

Whatever its merits, the NDP did NOT adopt the Leap Manifesto at its convention. In fact, they adopted a compromise resolution that sent it  back to be discussed, examined, debated, etc, etc, by NDP riding associations which will then bring back all the fruits of their labours to the 2018 convention where a version of the manifesto that may or may not have been modified may or may not be adopted.

It is also likely that Mulcair signaling his alleged openness to the Leap Manifesto actually contributed to his downfall by alienating the very large Alberta contingent.

So what the hell are people talking about?

If you know anything about the way the NDP works internally, this process will probably be a joke, and the party never runs on its membership polices during elections anyway,  so unless they elect a leader who is actually behind the manifesto its adoption will, were it to even happen, mean squat.

Further, other than the repudiation of Mulcair, the establishment backed candidates won all the votes for party office. There was no left shift in the internal power brokers within the apparatus at all.

None.

But, even assuming the party does adopt the Leap Manifesto in a meaningful way, how will that harm the party's electoral chances versus...ummmm...right now?

Not sure if everyone was asleep for the last few months, but the leader who was supposed to deliver the goods with his moderation and caution blew it big time. The NDP lost under Mulcair and lost badly. It now sits at under 12% in popular support in public opinion polls.

Similar centrist campaigns have also failed rather badly in BC, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan lately, so where is all of this promised electoral success? Alberta has been the exception to the rule, but there were also a specific set of circumstances at play there, and in some respects Notley ran a somewhat more radical campaign in tone.

Overall, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the shift to the apparently "electable" center has been a flop. Sacrificing principle has not delivered power!

At any rate, much of this is predictable.

False narratives are hard to relinquish, so why not double down on them? The NDP's right and its hacks have been very good at that over the years and there is little reason to expect any different from them now.

See also: Tom Mulcair exits stage right -- too late and not soon enough!

Mulcair's leadership failed even on its own premises -- It is time for the NDP to move on

As the clock ticks down to judgement day in Edmonton next month for Tom Mulcair's leadership of the NDP, the lines are being drawn in what is shaping up as a left-right fight. 

Both former OFL chief Sid Ryan and Ontario MPP Cheri Di Novo have offered up very effective public critiques of Mulcair from the left and have pointed out the obvious fact that if party members want to see a shift towards the politics of  Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, or Gary Burrill in Nova Scotia for that matter, then Mulcair has to go.

He likely has to go as well if party members wish to make the NDP less top-down and run basically exclusively by backroom strategists. For a party that has "democratic" in its name the NDP's record on internal democracy is pathetic and disturbing.

Both during and after the disastrous campaign of 2015 writers such as myself, Matt Fodor and Fraser Needham on The Left Chapter repeatedly pointed to the sharp turn to the right that was occurring under his tenure. Attempts since by Mulcair to re-frame himself as suddenly deeply concerned with inequality and the fight for social democracy come off as entirely disingenuous.

In fact, probably no one has made the left's case against Mulcair better than, ironically, the Winnipeg Sun in its sneering, condescending and reactionary editorial endorsement of him that reads in part:

...Mulcair understood he had to appeal to the centre. He went to the voters, rather than making the voters go to him.
This is an important distinction to make. Because the very faction calling for Mulcair’s ejection don’t think this way. It’s the socialists within the party who want Mulcair turfed.
But they don’t represent average Canadians. Their ideas are on the fringe. Those ideas are hard to sell to the public and for good reason. Canadians aren’t socialists.
We had a lot of respect for Mulcair during the last campaign as he didn’t run on nutty far-left ideas. While we disagreed on a number of his positions, we respected his commitment to lowering the small business tax credit and his refusal to pledge reckless deficit spending.
He understood that taxes and debt payments just end up harming the little guy at the end of the day. However the socialists don’t care about the little guy. They just care about implementing their utopian agendas.

With friends like these...

But, of course, the Winnipeg Sun is not wrong. Mulcair did support right wing ideas like tax cuts for "small business" and he did oppose personal tax increases on anyone, including even the wealthiest Canadians. He also did, of course, make a ludicrous and totally wrongheaded balanced budget pledge that could never have been kept anyway without a severe austerity program.

In the end, however, it may be that this increasing framing of Mulcair's leadership review as a "left-right" or "left-moderate" issue will actually help Mulcair to keep his job. Many on the left have already abandoned the NDP altogether and the party's organized left-wing, in groups like the Socialist Caucus, are completely marginalized and insular.

What is unfortunate about this is, setting aside the very important ideological issues for a moment, that Mulcair's leadership should be ended entirely on its own premises!

While it is true that any serious attempt to reorient or reinvent the party cannot happen if he stays on, and while it is also true that the shift to Third Way policies and tones that began under Layton and were consolidated under Mulcair can only be stopped by his ouster, it is also true that the entire purpose of the "pragmatic" shift and the entire justification of his elevation to the top spot was predicated on his ability to turn the Orange Crush of 2011 into Canada's first NDP government.

He failed to do this rather spectacularly. He even lost a considerable number of seats in Quebec, which his leadership was meant to easily preserve as the NDP's new stronghold. He was wiped out in Toronto and Atlantic Canada and while the deluded can try to point to the "second best election result in NDP history" (which is not quite true anyway) as some sort of solace, we all know that New Democrats could taste power this time.

Mulcair was meant to deliver it. He was supposed to be easily able to best the neophyte (and as it turns out grossly underestimated) Justin Trudeau. He was going to transform the NDP into Canada's permanent "credible" alternative to the Conservatives. He was going to win!

As a Montreal area NDP riding association president Alain Charbonneau put it recently on the CBC:

"We lost so much," he told CBC Montreal's Daybreak.
"He was hired, basically — voted in as leader — because he was supposed to be the one who could win. That was his mission. He failed."

While there are precedents, especially in the NDP, for leaders to stay on after failing to lead a party to power, these were leaders who were either not expected to win or who at least delivered the party back to a position it already held.

Mulcair not only failed to take government, he lost the party's status as Official Opposition and allowed the deeply loathed Trudeau to leapfrog the Liberals from third party in the house to majority government -- a feat that had not previously been accomplished in Canadian parliamentary history.

