At what cost power -- Whither the NDP & Leap?

By A.M.

With its recent rejection of leader Thomas Mulcair, as well as its (decidedly tepid) willingness to at least entertain the idea of debate on the Leap Manifesto, the NDP has shown itself to be more resilient than previously thought. Much to the shock of those of us on the Left, some New Democrats seem to be considering a real political shift. With elected representatives like Parkdale-High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo calling openly for a return to the socialism on which the party was founded - to say nothing of the activists and citizens who have signed the Leap Manifesto - the NDP may yet resurrect the prospect of a socialist Canada. Predictably, this has been met with fierce resistance from the hero-worshiping, and ever-shrinking, cult of NDP partisans. The battle of principles versus power seems to be in full swing.

When Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis unveiled the Leap Manifesto during last year's federal election campaign, I admit that I was quite skeptical of its possible impact. A strongly social democratic political document, directly calling out the plague of neo-liberalism, was not something I anticipated to catch on with Canadians. Predictably, right-wing blowhards like Rex Murphy and Conrad Black somehow managed to denounce it as both unrealistic and horrifically dangerous (after all, conservatives are not known for their logical abilities)! But I took a second look and, despite my reservations, was very impressed. A principled, progressive document that prioritizes Aboriginal treaty rights? Count me in.

The NDP, true to form, pounced on it as wrong-headed and destructive. No less an authority than Nathan Cullen, who then was poised to become Canada's Finance Minister, dismissed the Manifesto as "not the way to build a sustainable government."

And yet the Leap lives on.

The NDP, in a great act of direct democracy and political goodwill, resolved to debate the Leap in its riding associations for the next two years. Amazing! Party brass -- who are likely to be proven correct -- see this resolution as a happy medium wherein they can appear progressive, and actually accomplish less than nothing. Member resolutions, even when they directly endorse a genuinely progressive position, very rarely come within a hundred miles of official NDP platforms.

Left with this latest betrayal by the NDP, where do we turn in the aforementioned debate between principles and power? A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend a Leap Manifesto town hall hosted by Avi Lewis and Cheri DiNovo. I saw Torontonians of all social stripes connect their own experiences and activism to struggles like Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Idle No More and many other progressive - that is to say socialist - movements. I was fortunate enough to meet and speak to an older woman who has worked tirelessly for the NDP since before it even formally existed. She told me that she was exasperated to see the party fall so far as to have a leader who defended Margaret Thatcher. Her heartbreak was palpable.

What kind of progressives are we when we praise proto-fascists like Thatcher? When our only fiscal concern is balanced budgets? When we dismiss organic, democratic movements as "unsustainable"?

The answer is - we're Liberals.

The NDP, as the "conscience of Parliament" that so many professional social democrats sneer at, forced major concessions on issues that affect real people. Socialists, working in and outside the CCF and NDP, created Medicare (as insufficient as it is). They demanded and won union rights, employment insurance and workplace safety. Socialists have been at the front of all movements for women's liberation in this country - including the rights to vote, take maternity leave and access on-demand abortion. The idea that socialism is unrealistic is not just historically inaccurate – it’s absolutely insulting to the millions of ordinary people knocking on doors, signing petitions and being beaten and murdered by police for what they believe in.

The NDP faithful, in their aggressive posturing and historical ignorance, often quote Saint Tommy Douglas. We've all heard the "'tis not too late.."-style quotes a million times at this point. But even I, already bitterly cynical about the NDP, was not prepared for the historical and political betrayal trotted out on the campaign trail. Among many other things, Thomas Mulcair had the gall to compare his balanced-budget pledge to the CCF's fiscal record, noting that under Douglas, the party ran seventeen straight balanced budgets and paid down Saskatchewan’s massive debt. This is certainly true, but it ignores the ideological context in which the party was operating, which prevented it from obtaining any significant financial help (no problem for today's Bay Street-friendly New Democrats). It also ignores the religious motivations (good ol' Christian thrift, etc.) that most CCF voters supported.

Even with these constraints - like the crippling debt incurred by the previous Liberal government - the CCF government managed to bring Medicare to this continent, lift millions out of the poverty of the Dust Bowl, create arts programs, expand unionization rights, and so much more.

What would Tommy have thought about today’s imperialist, reactionary party? In an interview later in his life, Tommy was asked if he regretted never having enjoyed power country-wide. His response was, "I'm not interested in getting power unless you can do something with this power. I have watched politicians, for the last 40 years, drop their principles in order to get power." I defy NDP partisans to find more than a handful of their MPs and MPPs who don’t fit that description!

