(This is the next to last draft of my article that ran in The Walrus in May under the same title. There has been continuing interesting in the article so I decided to make it available.)
On election night, January 23, 2006, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton stood before a buoyant victory party crowd in downtown Toronto and announced that Canadians had voted for change and that more New Democrats in Parliament would mean better lives for working families and seniors. For Layton, winning twenty-nine seats and 17.5 percent of the popular vote represented an electoral triumph vindicating a very particular campaign strategy: an attack focused almost exclusively on the scandal-plagued Liberal government. With 460,000 new voters, ten more Members of Parliament than in 2004, better regional representation, and, judging by the jubilant crowd, momentum, Layton had every reason to be pleased. Indeed, not since the heady days of Ed Broadbent’s leadership was the optimism so palpable.
Just the same, in many respects it was what Layton did not say that evening that was more interesting. He did not mention that the most ideologically right-wing prime minister in Canadian history was about to be sworn into office; and he did not mention that while the NDP’s 2006 election result was impressive, the party would no longer hold the effective balance of power in Parliament.
Layton’s speech capped a campaign in which he studiously avoided warning Canadians about any potential threat from Harper and the Conservatives. This odd fact had been driven home to me a few days earlier when a newspaper reporter phoned to do an interview. Clearly frustrated, he told me he had been on the NDP campaign plane for three weeks and that despite repeated efforts, he had been unable to induce Layton to say anything about Harper. The NDP leader was quick to attack Paul Martin and the Liberals, but all he would say about the front-running Conservatives was that they were “wrong on the issues.” Shortly after the election, arguing that Canadians wanted parliament to function and for the sniping to end, Layton said that he could and would work with Harper. But based on ominous early warning signs from the Conservatives, he must be wondering if Harper will work with him.
Following negotiations with the Liberals that seemed designed to fail, Layton broke with the Martin government in a letter to health minister Ujjal Dosanjh on November 7, 2005. He wrote that he was halting talks with the Liberals vis-Ã -vis stopping “the growing privatization of public health care in Canada” because “in our view, on this key test of whether the Government has a real desire to make the present Parliament work, we must regretfully conclude that there seems to be none.” Three weeks later, the NDP joined with the other two opposition parties to defeat the minority Liberal government in a vote of non-confidence.
Inside the NDP, the move was divisive. By voting day, within the broader left community it had created a veritable chasm. The federal election “badly tested the relationship” between social movements and the NDP, wrote Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford in the Globe and Mail a few days after Harper’s election victory. “NDP strategists precipitated the election, sensing a moment of opportunity to win more seats. But their decision was made over the explicit objection of many progressive movements. They had used the Liberals’ fragile minority position to extract impressive, important gains (child care, new legal protections for workers, the aboriginal deal, and others); they wanted to solidify those victories, and win new ones.” Leaders from these progressive constituencies “all wanted the election later, not sooner.”
The most visible sign of division was Canadian Auto Workers’ president Buzz Hargrove’s campaign to stop the Conservatives by supporting New Democrats in ridings where they were likely to win and Liberals elsewhere. Three weeks after the election, the Ontario NDP executive suspended Hargrove from the party; its president, Sandra Clifford, explaining that the sum of the union leader’s actions led to the suspension. “It was appearing with the prime minister….hugging him. Saying that he wanted a Liberal minority government,” Clifford said. In effect, the party had decided that it was an expellable offence for members to advocate strategic voting. While many insiders wanted Hargrove to “Buzz off,” others were just as concerned about the decision to bring down the government; still others, viewing the entire NDP campaign as strategic, thought Hargrove’s dismissal deeply ironic.
Prime Minister Martin had promised to call the election within thirty days of the release of the second Gomery Report. Either way, therefore, a trip to the polls was imminent. But NDP strategists considered it dangerous to allow the government to set the terms of debate, and were concerned that on the key issue of political ethics the party would be caught in the squeeze between the Liberals and the Conservatives. They believed that the Liberals would accept virtually all of Justice Gomery’s recommendations and that, as such, a chastened Liberal Party could win a majority government.
