Is the NDP really still debating Mulcair's failed leadership?

What the hell is going on in the NDP?

With just over a week to go until the party's first convention since the complete debacle of the 2015 election campaign, bigger-and-bigger guns are coming out in support of Tom Mulcair's continued leadership. It increasingly -- if there was ever really any doubt -- looks like he will win his leadership review vote.

Five of Canada's most important union leaders released a statement backing Mulcair Tuesday. These included the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the National Union of Public and General Employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the United Steelworkers.

Mark Hancock of CUPE specifically, said ""Tom Mulcair is a truly progressive voice for CUPE members and all working people," The joint press release stated, "Mulcair is known and respected throughout every part of Canada and has the organic relationship with Quebec to keep and expand our strongest geographic base."

What are they talking about?

Setting aside for the moment that Mulcair's "progressive" bona fides are fairly dubious to begin with and were on scant display when it mattered (namely during the election), Mulcair is now largely known across Canada and among Canadians outside of the NDP as one of two leaders - the other being Harper - who blew the election!

Let us take just a cursory look at the facts about Mulcair's leadership:

• Mulcair led the party from Official Opposition and 103 seats to third party status and 44 seats
• He played a major role in allowing the third party Liberals to leapfrog over the Official Opposition (the NDP) to form a majority government - a feat never before accomplished by a third party in federal Canadian parliamentary history!
• Under his leadership the NDP lost every single seat the party held in Atlantic Canada
• The NDP lost every single seat in Metropolitan Toronto - without which no progressive party can hope to achieve power,- including one of the "safest" NDP seats in the country. 
• His "organic relationship" with Quebec apparently was strong enough to see the party's Quebec caucus totally decimated! It went from 59 elected members to 16.
• Starting the election either in the lead or close to the lead in federal opinion polls, the NDP now sits at a mere 11.7% in the polls, the lowest level of support for the party in over a decade.

What kind of "leadership" is this? In any other party he would have been run out of town!

It is true that Mulcair has gone on a tepid progressive charm offensive, suddenly showing great concern about (though no policies to tackle) income inequality and "social democracy" while also repudiating his "signature" economic policy plank during the election, the disastrous and reactionary balanced budget pledge. 

But who can possibly believe this at best mild change of heart is authentic? 

Given that his leadership, in electoral terms, has been a fiasco of epic proportions one has to think that what is really afoot is that the powers-that-be want to prevent a genuine cleaning of house and the re-examination of the party's fundamental directions and structures that might come in the wake of Mulcair's ouster. 

While it is true that Mulcair alone is not to blame for what ails the party, the party will not be changed, democratized or radicalized in any meaningful way if he remains. Which is likely what his backers wish to avoid. 

Apparently at the expense of political common sense. 

He has had his critics, but they have been few. Figures like Sid Ryan and Cheri DiNovo who have spoken out publicly are, sadly, not within the elite of the party's federal power structure. 

Meanwhile, party president Rebecca Blaikie has backed away from her previous implication that Mulcair would have to resign if he got less than 70% of the vote, setting him up to stay on if he scores in the 60s. 

She probably needn't have bothered. 

Ultimately the decision does lie with those who attend the convention, and while labour leaders and others wield considerable clout, it is conceivable, though unlikely, that their support for Mulcair will be repudiated. 

Those New Democrats not in attendance had best hope so. Otherwise, can the last person leaving the convention hall please turn out the lights? 

Because the party's over.

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

See also: Only those in the NDP can explain why Thomas Mulcair still has his job

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

According to the NDP and its leader it is now official --  what we've got here is a failure to communicate!

In a note entitled "Personal Reflections" that was posted to the NDP's website and emailed out to those on its email list, NDP leader Tom Mulcair made a show of appearing to "take full responsibility" for the debacle of a campaign he ran and accepted the predictably tepid conclusions of the 'Interim Report' of Rebecca Blakie's Campaign Review Working Group that he had appointed to allegedly look into what went so very wrong.

"I agree with the over-arching assessment [of the report] that our campaign came up short" Mulcair writes, in one of the great statements of the obvious in recent political memory.

While, one might note, that a leader who accepted full responsibility for such a totally catastrophic result would actually generally do the right thing by their party and resign to leave its stewardship in abler hands, as always with the NDP the devil is in the details when it comes to both the report itself and the mea culpa on Muclair's part.

After stating that "there remains within the Party a rock solid confidence in our core social democratic values" Mulcair goes on to say "we are addressing the important observation from the interim report that the campaign lacked an over-arching narrative that could easily communicate our progressive proposals."

And this is when it begins to become clear that to Mulcair and apologists for the party's campaign, its fundamental narratives and its strategists, the policies that the NDP ran on were just fine.They were, apparently, simply expressed poorly.

