
Tom Mulcair with NDP candidate Joe Cressy, who lost the Trinity-Spadina riding in last week’s byelection. | Photo courtesy of Joe Cressy
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? – Mark 8:36. I remember seeing this line from the Bible painted on the side of a grain elevator on the prairies. It’s a rhetorical question members of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) should be asking themselves. Under Thomas Mulcair, the party seems to have lost what was left of its soul. And they’re not even going to gain the whole world.
The NDP suffered a real setback in last week’s federal by-elections, especially in losing Olivia Chow’s former Toronto riding by a decisive margin to the Liberals. Polls consistently show the Official Opposition well behind the Liberal Party. If Stephen Harper is going to be defeated in next year’s election, it’s most likely he’s going to be replaced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. NDP members and supporters would do well to face up to this reality, and then take a good hard look at Mulcair’s politics and what it all means for the future of the left in Canada.
Thomas Mulcair was brought in to win. Old time leftist commentators and NDP insiders like Gerald Caplan told us that Mulcair was the only leadership candidate with the “royal jelly” to paint 24 Sussex Drive orange for the first time in history. Two years on, that whole discussion now seems based on hubris bordering on delusion that the Liberal Party of Canada was going to all but disappear. It’s now clear that analysts across the political spectrum underestimated the resilience of Canada’s traditional ruling party. The Liberals were hobbled after a decade of vicious infighting and inept leadership choices, but they weren’t dead. This whole strategic perspective – pursued ruthlessly during the later years of Jack Layton’s tenure as NDP leader – of taking over the “dead centre” in Canadian politics needs to be reassessed.
The Liberals are not going away, so Canada really doesn’t need another liberal party. Canada still needs a party of the left. We need an articulation of the demands of today’s social movements. We need a voice for the exploited, the excluded and the oppressed – a voice that will stand unequivocally behind Indigenous struggles for land and rights. We need a voice in the electoral arena against war and for international solidarity. We need a party willing to push for fair taxes and for economic democracy, a party that will take on concentrated corporate power.
Does this sound anything like today’s NDP?
Mulcair, who until 2006 was a Quebec Liberal, doesn’t seem to want to identify with the left at all. Last month, he told Global TV: “If you look at the history of some of the social democratic parties, if you look at British labour under Tony Blair, he used to quip that it wasn’t a question of left and right, it was a question of what worked and what didn’t.”
It’s especially strange timing to be citing Blair as a beacon of post-ideological pragmatism. The disaster that Blair helped create by riding shotgun on the illegal US invasion of Iraq has descended into a terrifying bloodbath, with extremist Sunni militias massacring opponents and declaring a new Caliphate. While most Labour Party politicians in the UK are eager to distance themselves from Blair’s legacy of war and privatization, the old war criminal’s venality appears boundless. Last week it was revealed that Blair is helping consult the new Egyptian dictator Sisi, a spin off from another gig with the monarchy in the United Arab Emirates. What a downright bizarre moment for Mulcair to cite Blair, a politically toxic and shameless mercenary, as an example. But I digress…
After the untimely death of Layton after the 2011 election, the leadership race to replace him hinged on who could present themselves as most “prime ministerial”. The debate was not about who could best embody the historic values and policies of the NDP, but simply about who could win. Mulcair was chosen on this basis. Critics, those of us who noted his past as a cabinet minister in a right-wing Liberal government in Quebec or his hostility to supporters of basic Palestinian human rights, were brushed aside.
The obsession with winning at all costs reflects a long-term depoliticization and withering of the democratic mechanisms within the NDP. Riding associations and rank and file members have less influence than ever. Where members used to have many avenues for real participation, they are now treated as mere donors. The leader’s office and his communications staff are in command.
Take Paul Manly, who was accepted by his riding association on Vancouver Island as a candidate for the NDP’s nomination in the 2015 election. The federal executive vetoed this decision. Why? Because Paul Manly, two years ago, had spoken up in support of his father Jim Manly, a former NDP Member of Parliament who was jailed by Israel after joining one of the boats to Gaza challenging the cruel blockade of that open air prison for
Palestinians.
None of this to suggest that Mulcair is singularly responsible for the NDP’s shift to the right. A recent piece in Jacobin Magazine by Gerard di Trolio noted that this has been a decades-long process linked to a global crisis of traditional social democratic parties.
Is it time for people who consider themselves on the left to abandon the NDP? At the very least, it’s time for soul searching about what to do now that the NDP has abandoned us.
Next issue Left Bank will return to matters related to municipal politics, as we get closer to the November elections.