Defenders of Mulcair staying on have had to resort to saying one variation or another of "if not Mulcair, who?" and insist that of all the possible options available to the NDP, he remains the best.

While hardly a ringing endorsement of either Mulcair or the qualities of those who surround him in the party establishment, it also not only misses the point that a leadership race would possibly give rise to the unexpected, but that Mulcair is a spent force even if one is totally uninterested in a shift to the left.

If Mulcair could not sell himself and his anemic "vision" against Trudeau and the Conservatives from a position of strength as leader of the opposition and from a starting point in terms of seats that was far ahead of the Liberals, there is absolutely no reason to think, in the game that is bourgeois politics, that he will be able to do so down the road and from the position of weakness he and the party are in now.

The NDP's very peculiar and inward looking culture is vividly on display here.  Perhaps never really comfortable with or believing of the idea that they could actually win, or perhaps unable to admit that they were wrong about Mulcair all along and that it turns out that the critics were possibly right that if you sell your soul for power in a party like the NDP you are likely to lose both, the NDP seems on the verge of rewarding what by any measure was a catastrophic defeat.

It is not solely or perhaps even primarily that Mulcair is a barrier to a return to roots, it is that having tried to supplant the Liberals by mimicking them Mulcair lost. He is not only not the politician to bring to the NDP any type of authentic social democratic narrative, he has also shown that he cannot win on the terms he claimed that he could win on.

While New Democrats may not be willing to acknowledge the error of their ways and their misjudgment of  Mulcair, the electorate is far less forgiving of failed narratives.

If Mulcair remains the NDP is left with the worst of both worlds. An opportunistic and centrist leader who lost badly and one who also could not connect with voters and win when it mattered.

This is not simply a choice between Mulcair and any possibility of a left revival, it is a choice between Mulcair and a long and meaningless journey into political irrelevance and oblivion for the NDP.

See also: The NDP's campaign disaster was much more than a failure to communicate

See also: Dear Mr. Mulcair: Fighting income inequality is not just an email petition away

The path ahead for the NDP -- Leadership, prospects and possibilities

By Fraser Needham

When the Canadian Parliament resumes in early December, it will be a very different House of Commons than has been the case over the past decade.

The Liberals will hold the majority of seats at 184, followed by the Conservatives in Official Opposition at 99 seats and the NDP at 44.

There is no doubt the recent election results are a big disappointment for New Democrats. The NDP led in the polls going into the campaign only to see the party’s first legitimate chance of forming government slip through its hands as it was surpassed by both the Liberals and Conservatives in the 11-week campaign. Not only did the NDP lose the 2015 election, it also lost Official Opposition status and shed 51 seats from coast to coast.

Nevertheless, all is not for naught. The party still picked up three seats in Saskatchewan and another two new seats in B.C. Although the NDP lost 43 seats in Quebec, at 16 the party is still in a much better position in the province than it has been for most of its history. In general, with 44 seats nationally, the NDP is in as good shape as it has ever been.

And the great thing about politics is each day is truly a brand new day. Political parties have come back from much worse fates than the NDP suffered in this election and revived to rule the day.

What the NDP now needs to do is assess the election results for what they are and move on. First off, putting partisanship aside, the party and its supporters need to understand that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives being out of government is a very positive thing for the country.

Sure, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau are a neoliberal government but they are not neoconservatives like Harper and his crew. There is no reason to believe the new Liberal government will be as partisan, divisive, hostile to the bureaucracy, war mongering, deceptive or inaccessible as the Harper government has been over the past decade.

A new day has dawned in Ottawa, the public sees it and the NDP should support the change where warranted. In other words, the party should fully support Trudeau when he tries to do the right thing whether it be the Liberal infrastructure plan, allowing government scientists to speak openly again, making serious moves to fight climate change, removing Canadian air strikes from Syria, forming a cabinet based on gender parity and diversity, etc. Overall, the public has had enough of the partisan games that went on in Parliament over the past decade and it will not look kindly on any party that continues in this direction – whether it be the Conservatives or NDP.

Once the House resumes, because the NDP is now the third place party, it will have much less time to ask questions than it did in the last Parliament. So, this means the party needs to use its time in Question Period very wisely and pick three or four issues it wants to hammer the new Liberal government on. If the NDP uses a scatter shot approach and decides to just oppose the government every time it gets a chance, what may be some of the party’s valid criticisms will get lost in the shuffle.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair says he plans to challenge the new government on its support for the Trans Pacific Partnership and hold it to account on its campaign promises to Indigenous peoples, which is encouraging. The TPP, as it stands now, is full of problems for Canadian working people and labour rights in general. The Liberals made substantive and good promises to Indigenous peoples in the election but they will be costly and the NDP needs to make sure these promises do not get pushed down the list in favour of other priorities.

Moreover, by appointing millionaire businessman Bill Morneau to the finance portfolio, the Liberals have sent a strong message to Bay Street that it will be business as usual under the new government. Morneau is a fiscal hawk and there is no doubt he will be trying to put the brakes on Liberal spending promises, especially now that the economy appears to be heading into recession.

Hence, the NDP opposition will need to work hard to ensure the Liberals do not renege on the party’s many spending promises. For its part, it is high likely, at least in the immediate term, the Conservatives under new interim leader Rona Ambrose will simply attack the new government on any of its spending initiatives as sending the Canadian economy into further recession.

The NDP opposition may also want to push the new Liberal government on a few of the planks it ran on in the election campaign. The NDP’s affordable childcare plan is a good one and there is no reason why the party could not push the Liberals to institute it. In fact, the Liberals were on the verge of signing an affordable childcare agreement of their own with the provinces prior to losing the 2006 election, so there is no reason why the new government could not revisit the idea again. Affordable housing and working with the provinces to establish a living wage are two other priorities the NDP may want to push the Liberals on.

However, other than the immediate problem of holding the new government to account when Parliament resumes, the NDP faces the much larger and long-term problem of assessing the party’s current direction and what is the best route to success.

