Vikander, N. “Reconquering the NDP” 
The New Federation 6.2 (2001): 7-10.

Reconquering the NDP
by Nick Vikander

The New Democratic Party of Canada finds itself in an unusual position these days. On the one hand, it is coming off a federal election that saw its national support drop to 8 percent of the popular vote. After Alexa McDonough led the party back from the wilderness in 1997, the NDP has now been reduced to 13 seats. On the other hand, many believe the disappointing performance presents the NDP with an opportunity for self-examination and renewal. Since the election, many within the party as well as without have called for discussions on the NDP’s future orientation. These calls for discussion are far from new.

The period between the last two elections also saw spirited debate on the NDP’s future. In an effort to build on 1997’s encouraging election performance where NDP representation rose from 9 to 21 seats, there was an attempt to expand their base of support. Alexa McDonough was widely seen as moving the party towards a more centrist platform, in the spirit of Tony Blair’s “Third Way” in Britain. The NDP voted at their convention in August 1999 to include modest tax cuts, a balanced budget and debt reduction in their policy, as well as to reach out to small business. Even up until the week before this past November’s election, erstwhile NDP MP Peter Mancini said the NDP should consider removing from its constitution the statement that the production and distribution of goods and services in society should not be directed to the making of profit.
Since the NDP’s wider tent netted so few people on November 27, calls for change have become louder. The difference is that the calls are now coming almost exclusively from the left.
One of the groups pushing for a return to the left is the NDP’s socialist caucus, co-chaired by Barry Weisleder. It is of the view that the NDP has strayed from its socialist roots. “There has been a general shift to the right by the party [in recent years],” he says. “The NDP believes it’s only realistic to accept the private ownership system. ... They accept the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of the economy.” Weisleder criticizes the NDP for its move towards the center, citing the example of international trade agreements. “The present NDP accepts NAFTA. They accept the idea of the Free Trade Area of the Americas now under discussion. They’re not opposed to these corporate bills of rights in principle, they just want some, in my opinion, pretty insubstantial changes.”
The NDP has attempted to shore up its leftist credentials since the election, particularly in the area of globalization and the proposed hemispheric FTAA. In January, the federal caucus voted to send all MP’s to Quebec City this past April to join citizens demonstrating against the FTAA at the Summit of the Americas. At Federal Council in late February, among the resolutions passed were motions condemning the United States’ military aid to the Colombian army under “Plan Columbia”, the creation of for-profit Universities in Alberta and the Liberal government’s stance on the FTAA. The latter motion contends that the FTAA “would enshrine the rights of corporations and investors over the rights of citizens and governments to act in the public interest.” Criticizing the Liberals for the planned militarization of Quebec City for the Summit and the secrecy surrounding the draft texts, it states “the New Democratic Party supports the (parallel) 2nd People’s Summit [and] calls for a general mobilization of its members in opposition to the FTAA in Quebec City and across the country.” In the House of Commons, the NDP supported a failed Bloc Quebecois motion calling on the government to make the negotiated texts public. Alexa McDonough and Svend Robinson have raised questions about the right of citizens to protest peacefully, free from police violence, in response to which Jean Chrétien has chided Robinson for “encouraging civil disobedience.”
Some believe added emphasis on issues such as globalization might target the younger demographic of voters who more often than not stay home on election day. “A lot of young people have been disillusioned by the party. ... Others are just apathetic about politics in general,” says Willy Blomme, Women’s Liaison for the New Democratic Youth of Canada (NDYC), the NDP’s youth wing. “They’re feeling completely unserved by the [political] process.”
The youth wing has been involved in disputes with the NDP over direction before. In the early 1970s, the then New Democratic Youth endorsed the Waffle Movement, a hard-left faction of the party. The Waffle was expelled from the party and the NDYC disbanded, to be reassembled only in 1988.
Blomme believes there is likely to be a push from the NDYC to move away from the political center. “Not all, but most youth that I know are more interested in moving the party back to the left,” she says. “[The NDYC] gets a very high representation on Federal Council, so we do get quite a big voice. The party takes us very seriously and we do get to influence things.”
Both Weisleder and Blomme agree that a change in leadership is likely. “[Ms. McDonough] has done good things, but if we’re going to have an upheaval in the party, we’re going to need a new leader,” says Blomme. Weisleder cautions that though necessary, a simple change of leader will not be enough. “The party has to reject neo-liberal leadership, but the program must come first and the leadership must come second. ... A change in leadership is not unimportant but it is subordinate [to a shift in policy].”
The NDP’s elected members, including possible leadership candidates Svend Robinson and Lorne Nystrom, have been careful with their words. The only one to call openly for drastic change since the election has been Nova Scotia MP Peter Stoffer. He has said a change in leadership must be considered and, in an open letter to the party, suggests the NDP’s traditional ties to organized labour must be re-evaluated to fight the image that they are captive to special interest groups.
The issue of labour is very important, as the NDP’s association with the labour movement is of historical significance. “The labour links were the big transforming feature between the CCF and the NDP,” says Desmond Morton, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Morton also points out the importance of labour support to the NDP today. “The CCF was chronically penniless and the NDP would be chronically penniless without labour support,” he says. “At a time when Buzz Hargrove, the head of the CAW, was practically urging people to support the Liberals, his union was coming up with very large donations to the NDP which made it possible for the NDP to campaign at all in the year 2000 elections.”
The largest private sector union in Canada, the Canadian Auto Workers is a political force. CAW President Hargrove has been perhaps the most vocal figure on the Canadian Left calling for change in the NDP. He has suggested a new party might have to be formed if the NDP can no longer be the party of the left. Ongoing is the CAW’s “Taskforce on Working Class Politics in the 21st Century.”
“First and foremost, the union is engaging in outreach to its members,” explains Hargrove. “We’re randomly selecting people in the workplace to come in for a day to talk about politics [and] the role of the union in politics. We’re interested in knowing where members of the union are at. I think it will help us in the long term to reflect the views of our membership on politics.”
CAW documents state that “there is an obvious gap between the political positions taken by our leadership and the positions taken by a majority of our membership.” As to why more union members vote Canadian Alliance than NDP, Hargrove places the blame squarely on the NDP.
 “The members vote for the party they believe best represents their interests,” says Hargrove. “What [the Union] can do is offer resources and expertise to the political party we think is best, as well as help in getting people out, and make a difference in close elections. If the party does its work, then we can make a difference. But I find it insulting and discouraging when people ask why labour can’t deliver its vote. .... Many of our members simply don’t see the NDP as relevant.”
Stating that the NDP has become more of an electoral machine than a movement, Hargrove also calls for an internal NDP taskforce to reach out to the Canadian left and to discuss its future. “We have to reach out to the broader left, many of whom have left the party, to rebuild the left of the party. Everything will have to be on the table. The party is no longer new, and a possible new name would be the Democratic Socialist Party of Canada. The party has to re-examine its relationship with the labour movement, to ask whether the ties have produced what we’d hoped.”
Desmond Morton believes outreach is important for the NDP, but differs from Hargrove in his belief that it is more important to reach out to ordinary Canadians than to the “Canadian left.” “The Canadian left is not wholly hospitable to the NDP, and the NDP is not hospitable to the whole Canadian left,” he says, pointing to the existence of both an undemocratic and an anarchist left. “The thought of reaching out to the whole left, which is not a vast army in Canada, is probably less productive in my view than reaching out to Canadians in general who have, whether they know it or not, social democratic instincts. This is a country that would have been impossible without large collective enterprises.”
Morton, along with former NDP head Ed Broadbent, is planning a conference slated for May that will focus on the future of social democracy in Canada. He believes some lessons can be learnt by looking to Europe. “One of the things about contemporary social democracy in Europe, as I read it, is that for the first time, ... they have begun to look at the way governments function. They have actually dared to make some big changes,” he says, an example being Tony Blair and increased Scottish autonomy. “Nobody notices this because social democracy is supposed to focus on the welfare state and the power of capital, and is not supposed to change institutions. Well, changing the way institutions of government operate is the best way to change the agenda.” According to Morton, this contrasts with Canada where it is largely “the Western Populists such as the Alliance who inherit a tradition of talking about these things.”
These issues notwithstanding, the media always seems to return to the question of leadership. Buzz Hargrove has said he has no designs on the position of NDP leader but the issue keeps getting raised. “It does come up often,” he admits, “because I’m outspoken and I challenge people. I just want to get the issues out there, to build a left political force,” adding he doesn’t believe it can be done with the current leader.
Morton says it is an example of the news media’s focus on personality politics. “[The] last election was a classic case. [They said] ‘This will be a serious election about issues’ and then it became a beauty contest. ... However, one of the differences between the democratic left and the other parties has been in its reaction against superficial beauty contest politics.” In his view, more important is a leader’s ability to motivate. “That kind of test is never the media test ... I’ve worked for people with no public image, people were bored stiff with them, and their personality persuaded me to work for the party.”
The leadership question is likely to play itself out at the NDP’s convention this August, where there will be an automatic leadership review. As calls for change continue, the party will have to decide what will give it a renewed relevance on the federal political scene. After ten years on the margins, it remains to be seen whether this can be accomplished at all.

