Forty years ago, during a sweltering five days in August 1961, 2000 delegates crammed into a convention centre in Ottawa to launch a new Canadian social democratic party. The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), conceived in Calgary in 1932 and born the following year in Regina, had been languishing in the polls. In 1958, in the federal election in which John Diefenbaker’s Tories took 208 out of 265 seats in the House of Commons, the CCF won only eight ridings. If it all sounds a lot like the crisis facing the NDP today, it was.
The CCF was a creation of the Great Depression. In the Regina Manifesto, the party’s founding program, the voice of the Social Gospel rang clearly, at a moment of deep despair, particularly on the prairies, where the natural disaster of the dust bowl had combined with the collapse of the wheat market, to provoke social catastrophe. Arrayed behind its saintly leader J.S. Woodsworth, a former Methodist clergyman, the CCF spoke of a society in which Canadians would be their brothers’ keepers and a planned economy would replace a tottering capitalism.
Mainstream social democracy was never as removed from the centre of established Canadian political values as during the Great Depression. The CCF, in its peaceful way to be sure, talked of eradicating the existing social order not merely modifying it. It was not until the Second World War that the CCF came in out of the cold. The war provoked a revolution in the role of government in Canadian society. The CCF had maintained that state planning could eliminate unemployment. Wartime economic mobilization under the direction of the federal government proved that the social democrats were right. Canadians saw with their own eyes what Ottawa was capable of doing to put people back to work if it had a strong enough incentive to do so. What social democrats were saying fitted with what Canadians now thought. Toward the end of the war, to the horror of Mackenzie King, the federal CCF was rising in popular support. In 1944, the party won power in Saskatchewan under the leadership of Tommy Douglas.
If the war pulled the CCF closer to the centre of Canadian political thought, the subsequent Cold War posed a new challenge. During the era of McCarthyism, talk of socialism was associated in many minds with Soviet communism and Joseph Stalin. It was David Lewis, for many years the National Secretary of the CCF, who steered social democrats through the dangerous shoals of the fifties. At a CCF convention in Winnipeg in 1956, Lewis was the architect of a new party manifesto---The Winnipeg Declaration. The Declaration substituted Keynesian reformism for the much more far reaching program of the Regina Manifesto. The CCF now accepted the idea that the private sector would dominate the economy. For its part, government would use the tools of fiscal and monetary policy, and extensions of the welfare state, to ensure full employment and greater social equality.
Changing the party’s programmatic course was only half of David Lewis’s prescription for Canadian social democracy. The other half led directly to the launch of the new party in August1961. In his days as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, David Lewis had developed close ties with leading members of the British Labour Party. He was convinced that the only way for a Canadian social democratic party to endure was for it to form permanent organizational links to the labour movement.
With the Winnipeg Declaration, Lewis believed the party had a pragmatic program that would appeal to working class Canadians. He seized on the electoral disaster of 1958 as an opportunity to remake the party from top to bottom and to forge the alliance with labour. During the three years from 1958 to 1961, Canadian social democrats were involved in a continuous process of debate and renewal, a very useful example of what is sorely needed again today.
During the great debate, the consensus in the party leadership was that social democrats had to reach out to what they called "liberally minded Canadians." To realize this objective, "new party" clubs were set up in many parts of the country. The idea was that people who would have found CCF clubs too narrow, and set in their ways, would feel at home, and social democracy’s base would be widened. During this heady period, a school teacher named Walter Pitman won a by-election in Peterborough, Ontario, not as a CCFer, but as the first New Party member of parliament.
Dovetailing with Lewis’s plan for a union between labour and the CCF was the merger in 1956 of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) and the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) to form the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). At the convention of 1961, it was the CCF, the CLC and representatives of the New Party clubs who joined forces to establish a new political institution. Just how important the New Party clubs actually were is a matter for debate. Many of the people drawn to these organizations turned out to be very similar to the members of the CCF.