Whether the party wants to admit it or not, the reality is the NDP ran a very poor campaign in the 2015 election which was out of synch with the desires of the majority of progressive Canadians. The party ran a center-right campaign allowing the Liberals to move into territory which has been traditionally the NDP’s and win the election.

Moreover, while Trudeau ran a campaign that focused on youth, hope, positivity, progressive ideas and looking forward, both Harper and Mulcair looked and acted old, out of touch, reactionary, negative and backward looking. Not surprisingly, the anti-Harper change vote went solidly behind Trudeau.

Although the NDP lost the election, the party should not necessarily be disappointed at how the majority of voters made their wishes known. Roughly 70 per cent of voters who cast ballots in the election firmly rejected Harperism and neoconservative values once and for all. And, another 40 per cent were not inspired by the play it safe road of fiscal conservatism the NDP ran on.

The results clearly show the majority of progressive voters have moved to the left of the campaign the NDP ran on. For a social democratic party, this should be very positive news. It means if the party were to move left and closer to its traditional roots, it would likely appeal to a lot more voters than those leading the party may have thought.

There is also good reason to believe the Conservative Party will need to moderate and move somewhat to centre if it wants to survive. For the present moment, it appears the Harper project of creating a neoconservative Canada is dead.

Nevertheless, immediate signals out of the NDP ranks in the aftermath of the election are not encouraging. From top to bottom in the party, there appears to be a complete and collective denial that the NDP ran a poor campaign. It is as if the tactical errors, of which there were many, in trying to run a controlled Harper-style campaign  based around fiscal conservatism never happened.

It has also become clear that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair and his entourage have no plans to take any responsibility for the election loss. In fact, it is very evident that the leader is determined to set his own exit date and has no plans of going anywhere in the immediate future, if ever.

Who is Thomas Mulcair? 

Most people know he is the current Federal NDP Leader and MP for the Quebec riding of Outremont. Others know Mulcair was an MNA in the Quebec Liberal Party from 1994 to 2006 and served as environment minister in the cabinet of Premier Jean Charest.

The story goes that the current NDP Leader quit Charest’s cabinet in 2006 over a dust up with the premier over a proposed condominium development in the mountain and ski resort of Mont Orford National Park. Charest was in favour of the condominium development and the environment minister against.

Mulcair left the Liberal Party shortly after and in the long run he ended up being right.

The Liberals eventually backed off approving the condominium development in Mont Orford.
Then NDP Leader Jack Layton, who was looking to build the party’s base in Quebec, approached Mulcair to run for the NDP in a by-election in the provincial riding of Outremont in 2007 and the rest is history. Thomas Mulcair won the by-election and has been re-elected in the riding ever since.

Other things that are known about the NDP Leader is that he comes from a large middle class family and worked his way through law school. He is known as someone not afraid to stand up for his principles and who won’t back down from a fight. Mulcair is also a staunch federalist and can more than handle himself in the House of Commons as was shown over the past four years when he took Stephen Harper to task during Question Period over any number of issues.

However, it also appears there is much more to Thomas Mulcair than what the official public record tells.

Globe and Mail reporter Jeffrey Simpson wrote an insightful feature article on the NDP Leader during the election campaign. Simpson never actually interviewed Mulcair, the NDP Leader and his handlers dodged him for weeks on end until finally he had to meet his deadline and publish the article. However, the Globe reporter did talk to a lot of people who have worked closely with Mulcair including former Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

Everyone interviewed in the article describes the NDP Leader as very bright, sharp and as someone who does not suffer fools gladly. However, there appears to be more than one story floating around as to why Mulcair left the Quebec Liberal caucus in 2006. In Simpson’s article and according to more than one source, including Charest, Mulcair’s departure may not have been as principled as some have been led to believe.

In the article, Charest and others contend Mulcair said one thing in cabinet and another publicly when it came to the proposed condominium development in Mont Orford National Park. In other words, a number of sources in the article say the NDP Leader supported the proposed condominium project around the cabinet table but then proceeded to question it in media interviews.

When questioned by cabinet colleagues regarding the discrepancy, Mulcair proceeded to browbeat a number of them including, according to Simpson,  driving one of his female counterparts to tears. In the article, Charest is quoted as saying he liked and respected Mulcair but things had come to such a point that he could no longer tolerate the disunity he was causing around the cabinet table. Hence, the Quebec Premier demoted Mulcair to a more junior portfolio in 2006 and he quit the Liberal Party soon after.

There were also numerous rumours swirling around Thomas Mulcair after he joined the Federal NDP caucus in 2007. Once again, no one doubted his intelligence or capability but some were wary of his naked ambition. Prior to Jack Layton getting sick with cancer, it was no secret around Parliament Hill that the NDP’s new Quebec lieutenant was interested in the party’s top job. Those close to Layton say the late leader mused that perhaps he had bitten off more than he could chew with Mulcair.

When Jack Layton passed away from cancer in August 2011, everyone knew Thomas Mulcair would seek the NDP leadership. What is telling is that almost none of Layton’s staff or the caucus got behind his campaign. Instead, Layton supporters strongly got behind backroom operative Brian Topp’s campaign. Within the party, rumours continued to swirl that Mulcair was too divisive, too right and too difficult to work with.

In the end, Thomas Mulcair defeated all other challengers and won the NDP leadership in 2012. He then proceeded to consolidate his leadership over the party caucus and perform well in the House of Commons in terms of challenging the Conservatives and Stephen Harper. Much better than Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was able to do.

Nevertheless, there have always been doubts. According to the Simpson article, many of Mulcair’s former Quebec Liberal colleagues were very surprised that he joined the Federal New Democrats. They say he had always been considered a blue Liberal and definitely not a social democrat. The current NDP Leader has also been known to be a strong proponent of former British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s move toward Third Way politics. In fact, Mulcair has spoken very positively about former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the Quebec Legislature.
When challenged on these comments in the last election campaign, he stood firmly behind them.

After Mulcair won the NDP leadership in 2012, a number of Layton’s strongest supporters, such as Brad Lavigne, left the employment of the party to pursue other opportunities. However, Lavigne and others rejoined the NDP team in this last election as the party strived to form its first ever government. Yet, it is not really clear just who exactly was running the 2015 NDP campaign.