I’m not so stupid as to believe that the NDP will be reformed. I think it’s still possible – after all, who’d have guessed that Jeremy Corbyn would one day become the leader of the British Labour Party? But I see it as a largely futile attempt, if honourable in some ways.

Let’s build a Left movement and get back to being the “conscience of Parliament.”

Let’s get back to being socialists.

“What is this free enterprise system? It is the law of the jungle applied to economics. It is the law of every man for himself, as the elephant said when he was dancing among the chickens. That is not a bad philosophy if […] you happen to be in the elephant class, but it is likely to be depressing if you are a farmer or worker, and belong in the chicken group. Free enterprise means unrestricted competition; the race to the swift and the battle to the strong; nature red in tooth and claw.” - Tommy Douglas

A.M. is a writer in Toronto 

See also: There was no NDP Leap

See also: The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

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

Racist refugee myths, NDP delusions, Tom Mulcair & more -- December and January on The Left Chapter in review

Winter and the holidays are often a time of year where the tempo and pace of things outside of the personal -- even for the very political among us -- slows down.

December and January on The Left Chapter were no exception to this!

Over the course of the two months, however, there were still 34 posts of various types from a look at the year's best songs to Albert Einstein explaining why we need a socialist economy!

Without any further ado the top five posts in terms of hits for the months of December and January were:

1) Stop sharing the refugees vs. seniors internet myths!

Have you seen this Facebook post circulating around?

Sadly and depressingly it has been shared more than 44,000 times as of this posting.

Old myths along these lines have been around for a long time and have been repeatedly disproved and shown to be false or totally misleading.

Read More! 

2) The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion

As we head into 2016 there is little that is more pathetic and disturbing from the point-of-view of that ever narrowing band of Canadian social democrats or "democratic socialists" than the descent of the New Democratic Party into a state of abject delusional thinking and total political irrelevance.

Read More! 

3) rabble.ca's Tom Mulcair poll and what it says about the disconnect in the left

There is an interesting poll being taken on the left-wing website rabble.ca right now. It asks readers to vote on the following question:

Read More! 

4) The terrorist war on women

By A.M.

“[T]he feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.”

There is a moment in Denis Villeneuve’s movie Polytechnique where, more than any other, you truly feel the gravity of what you are seeing onscreen. It is after the murderer (unnamed in the film, but clearly analogous to Marc Lépine) has shot several women point blank with his hunting rifle. He leaves them on the floor of their classroom and goes to find more victims. Most of the women in the classroom are dead, but two remain breathing.

Read More! 

5) A Farewell to a Bookstore

“The problem with books is that they end.” -- Caroline Kepnes

Back in November, 2001 my partner Natalie and I stood together holding hands looking around a large empty retail space that was to go on, the next month, to become the used bookstore that would be a central part of our lives for the next 14 years. At our feet in his car seat was our newborn son, Nathaniel, not yet a month old.

Read More! 

The top food post for the month was "Sauteed Garlic Pepper Steak with Provencal Mushrooms and Onions".

In the coming month watch for a return of our Throwback Thursday posts and a new feature looking at left news internationally.

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

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

See also: Racist Memes, Andrew Coyne, the NDP's Disaster & more! -- The Top Ten Posts and the year on The Left Chapter in review

See also: Caribbean Goat, Michael's West Indian, Ukrainian Cookery & more -- The Top 5 Food Posts of 2015!

The NDP, Nathan Cullen, Paul Dewar and the Canadian social democratic delusion

As we head into 2016 there is little that is more pathetic and disturbing from the point-of-view of that ever narrowing band of Canadian social democrats or "democratic socialists" than the descent of the New Democratic Party into a state of abject delusional thinking and total political irrelevance.

This is highlighted by the party's "group-think" circular emptiness that has led it to a dead end from which there is, at present, seemingly no exit.

Going into 2015 the NDP, led by former provincial Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Tom Mulcair, appeared to be in a position to actually take power. The Faustian bargain that party members had made by placing an allegedly "electable" Third Way, Tony Blair style leader -- the most right-wing leader the party has had without any doubt -- looked as if it had a chance of "success" in the electoral sense that was now all that mattered to those who were still hanging around.

Yet this bargain failed catastrophically and disastrously as Mulcair led the party to what can only be seen as one of the most unprecedented failures of "mainstream" bourgeois politics in Canada with the NDP becoming the first party in the country's history to allow a third place party, in this case the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau, to catapult themselves over the Official Opposition and into power.

