Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Who's not a socialist now? (click to view)
Date: June 21, 2011
As Vancouverites swept up broken glass, charred steering wheels, and other tattered remnants f their city's reputation this weekend, on the other side of town a spectacle of an entirely different sort was unfolding — the biennial convention of the New Democratic Party of Canada.
Canadian party congresses are usually incredibly dull things; as scripted as an infomercial and just as cloying and predictable. Unless there's a new leader to appoint, what comes out of them rarely more than a string of self-indulgent resolutions and choir-preaching speeches — little of which has much appeal beyond the ultra-partisan 2% or so of Canadians who bother to hold card-carrying party memberships. When it comes to useful authority over things like the party's agenda and policy positions, almost all practical power in the Canadian system is afforded to the party leader. At best, conventions can hash over the symbolic.
But sometimes symbolism matters, and last week's NDP convention was certainly occurring at a richly symbolic moment. Almost exactly 50 years ago, in August of 1961, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation party merged with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party of Canada, and elected its first explicitly NDP leader, Tommy C. Douglas. In those days, New Democrats usually battled with the Social Credit Party to control a couple dozen seats, and avoid fourth place status in the House of Commons. Today, the 103-member strong NDP has become the official opposition, and possesses a larger caucus than the Liberal Party did in 1961. Tommy would be proud.
Yet history can be a burden, too. The old CCF was founded as an explicitly socialist movement; its founding document, the
Regina Manifesto, professed a desire "to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity" with a glorious new order, where "economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition." Its NDP successor didn't quite go that far, but still maintained a commitment to the basic gist of socialism, with a constitution that proclaimed that "the social, economic and political progress of Canada can be assured only by the application of democratic socialist principles," pledged support for "economic and social planning" and denounced "the making of profit."
This agenda did not exactly prove to be a recipe for electoral success. Though Canada enjoys a reputation as a "left wing" country, outright socialism has never been popular in a country that took the Cold War quite seriously, and the NDP has fought most of its elections on the defensive.
In the 1990s and 2000s, following a collapse of their never-high-to-begin-with popular vote into the single digits, there were growing calls for the party to formally moderate and renounce socialism, in the same way that Tony Blair's Labour Party, and other nominally social democratic parties of Europe had already done in a (successful) effort to win the center. Yet the NDP lacked a Tony Blair of its own, and a sequence of weak leaders, elected in vicious left-versus-more left leadership battles, ensured that the status quo continued. A perennial problem that all small parties have to face is preventing their membership vacuum from being dominated by the very sort of unrepresentative hardliners who caused all the problems in the first place. The NDP of the 1990s and early 2000s suffered this fate in spades; as ordinary Canadians abandoned the party to peruse other options, hard line unionists and radical politicians happily filled the void.
Jack Layton's 2003 election as leader didn't seem to be much of a break with this trend at the time. A former Toronto City Councillor, Layton was an unapologetic leftist of the traditional urban stripe, who had pursued more than his fair share of flaky causes in the past. As a federal politician, however, he's proven to be incredibly savvy. By reaching out to Quebec, the one part of Canada whose politics have consistently remained on the far-left of the national mainstream, yet has historically never voted NDP, Layton has been able to secure enough French-based growth for his party to offset the erosion everywhere else. Thus, while the NDP achieved only modest increases in its share of the popular vote in non-Quebec Canada, this reality has been entirely eclipsed by the much sexier story of its unprecedented Quebec sweep. Layton, understandably, feels incredibly justified. His "have it both ways" approach seems vindicated; the party was able to remain leftist, yet also make gains. But the gains he made were still only good enough for second place, which brings us back to the original dilemma of the party he inherited — is the NDP still too radical for prime time?
In retrospect, the triumphant atmosphere of the party's first post-election congress was probably not the best place to ask such questions. Many members clearly felt they had nothing to apologize for. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc. Yet others, the more establishment NDP leadership types, saw this as the perfect moment to moderate the party once and for all, and set the stage for even
larger electoral gains in the future. A resolution to formally abandon socialism once and for all was drafted, earning the support of many moderate MPs, including some, like longtime Winnipeg MP Pat Martin, who have often been considered possible successors to Mr. Layton (Layton himself was neutral).
The ensuing debate was a revealing example of the NDP's internal schizophrenia. While Martin called socialism an "anchor" hanging around the party's neck, Barry Weisleder, a radical union activist and chairman of the party's unofficial "socialist caucus," retorted that socialism was actually a "rocket" and got much greater applause from the assembled delegates for his analogy. Cooler heads eventually just tabled the matter to a committee, and no decision was made.
If we think of socialism the way the old CCF did, then clearly few Canadians, or even NDPers, are textbook socialists today. Even if he won a majority government, it's absurd to think Jack Layton would have much interest in instituting a Cuban-style centrally planned economy, or nationalizing private assets for collective redistribution. The NDP's own shifting positions on issues such as free trade, corporate taxes, and spending cuts are ample proof of that, especially at the provincial level, where NDP administrations often govern in a way that's practically indistinguishable from Liberals or Conservatives. Whenever
I speak to NDP politicians, likewise, I find their unease with the socialism label quite palatable. Even those with some affinity for the traditions of socialism find the label messy and unclear, and would prefer to be identified by policy, rather than ideology.
Yet these politicians still need people to organize the rallies and write the cheques. Though I'd also question how many of these types actually want a formal, socialist economic structure, their distaste for capitalism and the market system remains intense. Totemic or not, to the hardcore public sector unionist, Marxist academic, new-age hippie, alterna-feminist, or other stalwart members of the NDP base, capitalism remains an icon of modern society's injustice, inequality, and oppression, and the very thing they joined an "outsider" party like the NDP to oppose.
The question is whether a party designed by and for society's proudest outsiders can ever hope to win the support of the rest of us.
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