Still smarting over Martin’s successful 2004 last-ditch appeal to NDP supporters to vote Liberal to stop Harper, Layton’s campaign team was determined not to let history repeat itself. Polls indicated that NDP supporters were the most worried about a Conservative government and, the thinking went, many again would vote strategically (for the Liberals) in the event of a successful campaign to demonize Harper. So, as revealed by NDP press releases, campaign literature, and Layton’s speeches, to prevent erosion of NDP support, the party concentrated its fire on the Liberals, barely mentioning the Conservatives in their attacks. The most memorable NDP television advertisement depicted Canadians giving the corrupt Liberals the boot.
This kind of messaging set the tone, and Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, for one, told me that she felt pressure “not to critique Harper,” and that the top priority was “to win more seats for the NDP.” During the election, the Council was involved in the Think Twice coalition, made up of groups that came together to warn Canadians about Stephen Harper’s record.” Barlow said: “if the NDP was not going to talk about Harper’s record, we felt we had to.”
A crucial division between the NDP and the wider progressive community is whether it really matters if a Stephen Harper or a Paul Martin is in power. The NDP answer during the election campaign was a flat no, a position that Maude Barlow couldn’t agree with. Offering a more charitable interpretation, author and social activist Naomi Klein reasons that Layton’s “strategy is pretty much vindicated by his having won so many seats.” Klein speculates that in a relatively depoliticized period of our history Canadians may have a growing appreciation of minority governments and that the NDP could win many more seats in the next election. “Why not?” she asks. “The party stands for what Canadians want.” At the same time, however, Klein insists that Layton “has a lot to prove. He must show that he can be a counter-weight to Harper.” Moreover, the Canadian left requires a “strategy of revival” akin the ones adopted in places like Mexico and France. In those countries there is considerably more policy interplay between social movements and political parties. The NDP, Klein contends, needs to be “more than a conference and less than a party.”
Klein’s comments echo debates from years ago, and in many respects the 2006 NDP election strategy actually had its origins in the political wars of the 1980s, wars that culminated in the landmark free trade election of 1988. Until that decade, strategic voting was not an important consideration in federal election campaigns for the simple reason that left-leaning Canadians were no more alarmed by a Tory government than a Liberal one. Conservative leaders like John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, and Joe Clark were in the Red Tory tradition – fiscally conservative, socially progressive, and not joined at the hip to big business – and were not anathema to the left. In the election of 1984, leader Ed Broadbent painted his NDP as the only genuine alternative by dubbing the Liberals and Conservatives the “Bobbsey Twins of Bay Street.” It was good politics and the NDP won thirty seats, managing to resist Brian Mulroney’s Conservative tide which left the Liberals with a mere forty seats.
If depicting the Liberals and Conservatives as tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee worked in 1984, replicating this strategy would have dire consequences in the next election. Under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neo-conservative revolutions were surging forward in the United States and Britain. Happy to swim with the current, the Conservatives abandoned their historic opposition to free trade (that dated back to John A. Macdonald), and began negotiating a far-reaching agreement with the US.
Rarely before had capital and labour been so polarized in a Canadian election campaign as in 1988. On the table was a deal that threatened to undo the most fundamental difference between Canada and the US; the state’s right and responsibility, vigorously exercised north of the border but largely neglected to the south, to mitigate the harsher effects of the free market. Trade unionists, social movement activists and many people in the cultural sector made the battle to stop free trade the fight of their lives. By the time the Tories called the election, Liberal leader John Turner had pledged that, if elected, his government would tear up the free trade deal.
Free trade, which conventionally simply meant reciprocal tariff elimination, was a stunning misnomer for the treaty Mulroney was negotiating with the Reagan administration. Under the investor-state provisions of the agreement, for instance, Canada would be required to accord “national treatment” to US firms located here. This measure would severely curtail Canada’s ability to foster winners in the public and private sectors, and to develop Canadian expertise, performance, and economic output for both national and international markets. In an equally significant giveaway, Canada would relinquish basic sovereignty over its oil and natural gas. In the event of a global petroleum shortage, Canada would be required to continue supplying the US with the pre-shortage share of petroleum, even if this meant that in some regions Canadians would go short.