After the NDP finished a distant third, many of Thomas Mulcair’s apologists have argued that he was forced into an ideological straitjacket by party apparatchiks and had no choice but to do as told. However, none of this fits with the NDP Leader’s past history and his political modus operandi is not to take orders from anyone. In short, the 2015 NDP campaign had Mulcair’s fingerprints all over it and there is no doubt he had a large part in designing it. The fiscal conservatism and center-right focus are all classic Thomas Mulcair. If anything, it seems likely the NDP leader bent his advisors to his vision and not vice-versa.

Where can the NDP go from here?

The current reactionary attitude of the party hierarchy is based on a few things. Mulcair and his immediate advisors are aware that the NDP caucus is very weak and too afraid to challenge him. If members of the caucus were to force a leadership convention Mulcair stands a good chance of defeating anyone in the current caucus the same way he did in 2012. In turn, what is left of the party membership is now so cowed and beaten down after the way the NDP has been ruled with an iron fist in recent years that it is unlikely any significant challenge would come from below.

The current plan of the leader and his inner circle is quite clear. Taking any responsibility for the election loss would be seen as a sign of weakness so they aim to deflect all attention elsewhere other than internally. Tell and convince the membership in the short term that Tom needs to stick around because the party could not stand the disunity of an immediate departure and he is needed to hold Trudeau to account in the House of Commons.

Mulcair does perform well in the House and you can be assured his supporters will exaggerate any points he does score against Trudeau as all the more reason why he needs to stick around in the long term. They will then look to build on these perceived successes in Parliament with the hope that members will begin to forget about his inept performance in the election campaign. By the time the party convention rolls around in April, the hope of Mulcair’s inner circle is that any opposition to his leadership will be quelled before it happens and he will achieve a strong endorsement in the leadership review securing his status as leader as long as he wants it. Commissioning an election report to the party president and national director is yet another attempt to whitewash what happened in the election and avoid responsibility.

Were Mulcair and his team to stick around any longer than a year, it would be disastrous for the long-term success of the NDP. Progressive voters in the election clearly rejected the NDP Leader. Much as some of his strongest supporters would like to believe, voters are not going to discover the hidden qualities of him if he sticks around. In fact, the longer Mulcair sticks around, the more the public will turn its back on the NDP.

But if the NDP caucus or membership won’t force Thomas Mulcair and his cadre out, who will?

Likely the only move that would start the ball rolling is if one of the party stalwarts spoke out or questioned how the NDP hierarchy ran the last campaign, the existing direction of the party and Mulcair’s leadership. Someone like Ed Broadbent or maybe Stephen Lewis. If either of these two spoke out against the NDP Leader and his inner circle, people would listen and others within the party would feel comfortable coming forward to air their concerns.

It is well known that Broadbent had serious concerns about Mulcair during the 2012 leadership race and aired them quite vocally at the time. The former NDP leader worried about the direction Mulcair would take the party in and that his vision was not a social democratic one. He was, of course, right.

Once Mulcair won the leadership, Broadbent backed off in his criticisms as a sign of unity as the new NDP Leader moved to consolidate the caucus. Now that the NDP has suffered a debilitating electoral loss under Mulcair’s leadership, hopefully Broadbent feels free to voice his concerns once again.

So what happens if Mulcair is ousted and the NDP is able to hold a leadership convention in the near future?

The way forward would be for someone from outside the caucus and party, but with serious credentials within social movements and the left, to come forward.

In political parties, there is always resistance to looking for leadership from outside the elected caucus. Yet the NDP would be wise to review some of its recent history on this front.

When Jack Layton first sought the party leadership in 2002, he certainly was not the favoured candidate. An MP from Winnipeg named Bill Blaikie was -- another “great Parliamentarian” just like Thomas Mulcair.

The establishment of the party frowned on Jack’s leadership campaign initially and did not take it seriously. Layton was seen as too Toronto, too inexperienced, too local politics to make the jump to the national stage. He had run as a federal NDP candidate before but never been successful.

Little did most people in the NDP establishment know that Jack Layton had cultivated a strong and loyal following in his many years as a Toronto municipal councillor. He was known as a guy who worked hard, got things done and delivered.

In the 2003 contest, Layton and his team proceeded to out work and out organize every other candidate, including Bill Blaikie, on his way to easily winning the NDP leadership. His campaign was the most youthful, the most energetic and fun and they caught the attention of and inspired the membership of the party in ways that had not occurred in a long, long time.

After Layton secured the leadership, the establishment of the party was still preaching doom and gloom. Who was this guy from Toronto who had never been elected to Parliament? Were he and his followers not too left, too inexperienced and too “wacky” to take the NDP anywhere in the hard game of Canadian politics?

Once again, Jack and his followers proved the naysayers wrong. In the following years, Layton literally rebuilt the party organizationally and financially in ways it had never achieved before. He did this through countless hours of hard work and relentless energy – all of which occurred outside of Parliament and Ottawa for that matter.

To see him in action was a truly amazing thing. A typical day for Jack Layton when he visited a city was to spend the morning and afternoon doing as much media as he could. He would do everything – even the most right wing radio talk shows. This would be followed by any number of meetings with constituency associations in the early evening and meetings with youth groups at universities later on.

So by the time Jack Layton fully hit his stride in the 2011 election, suffering from cancer and on crutches due to a recent hip replacement, it wouldn’t have mattered what he was selling, voters were buying. Le Bon Jack caught fire in Quebec and many other places in Canada. The moderately center-right NDP platform was an afterthought to most people who voted for the party. They voted for Jack and only Jack.

The fact that the party ran on a further-right platform in this election and failed miserably with a much less inspiring leader should be clear proof to the NDP that it needs to change gears in terms of leadership and direction. A more grassroots, left wing, younger and more inspiring leader than Thomas Mulcair, running on a truly social democratic platform could not only retain the number of seats the NDP currently holds, but also make gains in the 2019 election. This in turn would put the party, once again, in a very good position to form government in the 2023 election. Long-term thinking, for sure, but also realistic thinking.