And it all happened in an entirely predictable, slow-motion derailment the signs of which were clear to many of us on the left but were completely ignored by New Democrat partisans out of what can only be described as an internal party culture that demands almost suicidal compliance and self-destructive obedience to what turned out to be a completely inept leadership clique.

Despite that fact that many left critics, including on this blog, warned that the obvious and intentional shift to the right in the framing of the party's policies would not end well and was out of touch with where the Canadian people were today, the NDP and its partisans insisted that a centrist, uninspiring, empty-headed stab at office would deliver not the New Jerusalem but rather the well-paying jobs that come from the trappings of power and the bragging rights that accompany one's team "winning" something as when a room of chicken wing eating, beer swilling football fans applaud the triumph of this or that side in this or that championship match.

There was glory to be had. And years of very, very good salaries and pontificating soundbites of "social democratic" politicians being so very responsible and so very governmental as they gave press conferences to explain why more press conferences were needed to admit that the new government was not going to do much of anything.

Tragically for the party something happened on the road to Ottawa. And that something was the unexpected political smarts of Justin Trudeau -- or, at the very least, Trudeau's political advisers.

Sensing the obvious change in public opinion they ran, as did Kathleen Wynne the year before in Ontario, a campaign nominally on the "left" of the NDP. A campaign long on grand rhetoric and, of course, bereft of any real meaning. They were, however, only able to do this as the NDP had abandoned the field altogether and chosen to run a campaign that sought not simply to "reassure" voters that the party would not be much of a change but that also tried to dampen any expectations that its election would accomplish anything in advance.

This proved to be an error that was punished as craven errors like this by power hungry left politicians often are.

In some ways, perhaps, it would have been better for leftists had this shell of an echo of a social democratic party won if only to hasten the disillusion that needs to occur with the NDP in order for a new left electoral movement within or without the party to emerge, but the Blairites commanding the ship were utterly incapable of delivering results.

And so we are in the bizarre political moment in our history where the NDP is seeking to continue to justify its very existence given its now total insignificance and yet cannot do so without attempting to maintain the fiction that it lost not due to its actual political cowardice and emptiness but rather due to this-that-or-the-next-thing none of which had anything to do, of course, with the cabal of political dimwits who ran the campaign.

And so we have bright lights like Nathan Cullen, who ran for the leadership of the NDP in 2012 favouring a merger with the Liberals, and Paul Dewar absolutely refusing to accept any type of responsibility or to admit that the campaign may have been fundamentally misguided.

Instead they insist that it was all due to the niqab issue, "celebrity", or whatever other pathetic excuse for their own failings they can grasp at.

Dewar on CBC Radio sounded almost as if he could not understand how any of it happened.

Cullen, meanwhile, creates an absurd alternate reality where social democratic and social democratic governments cannot run deficits or where allegedly "working people" (as if this is who they aimed their middle-class narrative driven campaign at) will not abide them despite the fact that this can be clearly and demonstrably be proven to be false.

The NDP did not go down fighting on principle as these folks seeking to justify their continued paycheques would imply.

It was not the media and the voters who were wrong, as New Democrats seem to insist, it was the NDP!

It lost entirely due to its abject and obvious lack of principle, its dour and unpleasant leader and its complete inability to confront the vapid "sunny ways" rhetoric of Justin Trudeau or to come up with the "ambitious" ideas that the Liberals were worried they would come up with.

In other words, they lost entirely because they chose a centrist vision, not despite it.

There already was a Diet Coke on offer in the Liberal party. The NDP attempt to frame itself as the Coke Zero option might have succeeded in the horrible empty game that is today's mainstream narrative, but it not only did not deserve to, it ultimately didn't.

New Democrats appear incapable of grasping that in attempting to be the Liberal party they lost to it. In attempting to supplant the Liberal party they became it.

When the NDP ceased to be an actual alternative to our present political reality it ceased to have any reason to exist.

This or that wave of public opinion in a very short period could make or break it. Actual Liberals with personality and a paint-by-numbers vision could derail it.

There is no mystery to this. It was telegraphed. The only people on the left who failed to see it coming were New Democrats.

Now the party is claiming to enter a period of introspection while its representatives continue to deny their own culpability in the debacle they participated in and facilitated.

Denial will not change anything or serve those who desperately need a left political alternative well. It serves only to give so many candidates, apologists and party members cover when they seek to absolve themselves or explain why they did not speak up when it might have mattered.