Far from being a reciprocal trade deal, the agreement would allow Washington to retain its own trade laws and to hit Canadian producers with countervailing duties. The treaty would tie the hands of the Canadian government, drastically limiting its ability to implement policies regarded as inimical to the US, transnational business, and big oil in Canada. It was an ideological agreement that, once implemented, would essentially alter Canada’s constitutional order by negating social democratic approaches to the economy.
But on the day the writs for the 1988 election were issued, Broadbent failed to even mention free trade in his campaign kick-off statement. In the early days of the contest, the Conservatives topped the polls. In a televised leaders’ debate, however, Turner scored a powerful hit on Mulroney by issuing a warning about the trade deal’s consequences for Canadian sovereignty. The impact was immediate. The Liberals, having seized an issue that was at least as dear to the hearts of left-wing progressives, took the lead in the polls. It was a moment of truth for business, labour, social movements, and for the NDP.
Rather than joining the Liberals and other nationalists in a full frontal assault against free trade, the NDP reprised their 1984 election strategy, turned its guns on Turner (who was not even in office), and declared that there was no real difference between Grits and Tories. Those running the NDP campaign decided that what mattered most was the party’s seat total and its vote share vis-Ã -vis the Liberals, not the fight for economic sovereignty.
Amazingly, the strategy worked. On election day, Ed Broadbent was rewarded with forty-three seats, the most ever for the federal NDP. Almost forgotten in the NDP enthusiasm was that a renewed push by its big business allies had won the Conservatives a majority government. With 43 percent of the vote, against 52 percent for the parties that opposed free trade, Mulroney salvaged his free trade agreement, which took effect on January 1, 1989. The legacy of this deal is the current softwood lumber dispute and other disagreements which bring into question Canada’s right to subsidize crown and private corporations and to use other instruments of state economic intervention.
Paralleling statements made by progressives today, short months after the 1988 election then- Canadian Labour Congress president Bob White expressed the labour movement’s fury with Broadbent’s electoral strategy. “What was and remains an issue, was the style and orientation of the NDP campaign,” he wrote in a report to the NDP’s federal council. “Is our party becoming a pale imitation of the other parties? Can we still count on it to stand up for us?”
With free trade, the NDP’s policies that dealt with questions of economic strategy effectively disappeared. (Some are still there on party policy books, but they are never discussed at election time.) Before 1988, under pressure from economic nationalists, the NDP advocated the use of public ownership as the means for Canada to gain control of its resource industries, particularly oil and gas. Afterwards it stopped making an issue of the fundamental structure of the economy. The party became, above all, the defender of social programs, and in particular medicare. Philosophically, the differences between the NDP and the Liberals blurred to the point that Mackenzie King’s famous quip that Canada’s social democrats were simply “Liberals in a hurry” had become a reality. The NDP was unable to translate its vastly improved parliamentary status from 1988 into something grander. Beginning with the election of 1993, in which the NDP won only nine seats and lost official party status, the result for the party was a decade in the electoral wilderness, a fact it might well remember today.
The sense that the Conservatives had become arrogant and proto-American, and, perhaps, even more crucially Mulroney’s courting of Quebec nationalists, led to the Tories’ collapse under new-leader Kim Campbell in 1993. Once returned to office, the Liberals abandoned their opposition to free trade, but Canadians largely bought the idea that they would lessen the impact of the deal through strong social programs. This despite the fact of drastic social program spending cuts in the face of an enfeebled NDP. On the constitutional front, Prime Minister Jean Chretien (a Trudeau Liberal), would deal with Quebec. Without any traction in la belle province, at least in the minds of most Canadians, the federal NDP stood largely outside of the Quebec sovereignty battles of the early 1990s. In short, the NDP, having forsaken an ardent defence of economic nationalism to become the defender of Canada’s social-safety net and not being as intimately involved in the historic French-English divide, had less and less to talk about.
The NDP’s lean years during the Chretien era, of course, featured the growth of a markedly different form of Prairie populism from that which spawned the NDP’s ancestor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), in 1932. Seizing on a deep-seated sense of western alienation, the Reform Party threatened the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal nexus and federalism itself, uniting the centre-left behind the Liberals.