There can be no doubt there will be many arguments from within the hierarchy of the NDP for maintaining the current status quo. These proponents will argue that, at 44 seats, the party still sits in a better place than it has for most of its history. They will also argue that the most prudent thing to do is stay the course, current leader and center-right platform, and Trudeau and the Liberals will screw up so badly that the NDP will form government in 2019. This is of course wishful and delusional thinking but it will hold some sway.

It remains to be seen what the NDP decides to do in coming months. Whether the party decides to think small and recede or looks at the larger picture and progresses. Only time will tell.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: Delusion continues to rule the day in Mulcair NDP

See also: Mulcair's NDP ran a great campaign! We know this because they say they did.

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Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to

It is, ultimately, astounding how facile and false political narratives come back to haunt those who insist on their veracity.

And so it has happened with the "government-in-waiting" liberal led NDP.

After being aggressively told that the "left" needed a leader like Tom Mulcair to shed its "radical" and "left" image, the party has been delivered to its worst defeat in its history. While it is true that the party will have a final number of seats that a generation ago would have seemed a victory, yesterday's results are a terrible setback.

An almost existential defeat.

We were fed the line that the sacrifices of principle were necessary. It was claimed they would produce electoral results.

But like taste tests between Coke and Coke Zero, this proved a chimera. When the NDP sought to be another "liberal" government in waiting with the dour Mulcair at the helm the people chose an obviously inspiring Liberal leader in Trudeau instead.

And why not?

Canadians were offered two versions of "progressive" liberalism. Unsurprisingly, the more "inspiring" one won.

This was not due to the NDP running a "principled" campaign as some claim. It did not. It was not due, as some are conveniently suggesting, to the "niqab" issue either. If it were why did the NDP slide in the polls begin in Ontario after the "balanced budget" pledge the NDP made and why did Trudeau do so well in Quebec despite taking just as strong a stand on the issue?

The fact is, despite all the insults, Justin Trudeau proved a capable and even a remarkable leader. It turned out he had the very characteristics that over the course of a campaign the people wanted and that the pundits and the "strategists" running the NDP campaign misunderstood and lacked.

The NDP. almost like some slow motion suicide, mimicked the catastrophic campaigns of the Ontario NDP, Olivia Chow and others. They also massively underestimated Trudeau, as did everyone else.

Like moths to the flame they began from seeming positions of advantage and used those to justify right wing narratives as a path to power.

As if this was the UK in 1997 without any notion that Tony Blair was, in the end, a disaster,

The fact is, it was obvious that the Trudeau "left shift" would work. Many of us called it from day one. No one cares about deficits anymore. No one regards balanced budgets as a priority.

Only the NDP and its partisans failed to see the ground had shifted. The terrain has changed.

The illusion of Official Opposition  became the bitter pill of capitulation to political "realism".

The NDP has been wiped out in a number of regions. Annihilated in Atlantic Canada. Decimated in Quebec. Literally obliterated in Ontario and Toronto which was a must to win to power. It failed to make much ground in the west where its alleged fiscal "conservatism" was supposed to deliver results.

It has not.

At what point do we acknowledge that the NDP's strategy has failed? At what point do we acknowledge that "winning" will neither happen this way nor be worth it if it did?

At what point do we acknowledge the "Third Way" is a bankrupt place to campaign from?

Could the NDP have won? Yes. It could, had it had a better brand and set of strategists, have supplanted the Liberals once and for all as the new flavour of bourgeois opposition.

Given that it has not, maybe it is time to turn back to where the NDP came from. Back before Tom Mulcair and Jack Layton.

At this point it would seem there would be little to lose.

And the NDP might actually mean something politically again.

image via twitter

Editor's Note: The piece has been changed from an earlier version that stated that the NDP had been devastated in the west to state instead that it failed to make much ground in the west. 

The NDP's phony “credit card” analogy: a neoliberal conception of the public household

By Matt Fodor

In an attempt to shore up the NDP’s fiscal credibility, Tom Mulcair recruited Andrew Thomson, the fiscally conservative finance minister that served in the NDP provincial government of Lorne Calvert in Saskatchewan.

Thomson is running in the affluent Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence against Finance Minister Joe Oliver.  While the NDP has virtually no chance of winning this Liberal-Conservative battleground riding (it is one of the weakest ridings for the NDP in Ontario), Thomson has become Mulcair’s point man in articulating economic policy.

In an ironic twist, while the Liberals are positioning themselves as the party of Keynesian interventionism, Mulcair and Thomson have effectively expunged any remaining Keynesian notions from the party.  Commenting on the press conference where Thomson’s candidacy was unveiled, respected TVO journalist Steve Paikin expressed surprise at the NDP’s attempt to present themselves as the biggest deficit hawks of the major parties.  As Paikin reports:

“Mulcair reiterated his pledge to balance the budget during his first year in office. During a wide-ranging, free-wheeling scrum, I asked Mulcair why he thought it was so imperative to be even a tougher deficit hawk than the prime minister. He said it was immoral to go further into debt today, and pass on the responsibility of repaying those debts to our children and grandchildren. Thomson added that while Canada’s debt- to-GDP ratio is a manageable 30 per cent, if you add all provincial debts into the mix, it gets closer to 85 per cent which he considered dangerous.
“Do you like Paul Krugman as an economist?” I asked Thomson.
“I do,” he said. Krugman has repeatedly written in his New York Times column that with interest rates at historic lows, it’s a perfect time to deficit spend to catch up for decades of under investment in infrastructure.
“But on this one, Krugman’s wrong,” Thomson said.”

Krugman has of course been one of the most articulate and high profile critics of the economic orthodoxy of austerity, warning that in economic hard times the obsession with getting the fiscal house in order in economic hard times ultimately results in a downward spiral and contraction of the economy.   Keynesian economics calls for government intervention and deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy.