By the time the delegates arrived at Ottawa for the convention, the question of who was to lead the new party had received a great deal of thought. Many in Ontario wanted David Lewis, the architect of the party’s new course, to stand for leader. But Lewis was not enthusiastic about the idea of running. In part, he was concerned that the Canadian people might not yet be prepared to accept a Jewish leader of a national political party. Right from the start, Lewis hoped that Tommy Douglas, the only social democrat ever to head a provincial government, could be enticed to give up the job of Saskatchewan premier to take on the task of leading the New Party. But well into the year the New Party was launched, Tommy Douglas remained negative, at best skeptical, about the idea of standing for its leadership. Only at the very end did he accept the argument that he was the only person who could lead social democrats out of their Saskatchewan "beachhead".
In June 1960, Douglas had led the CCF back to power in a provincial election. During that campaign, he had declared that he would interpret an electoral victory as a mandate to proceed with the establishment of a government funded medicare program in Saskatchewan. With seventeen years under his belt as premier, Douglas was not only well loved and widely reputed to be the finest orator in the country, he was the symbol of political victory, exactly what the New Party needed at the federal level.
A leadership contest between Lewis and Douglas was never in the cards, but unlike J.S. Woodsworth and M.J. Coldwell, his illustrious predecessors at the helm of the CCF, Douglas did face an opponent at the Ottawa convention. Hazen Argue was the only CCF MP from Saskatchewan to survive the Diefenbaker sweep of 1958. Argue and other members of the CCF caucus in parliament had felt overlooked and somewhat miffed during the transition to the New Party. In 1960, at the last federal CCF convention, Argue gave in to pressures from within his caucus to contest the leadership of the party, despite advice from David Lewis that the post should be left vacant while the New Party was being formed. It is likely that Argue (who ended his days as a Liberal Senator) became the last leader of the CCF to prepare the ground so he could later contest the leadership of the New Party.
While some party members were shocked that a leadership contest was in the offing in Ottawa in August 1961, the Douglas-Argue standoff generated excitement. Douglas easily won the contest with 1391 ballots against Argue’s 380. In fact, the leadership battle legitimated Douglas as a party leader, launching him with far more flair than would have been the case at a staid CCF style convention.
The New Party declaration, adopted in Ottawa, was ideologically similar to the Winnipeg Declaration of 1956. An important difference was that the declaration was influenced by the tidal wave of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which had begun with the election of Jean Lesage’s Liberal government in 1960. In 1961, the NDP, to the great discomfiture of some long standing members such as constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, pronounced that while Canada was "a nation", it embodied two "national cultures". The declaration went on to say that the French speaking community frequently and legitimately used "the word ‘nation’ to describe….itself."
The other great controversy at the convention had to do with the name of the new party. Some delegates thought the label "New Party" had already caught on and ought to be adopted. Others wanted the term "Social Democratic" to be included in the party name. Among the Ontario delegates, there developed enthusiasm for the name "New Democratic Party", which of course, carried the day. Ironically, one of the goals of party leaders had been to shed a party label that could be reduced to three initials. But for most Canadians, despite efforts in the party to get people to think of "New Democrats", the CCF simply became the NDP.
The NDP did not live up to the hopes of some of its founders that it would become a contender for power in Ottawa. In subsequent federal elections, it won more voters on average, than the CCF had. Its best performance came in the election of 1988, the fateful free trade election, when the NDP won 20.4 per cent of the vote and 43 seats. Over the course of its existence, the party has won power in four provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Ontario.
But in the age of free trade and globalization, the NDP has fallen on hard times. In the 1993 federal election, the NDP lost status as an official party in parliament. While it bounced back in 1997, in the 2000 election, the NDP was reduced to 13 seats in the House. Following devastating provincial defeats in Ontario, and recently in British Columbia, the party remains in office in Manitoba and clings to power in a coalition government in Saskatchewan. The crisis that now confronts Canadian social democrats is as deep as the one that led to the founding of the NDP forty years ago.
For four decades, the federal NDP has lived off variations on the themes embodied in the Winnipeg Declaration of 1956. It remains a party committed to using the powers of the Canadian state to improve the conditions of the majority, largely through the further extension of social programs. The federal NDP has not yet acted as though it comprehends the vast changes in the nature of capitalism that have resulted from globalization and technological revolution. While a vigorous, important new movement has arisen in opposition to the corporate agenda inherent in globalization, the NDP is only tangentially associated with the vitality and new leadership this movement can provide. Most ominous, the party is largely cut off from the younger generation from which this new movement springs.
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