But the decade also featured a phenomenon that might have favoured the NDP had the party been prepared for it. The anti-globalization movement, demanding “fair trade not free trade,” stole headlines. Many of its supporters, young potential NDP backers who were joining civil society groups, didn’t see enough in NDP policies to support Canada’s progressive mainstream political party.
On top of this, the creeping separation between the values of rural (and to a lesser extent suburban) and urban Canada, were becoming more pronounced. And young urbanites questioned whether the NDP understood the issues related to contract employment or that an entire generation, the baby boomers, was preventing young people from gaining access to the halls of power. Adjustments were clearly necessary, but what rankled most inside the NDP during this divisive decade was having “their” issues (childcare, the environment, etc.) stolen at election time, and then ignored by the ruling Liberals. To this, the body-politic responded with a collective shrug, content, it seemed, with having a “party of principle” that would never be a party of power.
With the election of Jack Layton as leader in 2003, NDP hopes for the future were re-kindled. Here was a talented, energetic, media savvy politician who understood cities and the environment, and who could go onto university campuses and actually draw crowds. In his 2004 book, Speaking Out, Layton provided Canadians with a coherent social democratic vision, full of workable ideas that promised to restore the NDP’s capacity to debate economic issues and to challenge the priorities of capitalism, if not capitalism itself. What was more, Layton’s rhetoric suggested a keen appreciation that the left was about more than electoral politics, that process politics and reaching out to civil-society groups was critical.
Strangely, however, in the 2004 election, and much more overtly in 2006, exhibiting a penchant for short-term fixes over long-term party-building, the NDP leader became a servant to the proposition that what was good for working people and for the left was more seats for the NDP, no more, no less. Playing right into Conservative hands, in the 2006 election, Layton helped frame the central issue as Liberal scandals. The Canadian Election Study (CES), published just after the election, suggests this issue was responsible for the Conservative victory. It showed that outside Quebec, the proportion of people rating Liberal scandals as salient jumped from 19.7 percent at the conclusion of the 2004 campaign to 30.4 percent at the end of January’s election. The proportion of people rating Harper positively actually declined slightly from 48.8 percent to 46.7 percent, over the same interval. The share of people who believed that Harper “is just too extreme” barely budged, down from 49.1 percent to 48.3 percent of those interviewed. But this did not matter. While the NDP’s prospects improved, its strategy clearly helped install the Conservative minority government.
Analysts agree that the major turning point in the campaign came in late December with the RCMP’s letter to NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis informing her that a criminal probe was being launched about possible leaks in Ralph Goodale’s finance department on Income Trusts. Wasylycia-Leis had written to the RCMP to request an investigation and when the Mounties, in a questionable move during an election campaign, wrote her back, she released the letter to the media. The Liberals never recovered.
In the last week of the campaign, Layton advocated strategic voting, urging traditional Liberals to “lend” the NDP their vote, while the Liberals went into the “repair shop” for refitting. To cap it off, in what was billed as his last statement as an MP, Ed Broadbent thundered that power “should be taken away” from the Liberals, that the party “no longer has the moral authority to deserve people’s votes.” Meanwhile, Broadbent said not a word about what a Harper government would mean for the country.
What was the NDP leadership playing at? Did it actually prefer a Conservative victory? Unlikely as it may seem, there are reasons for thinking so. Since the founding of the CCF, social democrats have dreamed that one day their party would replace the Liberals as one of the nation’s two major political vehicles. Inspired by the British Labour Party which had relegated the once mighty British Liberal Party to middling status following World War I, CCFers saw this as the natural course of Canadian political development. For a few years following the founding of the New Democratic Party in 1961, with Tommy Douglas as its first leader, the dream returned, only to fade as a result of relatively poor election results in 1962, 1963 and 1965. The dream was extinguished when Pierre Trudeau swept to power in 1968.