Nick Vikander is a Montreal freelance writer.

Possible Leaders

Amid the discussion on whether the NDP needs a new leader, there has been speculation as to who could occupy that post. The following are a few of the possible candidates:
Lorne Nystrom is MP for Regina-Qu’Appelle in Saskatchewan. He was the youngest MP in Canadian history when first elected for the NDP in 1968 at the age of 22. In the last parliament, he was NDP critic for Finance, Banks and National Revenue, and has spoken out in favour of electoral reform. Nystrom ran for the NDP’s leadership in 1975 and 1995, and in the latter year was eliminated after finishing third on the first ballot.
Svend Robinson is MP for Burnaby-Douglas in British Columbia and is federal NDP spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and International Human Rights. He was first elected in 1979 and has acquired a reputation as a vocal critic of human rights violations and imperialism. Robinson headed the NDP’s presence in Quebec City this April, where the caucus joined the protest against the FTAA. He ran for NDP leadership in 1995 and led after the first ballot, but withdrew when Lorne Nystrom’s supporters seemed ready to back Alexa McDonough.
Buzz Hargrove has been National President of the Canadian Auto Workers since 1992 and is co-author of Labour of Love (MacFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1998). Under Hargrove’s leadership, the CAW has been one of the NDP’s biggest supporters, though he has had public disputes with former Ontario Premier Bob Rae and current Ontario NDP head Howard Hampton over party policy and electoral strategy. Party insiders have been angered by his public criticism of the NDP and dispute his claim that he has no interest in the NDP leadership.
Judy Rebick is a writer and broadcaster. She hosts CBC Newsworld’s “Straight from the Hip”, writes columns for CBC Online and is a contributor to ZNET, a self-described on-line community of people committed to social change. Rebick was the President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women from 1990 to 1993 and is the author of Imagine Democracy (Stoddart, 2000).
Stephen Lewis is a former Director of Organization for the NDP and led the Ontario party for much of the 1970s. His father, David Lewis, was NDP leader when the party held the balance of power in Parliament from 1972 to 1974. Since resigning as Ontario Party Leader in 1978, Stephen Lewis has worked as a columnist, broadcaster and labour arbitrator. He served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988.