It is ironic to see the NDP present themselves as the most committed deficit fighters.  During the 2008-09 fiscal crisis, Jack Layton led the charge for a greater stimulus, in opposition to the Hooverian orthodoxy of the Harper government.  And as recently as last year, Finance Critic Peggy Nash stated that the government’s focus on deficit reduction was wrong-headed in a time of high unemployment and the economy operating below potential.

Nor are the two NDP provincial governments prioritizing fighting the deficit.  The government of Greg Selinger in Manitoba has run deficits since 2009.  And while the government of Rachel Notley in Alberta inherited a deficit from the previous Conservative government, it has vowed not to cut services in order to balance the books.

In criticizing Trudeau’s short-term deficit spending plan, Mulcair and Thomson have continued to present right-wing talking points.  A particularly ludicrous example is this recent statement, which says:  “Justin Trudeau has already maxed out his deficit credit card in the first year of his “fiscal plan.””

These right-wing talking points are balanced out by ones about “deep Martin style cuts.”  Yet the NDP, if it accepts the self-imposed constraints of balancing the budget no matter what the circumstances (while keeping taxes at “competitive” levels) will almost inevitably be forced to make cuts (and the experience of the Ford regime in Toronto has shown that the idea of only pursuing “painless” cuts, going only after waste without touching essential services, is a mirage).  And they certainly render a social democratic reform program virtually impossible.

This phony “credit card” analogy shows the degree to which even social democratic and center-left parties have embraced the neoliberal conception of the public household.  It appeals to the populist “common sense” idea of “if a family must live within its means, so should the government.”  But this is a ludicrous idea as the government is not a private household!

The distinguished political economist Andrew Gamble has argued that neoliberals have too long dominated the discourse about the public household.  According to Gamble, the center-left must

...find new ways to talk about the economic crisis and to engage in the politics of austerity.  At present it is losing the argument.  One of the reasons for this is that politicians of the centre-right have generally been more adept at employing a discourse about an international market system that must obey the impersonal rules of ‘market forces’ alongside a discourse about the public household.  In this discourse the public household is often reduced by analogy to a private household (which must subordinate everything to balancing its income with its expenditure) or to a corporate household (which subordinates everything to the bottom line and the pursuit of efficiency.

In recent years even the center-left has often accepted the “minimalist” conception of the public household, and should again be “maximalist.”  As Gamble states: “Recapturing the confidence to affirm the importance of politics that shape the way markets are governed and companies are governed is an essential step to a new centre-left political economy.”

The NDP’s embrace of conservative talking points about deficits and use of a “credit card” analogy to talk about government spending shows that they have a long way to go!

Source:  Andrew Gamble (2013), “Coming to Terms With Capitalism: Austerity Politics and the Public Household.”  In Olaf Cramme, Patrick Diamond and Michael McTernan, Progressive Politics After the Crash: Governing from the Left.  London: I.B. Tauris.

Matt Fodor is a Toronto based writer and academic. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University.

This piece originally appeared on Matt Fodor's new political blog, Dropping the Writ. It is reprinted here with permission.

Matt has also started a blog dedicated to Toronto's local history,  South of Bloor St. 

See also: NDP spending document creates more questions than answers

See also: As "Third Way" politics suffers a huge defeat in the UK, in Canada it has now triumphed

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It appears the NDP strategists are stuck in the 90’s – again

by Fraser Needham

As NDP strategists mull over the polls this weekend and try to figure out why their shift to the right of the Liberals on the issue of balanced budgets and deficit financing doesn’t seem to be playing out as they hoped in Ontario, they might be wise to take some time out and do a little research on the British Labour Party leadership election.

Early projections seem to indicate rogue left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn is poised to win the party’s leadership race on Sept. 12. Corbyn is not only left wing, if he wins the Labour leadership, he would be the party’s most left leader in more than three decades dating back to the early 1980’s when Labour was led by Michael Foot.

The longtime Labour politician has also remained unshakeable in his convictions of what he believes constitutes a truly social democratic society. Or, to put it more succinctly, Corbyn has never advocated tax cuts for the middle class as one way of achieving social democratic goals.

The Blairites are of course horrified but it doesn’t really matter what they think if the majority of the Labour Party membership is behind Corbyn which they appear to be. The British press is already speculating the MP from Islington -- who chooses to wear a suit and tie as little as possible and likes to speak his mind about his left convictions -- could pose a real problem for David Cameron and the Conservatives and actually become Prime Minister in the near future. Some journalists are accusing the Blairites of being stuck in the past and failing to see the on the ground appeal of a guy like Jeremy Corbyn to a significant constituency of voters.

Let’s shift over to the Canadian political scene for a moment.

Although the people running the Federal NDP and its provincial wings these days will never admit it publicly, they are strongly influenced by Third Way politics and the vision that Tony Blair very firmly stamped on the British Labour Party in the early 1990’s. Third Way politics basically says there is no way social democratic parties can get elected anymore on the types of platforms they ran on from the post World War Two period up until the early 1980’s. They believe all voters, including working class voters, have moved on from any opposition to capitalism, favour neoliberal ideology without question, do not believe an interventionist state in the economy can ever have a positive influence, are anti-labour and much more individualistic than they had been in the past.

So wherein lies the hope for social democratic parties as far as how the Third Way sees it? There is a "third way" that can be instituted which means social democratic parties have to far lower their expectations of the past by fully embracing the inequities of the free market, eliminating government intervention in the economy from the policy book, sometimes reducing income taxes and certainly never raising them, being firmly committed to balancing the budget, trying to appear as business friendly as possible and never, ever doing anything pro-labour.

If social democratic parties are willing to accept the cold and harsh realities that the general public has moved significantly to the right, they can then make themselves palatable to voters and actually win elections. What is their advantage over the right wing parties? They are a kinder, gentler form of neoliberal party than the mean spirited right. They seek not to destroy the state but to try to preserve it in the current harsh realities that we live in. Their goal is not to completely eliminate taxes but maybe just keep them where they are or reduce them slightly. These parties are also much more easily able to present themselves as more open minded and liberal parties on social issues than the right wing parties who are really neoconservative parties and believe in a much less socially liberal society.