In the advanced world, Canada is that rare case where a centrist party has been dominant for many decades, borrowing ideas from the left and the right, whichever was opportune. Rarely innovative, always adaptive, the federal Liberals have been the bane of their opponents, detested by NDP and Conservative insiders for their lack of principle. Under Layton, NDP strategists have resumed the search for the Holy Grail: the realignment of Canadian politics around the centre-left pillar of the NDP through the marginalization of the Liberals. For the dream to become reality, the NDP will have to move even further to the centre, and to abandon its half-remembered social democratic aspirations.
Here’s a way to measure just how far the NDP has journeyed from the left to the centre as a result of free trade. When it held the balance of power from 1972 to 1974, led by David Lewis the party pushed for the creation of a national oil company. Having won back its majority, Trudeau’s Liberal government completed the launch of Petro Canada as a publicly owned petroleum company in 1975. Though no longer under effective NDP pressure, the Liberals aggressively built Petrocan, which acquired the assets of foreign owned oil companies in Canada in the process. Within a few years, Petrocan grew into a vertically integrated company that operated in all aspects of the oil business, from exploration and production to retailing. Petrocan’s purpose was clear: to establish a public window on an industry controlled by global oil giants that regularly altered estimates of Canadian oil and natural gas reserves to suit their purposes.
Along with Petrocan, Ottawa froze the price of domestic oil well below the world level while exporting to the US at the world price. The policy sheltered Canadian consumers from the full impact of the quadrupling of world oil prices between December 1973 and the summer of 1974. Ottawa collected the difference between the domestic price and export price as an export tax. This under a Liberal government. If this all sounds terribly radical – and to oil companies, horrifying – it’s simply a sign of just how tame Canadian economic policy has become since the free trade election. Today, Layton’s NDP wouldn’t dare advocate such policies, and not just because a two-price system would violate NAFTA rules. It would represent too much interference with the operations of the market. Too radical for today’s NDP but all in a term’s work for the Trudeau Liberals.
And yet, such policies, modified to meet environmental goals and to pay proper royalties to Alberta and other petroleum producing provinces, make eminent sense in our age of spiraling petroleum prices and record high profits for the oil companies. High energy prices have forced poorer Canadians in the Atlantic provinces and elsewhere to have to choose between food and home heating. One of the reasons so many people are jaundiced about reports of how well our economy is performing is the bite energy prices take out of their incomes. Over the past two decades, the real incomes of wage and salary earners have barely kept up with inflation, while the incomes and, more impressively, the accumulated wealth, of corporate executives have soared.
(The members of the Calgary Petroleum Club are laughing all the way to the bank. And now the political party that was built in their backyard, the party whose policies they adore, is in power. Is it possible that the reason that Stephen Harper won’t release the names and contributions of donors to his 2002 run for the Canadian Alliance leadership is that so many big oil names are on the list? Certainly, Layton didn’t make an issue of Harper’s connections to big oil during the campaign.)
What would have happened if the NDP had proposed a return to the two price system for Canadian oil? The revenues from the export tax could be dedicated to paying oil rich provinces for forgone royalties and to lowering the bill for oil imported for large parts of eastern Canada. Some would argue that the scheme would promote wasteful energy consumption. But until this country is prepared to do something about SUVs in posh neighbourhoods, the idea that the less than well-to-do, farmers, and small businesses should bear the burden of higher energy prices is preposterous. Environmentalism for ordinary Canadians and unprecedented consumption for the few simply isn’t a defensible path to a sustainable economy.
What prevents the NDP from putting these questions on the political agenda? Tommy Douglas or David Lewis wouldn’t have hesitated to do so. Nor for that matter would Pierre Trudeau. The political appeal of the energy issue is abundantly clear. Bernard Lord’s Conservative government in New Brunswick was very nearly overturned in the provincial election of 2003 on the issue of skyrocketing auto insurance rates. Energy prices are a similar issue with enormous populist potential. Beyond prices, the issue of who controls Canadian resources is once again crucial. The US government is looking at the Alberta oil sands as a huge source of petroleum that could lessen American dependence on supplies from the Middle East. China and India are also eyeing Canadian petroleum and other resources. The question that has dogged Canadians throughout their history, the control of Canadian resources by outsiders, is on the table, and so far the NDP hasn’t touched it.