But it will allow the NDP and its truncated narrative and decimated caucus a thread upon which to cling to seek to justify its continued existence when it has become an ideological and political irrelevancy.

See also: Catastrophe: The NDP lost because it deserved to

See also: Doubling down on disaster

The NDP muses about a coalition...and this should be no surprise to anyone

On Wednesday NDP MP and former leadership hopeful Nathan Cullen talked forcefully about what Tom Mulcair has also previously mused about on occasion -- forming a coalition government with the Liberals in the event of a minority parliament after the election in order to oust the Harper government.

As noted in the Toronto Star:

NDP MP Nathan Cullen (Skeena–Bulkley Valley) said that while winning a majority remains his party’s goal, ultimately the number-one priority is toppling the Tories.
“The Liberal voters that I know are as fed up with Stephen Harper as anybody,” Cullen told The Canadian Press in an interview on Wednesday.
“But Justin Trudeau will do himself a great deal of damage with progressive voters if he wants to contemplate more years of this Harper government,” Cullen told the wire service.

This should hardly be a shock from Cullen who based his pitch for the top party job in 2012, at least in part, around exactly this principle and idea. Again as the Star put it at the time:

...he [Cullen] has weathered the leadership battle better than many expected and has championed an idea — cooperation with the Liberals and Greens — that only a few months ago was considered taboo.
It is his pragmatic desire to win, rather than to cast his lot with one flank or the other of the NDP, that has driven him this far.
“There are some who believe that it’s principles or power but you can’t have both. I detest that philosophy,” he says.
Asked about what many NDP supporters have long considered the party’s role in the governing of this country, he replies: “The conscience of the Parliament? Thank you, but no thank you.”

Just in case this hardline repudiation of the historic role of the party -- along with the entirely fictitious and facile notion that people who are committed to an ideologically principled leftist political movement somehow do not think that such a movement can ever win or take power -- was not clear enough Cullen went on to offer this deep insight into political theory and what was wrong with socialist continuity within the NDP "“In my generation, socialism means a different thing,”...To him, he said, it means communism, and he is no communist."

Indeed.

Given this, and given the pronounced right shift under Mulcair, why anyone is surprised to hear Cullen call for a possible coalition is a little difficult to understand.

Despite -- and indeed, in some ways, even because of -- the NDP's lead in the polls, these comments from Cullen and Mulcair make perfect sense. They are intended to appeal to strategic voters (and I have argued previously that reframing the strategic voting narrative is incredibly important for the NDP tactically in the lead up to October), to imprint the NDP as the anti-Harper choice in the minds of Canadians and to put the Liberals on the defensive on this front given that Trudeau has foolishly dug in his heels rejecting the idea -- likely out of fears of alienating right-wing Liberal voters.

They also work to soften up NDP diehards and partisans to the reality that there is a very, very good chance that after voting day we will end up with an NDP-Liberal government of some type. While the hacks pretend to think that the NDP are the only "progressive" party and that the Liberals and Tories "are the same", no one -- and certainly not their leaders -- actually believes this and the thirst among progressive, left-leaning and even most centrist voters to see Harper shown the door in a minority situation will be almost certainly impossible for either the NDP or Liberals to deny -- especially as there is so much less that separates them ideologically than at any other time in our political history.

The Liberals and Conservatives may be "the same" but everyone seems to know that Harper has to go!

While Trudeau continues to throw cold water on the whole notion, though this is much less wise than it once was on his part, were he to in the end enter into any formal arrangement with the Conservatives that kept Harper in power he would be committing political suicide for both himself and what is left of his party.

I think he is well aware of this.

In the jockeying for position and advantage between the bourgeois progressive parties this is simply another predictable and even politically smart maneuver by the NDP that has very little downside for its leadership. The party's left-wing and anti-capitalist supporters are trapped by the logic that they have used to continue to support the party despite its complete repudiation of anything even remotely like a radical or anti-capitalist platform and the NDP leadership knows they have nowhere electorally to go.

They can be, and are, taken entirely for granted, meaning that there is no left flank for Mulcair and his clique to worry about. This is why the NDP can set its sights completely on Liberal, Green and centrist voters which is what its strategy is and which is what it is doing here rather explicitly.

Regardless of whether it would be principled for the NDP to take power through some arrangement with what many of its faithful see as an "old-line" party of Bay St., it is, after all, pragmatic.

See also: The NDP and the strategic voting narrative 

See also: Do we really want to Stop Harper? The year ahead in progressive partisanship