It was not that the party's policies were basically misguided, it was all in the presentation and the fact that they were misunderstood by the electorate.

It was not them, it was you Canadian voter!

The new line emerging is brought more into focus as Mulcair goes on to state:

This became apparent when our commitment to balancing the budget overshadowed our social democratic economic vision which saw new government revenues generated through higher taxes for corporations, closing CEO tax loopholes and a crackdown on tax havens. 

This is a fascinating attempt to frame the reactionary balanced budget pledge as "social democratic" -- something that it was not at all -- while also seeking to imply that the "revenues generated" by the, in fact, minor tax commitments the party made during the election (which would have been offset by boutique tax cuts) would have enabled the NDP to keep this pledge without cutbacks.

They would not have. Despite the best attempts of New Democrats to claim otherwise, the choice on offer was not between running deficits and a set of "fiscally-responsible" leftist initiatives, but between a modest deficit accepting Keynesian infrastructure programme proposed by Trudeau and two parties pledging to balance the budget in ways, with tax policies and under a set of economic conditions that would have led to them either having to break the pledge almost immediately upon winning government or to implement severe austerity measures.

In other words, the NDP balanced budget pledge was either going to lead to the worst attack on what is left of the Canadian state since the Liberal budget of 1995 or was a total fiction. You can decide which is worse, but by pretending it was simply poorly communicated Mulcair accepts responsibility not for what was a fundamentally terrible policy but rather for his inability to spin it.

And if it was only the spin, as opposed to the overall narrative itself, that was wrong, then Mulcair likely feels he can make a somewhat compelling case to those left in the party and willing to listen that, given another chance, he will spin this and other basically bankrupt "Third Way" ideas with a new paint job that will, indeed, deliver the dream of power next time.

Mulcair, whose leadership of the party has been, to say the least, top down, also appears to cryptically acknowledge that perhaps the purges of candidates and the burying of things like the member policy resolutions went too far when he says "We spent far too much energy trying to avoid mistakes in the lead-up to the last election" and "the parliamentary wing must work more closely with the party and the grass-roots". Predictably he does not elaborate much on what he intends to do about this other than having appointed insiders to somehow "ensure this happens".

And, again, as he did recently in an email I discussed in a previous piece, he makes an attempt to portray himself as deeply concerned about income inequality while continuing to not articulate one single meaningful policy to do anything about this inequality in a serious way.

This specific attempt to portray himself and the NDP in left-wing terms is especially galling when in comes in the wake of the NDP caucus voting in favour of the very Liberal tax changes they had supposedly opposed and had claimed -- likely correctly -- would actually increase inequality!

So what you get is Tom Mulcair "accepting" the conclusions of a report that does not tackle the fundamentals at all, still trying claim that the balanced budget pledge was somehow misunderstood, and now claiming that it was all the emphasis and that he is, despite all the evidence of his leadership to this point, a great standard bearer of the social democratic cause!

This is, it must be said, all a whitewash that makes the Andrea Horwath ONDP maneuver to save her leadership look like one of the greatest moments of political self-reflection and introspection of all time by contrast.

When Mulcair cruises to victory on the back of this farce at the upcoming NDP convention, get ready for a very long trip into the political wilderness of centrist narrow-vision emptiness for the NDP just when so many opportunities on the left might have been opening up.

Opportunities that cannot and will not open up so long as Mulcair remains leader and so long as the party and its caucus labours under these fundamental self-delusions and with this complete inability to truly accept that it was not the communication it was what the party was communicating that led to an entirely warranted and self-inflicted defeat that did not even have the solace of sound principles to make it worthwhile.

(This piece is posted with all due apologies to a classic cinema moment!)



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

See also: Just forget about a Canadian Corbyn -- How a lackluster left in Canada gets the Mulcair it deserves

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

By Fraser Needham


It has now been almost three weeks since the NDP suffered a devastating loss in the 2015 federal election and the party remains shell shocked as to what exactly went wrong.



The Liberals are forging ahead on their mandate after winning the party’s first majority government in 15 years. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named his first cabinet this week with gender parity and significant minority representation. If early signs are any indication, it appears clear the Liberals intend to run a much more open and accessible government than their predecessors.

This, of course, wouldn’t be hard as Stephen Harper ran the most inaccessible government in Canadian history.

The Conservatives are moving ahead too. The party has already appointed an interim leader and is making plans to hold a leadership convention. There are also strong signs coming out of the caucus and party that the Conservatives realize they will likely need to moderate a bit and not be so hard right if they want to appeal to a larger portion of Canadians beyond the 30 per cent base Harper consolidated.