Proposing to regulate energy prices could expand the NDP’s base among wage and salary earning Canadians, the “working families” it claims to represent. But the NDP does not want to be seen intervening in the economy, its current goal being simply to render capitalism a little more humane. That’s not a disgraceful philosophical stance. It’s just not in keeping with the radicalism of the party labour activist J.S. Woodsworth founded and firebrand preacher Tommy Douglas built. The NDP is fighting the Liberals today over which of the two parties is best able to represent the liberalism of an urbanized, multi-cultural Canada, and the reason NDP strategists are so thin skinned about the Liberals is that they are after the same turf. What divides today’s NDP from the Liberals is the narcissism of small differences; what unites them is political pragmatism. Even the cultures of the two parties have merged. As with the Liberals, there is now a definite career path in the NDP, and the party today is very much in the hands of professionals.
While some NDP insiders are already speculating about the party becoming the major alternative to the Conservatives, the broader progressive community has a different outlook and quite different aspirations. For one thing, there is the blunt fact of political tactics in a system with a first past the post voting system: an all out fight between the NDP and the Liberals for control of the same real estate is an incalculable gift to the Conservatives. To improve his chances in the next election, Harper must make it appear that those who voted NDP did not waste their ballots. We can expect the Conservatives to seek an alliance with the NDP on two issues on which they essentially sang from the same song sheet during the election campaign: government ethics and crime.
Knowing that a unified centre-left vote means the end of the Conservative government, in many respects, on these two issues Harper has the NDP right where he wants them. Never mind that Harper displayed a neo-conservative contempt for democratic due process by appointing Liberal turncoat David Emerson and newly-minted Senator Michael Fortier to Cabinet; the NDP is unlikely to win electoral support on ethics because it has never formed the government federally, and thus has no record of moral probity while in office upon which to base its outrage. The Conservatives credibility on this issue stems from western alienation, and the propaganda that the crooks in Ottawa are running away with their tax dollars without the good grace of political representation in return.
On crime, Layton tried cravenly to capitalize on urban anxiety, attempting to trump the law and order Conservatives by proposing five-year minimum sentences for certain gun-related offences. Urban advocacy is one thing, but a mountain of US-based evidence suggests that such punitive policies simply don’t work. Nonetheless, Harper can now conscript the NDP’s positions in support of his own proposed legislative solutions. On this terrain, the party of progressive principle has become an accessory to the Conservative agenda.
Childcare advocates are, in turn, furious at the NDP for its electoral tactics. Immediately after Harper was sworn into office, and after Layton announced that he could work with the new Conservative government, the new prime minister made good on his promise to scrap the Liberals $5 billion universal childcare program. While he will honour the agreements for one year, they will lapse on March 31, 2007. The deal the Liberals had negotiated with the provinces would have provided $1.2 billion annually for five years to create spaces, hire staff, and launch provincial child-care programs that would be affordable and available to all families.
“As a result of the early election call,” Martha Friendly, the coordinator of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto, told me the implementation of the childcare agenda was “considerably less advanced than it could have been several months further down the road.” Friendly has worked for a couple of decades in pursuit of a national, not-for-profit, early childcare program of the kind that exists in Western Europe. Though the Liberal childcare program did not deliver everything she and her allies had been fighting for, it went a long way in that direction. Beyond the initial five-year commitment, the Liberal election platform promised to continue the funding for an additional five years with at least that level of funding. With the victory of the Conservatives, Friendly says that the quest for universal, not-for-profit childcare has been put on hold.
While Harper ran a near-flawless campaign and masterfully disguised many of his core beliefs, his prescriptions for childcare -- $100 a month for families with children under six – speaks to an anti-big government bias, an individualist ethic, and, perhaps most importantly, a rejection of the notion of imposing social programs of any kind on the provinces. Such top-down impositions run counter to Harper’s libertarian political instincts (and against the Conservative policy platform), but part of the brilliance of Harper’s campaign rests in a calculated judgment: in an already decentralized Canada, the path to Ottawa must lead through placating the provinces, especially Quebec and Alberta. Satisfied that they had a friend in Harper, Gilles Duceppe quickly announced that the Bloc Quebecois would prop up the Conservative minority government; Thomas d’Aquino and the Chief Executive Officers of Canada called on the prime minister to delegate federal powers to the provinces; and, in a delicious irony, Alberta’s Ralph Klein dubbed his privatization of healthcare delivery the “Third Way” – the term used to describe Tony Blair’s highly moderated British socialism – and dared Ottawa to respond.