The Third Way is the strategy New Labour ran and was elected in Britain on in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections. It was the platform that was used in Saskatchewan that saw four straight NDP governments elected from 1991 to 2003. It is also the strategy that has been used by the Manitoba NDP that is now in its fourth consecutive term after winning power in 1999. A lot of NDP strategists would probably argue that the short-lived Bob Rae NDP government in Ontario in the early 1990’s might have lasted longer had it been willing to accept Third Way strategies a little more fully or at least a lot sooner.

However, all of a sudden the Third Way strategy doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did. New Labour lost the 2010 British election and was soundly defeated in this spring’s election by the Conservatives. Many of its losses came at the expense of a much more left Scottish Nationalist Party.

In Saskatchewan, the NDP was soundly defeated by the right wing Saskatchewan Party in the 2007 election and then thoroughly routed by them again in the 2011 election – suffering the party’s worst electoral loss since its very early CCF days. The once formidable Saskatchewan NDP now sits rudderless and directionless in opposition with only a rump of nine seats. The party is not positioned to win the next election and it could be a number of years before they are competitive again. To give the Saskatchewan Party credit, they were forward thinking enough to shift slightly left after their surprising 2003 election loss – eliminating any public fears that they would privatize Crown corporations, generally maintaining existing government services and shedding the image of being nothing more than a neoconservative party trying to move the province to the hard right.

The B.C. NDP was supposed to be a shoe-in for government in the 2013 election as a discredited Liberal government appeared to be on its way out. However, the party ran on a moderate centre-right platform and was soundly defeated. The Manitoba NDP is likely headed for defeat in the next provincial election. The Nova Scotia NDP was elected for the first time on a centre-left platform in 2009 but only lasted one term being defeated by Liberals in the 2013 election.

And perhaps the biggest screw up of them all – the Ontario NDP’s bizarre decision to trigger an election in the spring of 2014 and then run on a right wing populist platform. Right of, you guessed it, the Liberals this time around.

Every thing they did in the campaign seemed designed out of some sort of Mike Harris/Rob Ford handbook. The NDP railed out against government excess and tried to position itself as the party of small business. It lashed out at the Toronto “elites,” which was pretty much anyone who questioned their ethics or motives, and wondered why many unions in the province decided not to support them after the NDP was running a campaign that was in many ways hostile to labour. They accused the Liberals of running a fiscally irresponsible campaign when in reality the Liberal campaign was hardly fiscally ambitious at all. The party even decided to place a cover ad in the Toronto Sun of all newspapers – you know – to reach out to all their blue-collar right wing friends who read it.

And it all made such “common sense.” Except to voters of course who decided to re-elect the Liberals to a majority on election day and reward the NDP with a third place finish.

Now the Federal NDP strategists will tell you the party ran on a centre-right platform in the 2011 election winning more seats than it ever has and becoming the official opposition for the first time in the party’s history. However, if they were actually honest -- and in their current state of hubris they most likely wouldn’t be -- they would admit that the party’s good fortunes had much more to do with the strange circumstances of that particular election than anything that was in the NDP platform.

First, the Liberals hit what will be for them likely rock bottom running under a leader which is the worst the party has ever seen in its modern history in Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff wasn’t even able to hold his own Toronto seat.

Second, after almost 20 years of successful campaigns in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois completely imploded and bit the dust leaving a tremendous opportunity for another party to become dominant in the province. With the Liberals remaining largely discredited in Quebec since the sponsorship scandal and the Conservatives quickly wearing out their welcome after the 2006 election, the NDP was able to seize that opportunity and fill the gap.

Third, and most important, the NDP was very well served by their late leader Jack Layton who admirably decided to fight the campaign despite suffering the effects of a recent hip replacement and what later came to be known was terminal cancer. In his fourth campaign as party leader, Layton caught on like wildfire across the country but no more so than in Quebec where his meteoric increase in popularity there sealed the deal for the NDP in the province.

The point of all this is the NDP might actually want to try something that would be considered a little “radical” to those people running the party these days. Rather than always shifting right why not shift a little left? Maybe consider that working people might actually be a little bit fed up after 25 years of neoliberal policies and lies that have left them worse off than at any time since before the Second World War. That people may not be so easily tricked into the deficit hysteria as they were 20 years ago. That they even may be willing to pay a bit more in income taxes if this means better public services.

In general, why not just try and run on the values your party was founded on rather than someone else’s? You certainly would make your base happy and give your party members and campaign workers something to believe in again and you might just gain some votes and a little respect at the same time.

It also likely wouldn’t splatter as much egg on your face as promising to balance the budget heading into a looming recession.

Just a thought.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

See also: Playing the progressive card -- Trudeau's cynical, but clever, "left shift"

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Deficit spending and the very odd week in Canadian social democracy

This has been an interesting week in the history of Canadian social democracy.


After Mulcair decided to double-down on comments he made praising Margaret Thatcher last week, we began this week with NDP advisers musing to Lawrence Martin in Canada's business tribune, the Globe and Mail, about trying to outflank the Harper Tories from the militarist side on defense spending by stating that they may yet be going to propose a whole lot more of it! As Martin relates it:

“You might well imagine,” an adviser to Thomas Mulcair was telling me, “Tom coming out in September and saying Harper has driven down defence spending to one per cent of GDP. We’re going to raise it to 1.2 per cent. We have a military that’s being allowed to rust out and we’re going to fix it.”
Another adviser cautioned the level of support might not be that high – a 20 per cent increase – but significant enough to show Canadians the NDP is by no means soft on defence.

Then, despite the fact that one would imagine that debating women's issues and the polices and ideas that he felt would help to redress the harsh realities of systemic discrimination and oppression that millions of Canadian women face everyday, would be something that the NDP leader would be inclined to do, he continued to insist that he would not participate in what would have been the first leader's debate centered around these issues since 1984 unless Stephen Harper did as well.

In the end this led to the debate being cancelled and reformatted into a non-debate -- becoming instead a series of "interviews" with four of the leaders individually. This meant that, regardless of supposed intent, Harper and Mulcair had managed to avoid debating women's issues with the only woman who leads a federal party, Elizabeth May.