It is also likely that whoever becomes the next party leader; they will not rule the party with an iron fist like Harper did. It seems those days are finally over.

And then we have the NDP.

After close to three weeks, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair emerged from a self-imposed seclusion to hold his first caucus meeting and to speak to media for the first time since the election. However, Mulcair didn’t say much and what he did say didn’t make much sense.

The NDP Leader was quick to point out that the October 19 showing was the second best in the party’s history -- but this is not true. Sure, Mulcair’s seat count of 44 in this election is slightly higher than what the NDP got under Ed Broadbent in the 1988 election at 43. The only problem with this analysis is that there are now far more seats in the House of Commons than there were back in 1988.

Using the actual facts, Broadbent got 14.6 per cent of the seats in a 295-seat House in 1988 while securing 20.4 per cent of the vote. In this election, the NDP attained 13 per cent of the seats and 19.7 per cent of the vote in a 338-seat House of Commons. And of course Mulcair made no mention that the NDP lost over one million votes since 2011 and shed 51 seats from coast to coast.

The NDP Leader informed the media he was very proud of the campaign the party ran and made it out that it was him that stopped Stephen Harper and not Justin Trudeau. The truth is Mulcair did not stop Harper but his inept campaign certainly did give a lot of help to Trudeau. Perhaps when the new Prime Minister has time he will send a thank you letter to Thomas Mulcair and the NDP for all the unpaid and volunteer help they put in ensuring the Liberal campaign was a smashing success.

The NDP Leader also made the grand statement that the NDP opposition from 2011 to 2015 was the best Official Opposition the House of Commons has ever seen in it’s history – ever! Yes it certainly was effective. So effective that the NDP is no longer Official Opposition and sits in a distant third place in the new House of Commons. Now that’s progress!

So in short, we know the NDP ran a great campaign because they tell us so. They have come to the conclusion that voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for change and that meant voting Liberal. Both the partisans and leadership of the party have no idea why voters choose the Liberals as the party of change rather than the NDP, especially when the latter led in the polls going into the election.

But you can be assured none of it had to do with the fact the NDP ran the most right wing campaign in the party’s history by pledging to balance budgets ahead of social priorities, increased funding for military and policing, wholehearted support for the oilsands, small business tax cuts, a refusal to tax the very wealthy and inaccessibility. Of course not, that is just left wing loony talk!

And wasn’t it just a very short time ago that NDP partisans were mocking Stephen Harper for refusing to invite defeated MPs to the first Conservative caucus meeting since the election defeat? Well, who did the exact same thing last week? You guessed it, Thomas Mulcair. It appears the NDP Leader is a lot like Harper in that he wants to head off any criticism of his leadership before it actually happens.

But wait, the NDP wants to get to the bottom of its epic election loss and Thomas Mulcair has commissioned that a report be written and presented to the party in short order. So who is going to head up this report? Is it going to be one or more of the many academics that are connected to the party who might actually be willing to write something truthful? Of course not!

The report is being prepared by NDP President Rebecca Blaikie and National Director Anne McGrath – two individuals who played key roles in the disastrous NDP campaign strategy. I am willing to save the party a lot of time, effort and money and write the report for them free of charge.

It will go something like this:

“There is no doubt the NDP suffered a setback in the 2015 election. We went into the campaign with the goal of forming the party’s first government but instead by the time the ballots were counted we finished in third place. There is also no doubt voters overwhelmingly voted for change in this election and they chose the Liberals as that agent of change. 

However, there are also many positives to be taken away from the 2015 election. It is our conclusion that the NDP ran a very strong campaign, which resulted in the second best seat total in the history of the party. We had an excellent platform, which was completely in tune with desires of progressive voters. It is also our belief that we have the best party leader who performed fearlessly and with passion on the hustings. 

So why didn’t average Canadians vote for the NDP as much as we had hoped? It is our belief that although the platform was certainly excellent and progressive, we failed to communicate its key planks in a way voters could understand. So it is our finding that we are not far away from where we want to be. What needs to be done is a tightening of our messaging so we are communicating our great ideas to average voters in ways they can understand. 

Some have argued that the NDP needs to do a major examination and revamping of where the party is at and where it is going. We believe this would be a major and fatal error. Although the party suffered a minor setback in 2015, we are well on the way to forming our first NDP government. The party is very blessed that Thomas Mulcair, the best leader in Canadian politics, has agreed to stay on.  

With Tom in the House to hold the new Liberal government to account, before we know it four years will have gone by, we will be in another election campaign and forming our first federal government in 2019. ‘Courage my friends, it’s never too late to build a better world.'”

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: As Liberals and Conservatives look for success, Mulcair NDP embraces failure

See also: Only those in the NDP can explain why Thomas Mulcair still has his job

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