The rapidity of these moves suggests that right wing and provincialist power-brokers are testing Harper, but beneath the high drama of high politics others are quaking. On the sensitive issue of refugees, for instance, the Harper government does not need new legislation to clamp down. The portfolio is in the hands of Stockwell Day, Harper’s minister of public security. In the weeks following 9/11, Day, then the leader of the Canadian Alliance, insisted that there was a Canadian connection to the terror attacks. In the House of Commons, he alleged that there were “thousands of these claimants roaming around Canada who should have been detained and some possibly deported…We know that there have been terrorists living among us. We know that they get here illegally through our refugee system.”
The aboriginal accord, negotiated just prior to the election call, is likely to be negated by Harper. Again, no legislation would be required, and none would be necessary to gut the cultural sector. The ideological right gets the importance of culture, and believes that the arts and non-governmental organizations are breeding grounds for left and/or liberal thought. While the Harper government may not privatize CBC television, it will almost certainly slash the network’s budget, and bleed NGOs of federal funds.
Another element in the culture war will be the Harper government’s revisiting of the same-sex marriage issue. While Focus On The Family, a US-based organization dedicated to “family values” is now a registered Canadian charity with offices in Ottawa, Harper is unlikely to re-open the abortion debate in this parliament. But the anxiety list goes on. The Harper government will have difficulty passing anti-labour legislation, and is shrewd enough to know that an upset civil service can be awfully troublesome to a minority government, but a significant downsizing in the number of federal employees can be anticipated. Having welcomed provincial premiers as federal government bedfellows, Harper will likely take his cue on the all-important New Deal for cities from them, not from the more demanding mayors of large municipalities. And if indeed Harper as prime minister becomes little more than a “headwaiter to the provinces” – as Trudeau dismissively characterized Joe Clark – this will no doubt reshape policies from Kyoto to healthcare privatization, the issue on which Jack Layton triggered the 2006 election.
In the aftermath of the Conservative electoral victory, the left needs to revisit a question dating back to the founding of the CCF: the relationship between the Party and progressive movements. From the beginning tension has existed between those devoted to “movement politics” (trade unionists, farmers, and today, civil society groups) and those principally concerned with electoral politics; between those committed to building people’s institutions and transforming the political culture, and those who insist that winning votes, seats, and eventually power (at the provincial and federal levels) is all-important. When the CCF first won in Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas in 1944, this tension was immediately evident. Many, imbued with a strong western Canadian belief in direct democracy, thought that the Douglas government should adhere exclusively to policies set at party conventions. But Douglas maintained that the government was responsible to all of Saskatchewan and that his cabinet was responsible to the provincial legislature. His view prevailed, as it has ever since with every elected social democratic government in BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. The premier and the Cabinet would rule and would listen to the party convention as one voice among many in its formulation of policy.
With Harper in office, Maude Barlow thinks that “dialogue and healing need to take place” among progressives. For her, the road ahead needs to spring from an alliance of forces inside and outside parliament, which could include New Democrats, some Liberals, and some members of the Bloc. “If Stephen Harper wins a majority in the next election,” she says “we will lose decades in the social struggles we are involved in.”
Talk of tactical cooperation is one thing. This must be tempered, though, by the the clear need for a left political party in Canada. Merging the NDP with the Liberals would extinguish a seventy-year social democratic tradition. It would kill an important part of what makes Canada distinctive. The NDP must survive. Ironically, its survival is most threatened by its move to the centre, which has led many to conclude that the country does not need two liberal parties. A critical outlook on capitalism and the championing of the interests of the non-affluent majority were the reasons the party was founded in the first place. Those reasons remain as compelling as ever. The NDP should fight avidly to expand its influence, but that does not mean that its leaders should give in to the cynical politics of short-term electoral advantage, as they did in the recent federal election.
