Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Rae plays catch (click to view)
Date: September 3, 2011
Canada's epic, multi-week national drama of mourning, romanticizing, and then ultimately beatifying the late Jack Layton having finally concluded, the nation can now move into the final stage of the grieving process — politics.
As has been remarked endlessly, the electoral strength and political success of the New Democratic Party of Canada was derived mainly from the popularity and canniness of its deceased leader, giving his party's present quest to find a suitable replacement a certain level of frantic energy. But one important fact that hasn't been observed nearly enough in the aftermath of Layton's death is that all parties in Canada basically work like this. The NDP isn't really experiencing anything notably unprecedented or tragic right now when one considers just how common it is for Canadian political parties to experience great convolutions and upheaval the second their domineering leader shuffles away.
The whole crisis that the Liberal Party has been experiencing for the last five years, for instance, all really stems back to the fact that the party never found a particularly good replacement for Jean Chretien way back in 2003. Paul Martin seemed decent at the time, but proved underwhelming at the ballot box, and neither he, nor the Dion-Iggy duo that followed, seemed to have anything resembling the message discipline, strategic savvy, or charismatic likeability of the "Little Guy from Shawinigan" (he even had his own catch-phrase!). Chretien was arrogant, inarticulate, and often maddeningly simple-minded, of course, but he could also win elections, which is more than we can say for his egghead successors.
With Layton suddenly gone, however, the Libs may be facing their greatest strategic opportunity in decades. Under Layton, after all, the very real fear — born out by the results of the 2011 election — was that the NDP was well on its way to replacing the Liberals as the preferred party of the Canadian left, and permanently assuming the role of the progressive, anti-Conservative coalition party that sits as choice #2 in Canada's historic two-party system. The key word being "coalition." In a country as large as Canada, with such vastly disparate and hard-wired regional identities, prime ministers are rarely elected unless the party they lead has some sort of broad, national appeal. Which, in practice, often means offering very different things to different people. The good leader's challenge is making this look natural.
Under Layton, the NDP was a coalition of progressive Quebecers and the various left-wing rump communities that always vote NDP, namely young people, academic-types, social activists, and other Stuff White People Like-types dwelling in the downtown cores of Canada's biggest metropoli. But it was never a winning coalition. Though it was a good enough coalition for second place, the Liberals are now poised to peel off as much of the fair weather 2011 Layton groupies as possible, and welcome them back into their own larger and stronger tent — where many of them have a lot more history.
Speaking at a Liberal Party conference this week, acting Liberal leader Bob Rae tried valiantly to remind the nation that it was his party, not the NDP, that has served as Canada's left-of-center option for over a century, blasting the Conservatives as the party of uncaring, "Tea Party-type ideology" while simultaneously casting the Liberals as stalwart progressives who care about "social justice as well as prosperity."
"Liberals had everything to do" with crafting Canada's proudest progressive traditions, he said, rattling off issues such as healthcare, the environment, and ensuring "no one is left behind" as potential battle fronts on which his party is willing to fight the Harper government "every single step of the way" in the coming years. Yet he also repeatedly emphasized that Liberals were "flexible and pragmatic," in contrast to Conservatives (and, though not explicitly stated, presumably the NDP as well), who are guided by little more than "whim, prejudice and ideology."
My view, which I discussed in an essay shortly after the recent election, is that the Liberal Party should, subtly or not, continue this sort of rhetoric, and constantly seek to market itself as the party of the smart, pragmatic left, and brand the NDP as the party of the flakes. With Thomas Mulcair — the man who famously refused to accept Bin Laden's death on national TV hours after it was announced — currently viewed as a prospective front-runner in the NDP leadership primary, there seems to be a lot of room at present for Liberals to reach out to common-sense progressives turned off by some of the NDP's fringier rhetoric and members. As I noted in yet another recent essay, this has very much been the victorious strategy of the Liberal Party of British Columbia, which has proven tremendously effective pushing itself as the progressive party of successful and smart people, while counter-branding the NDP as the party of dated, ignorant socialists thoroughly unprepared to run a 21st century economy. One could also see parallels to the success of Bill Clinton in the States, who, unlike many Democrats before and after, made great hay out of denouncing the unrealistic and unattractive fringes of the American left, with his Sister Souljah moments and so on.
Liberals can also capitalize on the fact that the NDP is currently suffering from something of a separatist problem. Their current acting leader, we now know, was once a member of the Parti Quebecois, and due to an evident lack of background checks during the last campaign, many other members of the caucus have similarly dubious or unknown allegiances to federalism, either in the past or present.
Positing the "in or out?" question in sharper terms could very well help expose a central weakness in the NDP's bloated Quebec contingent, while playing up the right-wing element of the Harper Conservatives could move the separatist-vs-federalist discussion into a more of a left-vs-left matter, as it already is in Quebec provincial politics. If nothing else, Quebecers are a people who like having their voice in government. Paradoxically, the NDP's victories in the province can actually be twisted to make the party appear less successful, if the Liberals are smart. "Second place is well and good," they might say, "but we're the only progressive party in this country that has repeatedly proven we can win Quebec and the rest of Canada, too."
But I'm curious what you guys think. What should the Liberals learn from the NDP, and what does the NDP have to learn from the Liberals? And most importantly: what leader should be recruited to take either of them to victory?
CKA Uber 