What is rather telling, however, as Yves Engler pointed out in rabble.ca, is who, instead of the groups that were organizing the women's debates, these same leaders were willing to debate each other at the behest of:

While about 50,000 people and 175 organizations supported Up for Debate's call for an election debate focused on women's issues, it won't happen because Stephen Harper refused to participate and NDP leader Tom Mulcair is unwilling to appear if the prime minister is not there to bash. 

But the same politicians have agreed to a September 28 debate on foreign policy sponsored by an organization named after and financed by one of Canada's richest and most right-wing capitalists. 

Through his Aurea Foundation, Peter Munk, the founder of Barrick Gold, established Munk Debates in 2008. Peter's son Anthony Munk, a close friends of Harper's former chief of staff Nigel Wright, is part of the four-person committee overseeing the debate series.

In the wake of this it was further discovered that the NDP had removed the membership's policy resolutions from the party website on the grounds that these policies were not the platform!

Now, of course, this is true. The NDP leadership has demonstrated that they could not really care less about member "policy" resolutions and have done so to such an extent that, as I have noted before, I am not even sure why they bother to hold the policy conventions anymore at all. The Ontario provincial party actually tried to deny the member policies even existed to the media in the lead-up to the last provincial election.

But by actually taking the step of removing them from the party website, after having finally agreed to put them there a couple of years ago, they are literally thumbing their nose at their own base and members during an election campaign. It seems it embarrasses the leadership that they have a membership that still sometimes thinks they are in a left-wing party and passes pesky leftist resolutions on occasion as a result.

Would not want those democratically arrived at polices to fall into the wrong hands!

Finally we come to what is perhaps the most disconcerting development of all -- Mulcair's ironclad promise that he will deliver as his first budget a balanced budget and his attempts to paint Trudeau's short-term deficit spending plan as somehow economically irresponsible in contrast to this -- when it is actually exactly the opposite that is true.

Trudeau has "said he’ll run deficits of up to $10-billion a year for three years in order to allow for a multibillion-dollar increase in spending on infrastructure, raising it from $5.1-billion to $10.2-billion next year" in order to create jobs and help the economy as it appears to be heading into a downturn.

This is, in relative terms, actually a rather good idea and is basic Keynesian-progressive economics that, in any other era, would have hardly been seen as radical or at all out-of-place in a centre-left platform -- terrain the NDP continues to claim is exclusively theirs. It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to question if Trudeau and the Liberals will actually carry through on this given their past history. After having been elected on a very progressive platform in 1993, the Liberals shifted very far to the right in the 1995 budget and, as  Michal Rozworski noted, this was really when "Canada's harsh 'austerity' policies started".

It is, without any doubt, deeply and profoundly cynical and hypocritical for Trudeau to be campaigning, as he has been, on this new platform with Paul Martin given Martin's vicious austerity record as Finance Minister!

Mulcair however, as he has done before, and as when he mocked Bob Rae's entirely correct decision to run deficits as Ontario NDP Premier in the early 90's instead of engaging in the deep cuts that were to come under Mike Harris, has made a great show of maintaining that he will, absolutely, positively, no matter what, balance the books and continues to do this after Trudeau's announcement -- essentially attacking Trudeau on this front from the right.

Mulcair rejected the very idea of even Trudeau's type of mild deficit spending and stated:

“Governing is about priorities and we’ve watched the Conservatives run up eight deficits in a row, the Liberals are now telling us that they want to run several years of deficits,” Mulcair said. “I’m tired of watching governments put that debt on the back of future generations.”

He and his new finance front man, Andrew Thomson, also went on to tell TVO host Steve Paikin that progressive economists like Paul Krugman were "wrong" when they said that "with interest rates at historic lows, it's a perfect time to deficit spend to catch up for decades of under investment in infrastructure." Mulcair cast it as "immoral" to pass along debt to future generations, as if short-term deficit spending of necessity means this -- which it does not.

One might have asked him if passing along decrepit infrastructure and decaying communities was, by contrast, moral?

As the Ottawa Citizen noted "It’s all made for a dizzying U-turn on the Canadian political spectrum".

It is deeply puzzling (or perhaps, given his past praising of Thatcher, it is really not) trying understand Mulcair's fixation on this, other than as a deliberate pandering to Bay St. narratives for what he and his advisers see as necessary to reassure whatever group of voters they think it will reassure. It was, after all, only a few short years ago in 2008 that his predecessor Jack Layton signed a coalition agreement with the Liberals  that was in no small part centered on the need for a vigorous government stimulus spending  package that it was acknowledged would lead to some short-term deficits! In fact, the Layton-Dion plan would undoubtedly have led to deficits as high, and likely higher, than those Harper has run.

As I have noted previously, while it is important for left governments to avoid over-reliance on deficits and borrowing within a capitalist context, promising balanced budgets during a period when the economy is stalling and appears to be about to decline, is both bad for the economy and virtually guarantees some version of austerity. It also capitulates to the false notion that alleged fiscal prudence should be placed ahead of programs and government intervention to create jobs and infrastructure.

Further, as Mulcair has ruled out any personal tax increases on anyone, even the wealthiest Canadians, and as it has become increasingly clear that the planned NDP corporate tax hikes will not be particularly significant nor will they result in a dramatic increase in revenue, it is becoming harder-and harder to see how Mulcair will be able to undertake any serious initiatives or follow through on even the very meager promised ones fully with these entirely self-imposed budgetary and taxation restrictions.

Never mind that he has pledged a quarter-billion dollars to the police and, as indicated above, may be about to announce a large military spending increase within these confines for himself that have been set.

The first casualty has already occurred -- with Mulcair now saying that his promise of last year that he would reverse the Conservative health transfer cuts will likely have to be delayed.

When politicians begin to make retreats on their promises even before being elected, it is not a very good sign.

When the leader of a social democratic party attacks Keynesian and stimulus economics from the right it does not augur well on any front.


See also: Tom Mulcair, Bob Rae and balanced budgets

See also: Mulcair doubles-down on the NDP's right shift by defending Thatcherism