Though depicting the Liberals and Conservatives as Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee worked in 1984, the replication of this strategy had 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 (which dated back to John A. Macdonald), and began negotiating a far-reaching agreement with the US.

Rarely were business and labour so polarized as in the 1988 federal election campaign. 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 activists, and many people in the cultural sector made the battle to stop free trade the fight of their lives.

Free trade, which conventionally meant nothing more than 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 American investors and 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 its pre-shortage share of petroleum, even if this meant that in some regions Canadians would go short.

While it promised better ways of settling disputes, the agreement would not preclude the more powerful US from hitting Canadian producers with destructive countervailing duties if, on a whim, it decided Canada wasn’t trading “freely” enough. 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 would fundamentally alter Canada’s constitutional order by negating social-democratic approaches to the economy. And the ndp knew it.

y the time the Tories called the election in 1988, Liberal leader John Turner had pledged that, if elected, his government would tear up the free trade deal. But on the day the writs were issued, Broadbent barely mentioned 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 by warning Canadians of the consequences of Mulroney’s trade deal. “With one signature of a pen,” Turner thundered at Mulroney, “you’ve thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States.” 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 its 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 relative to 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. But virtually forgotten in the ndp enthusiasm was the fact that a renewed push by their big-business allies had won the Conservatives a majority government. With 43 percent of the vote (compared with 52 percent for the parties that opposed free trade), Mulroney salvaged his free trade agreement, which took effect on January 1, 1989. To this day, we are witnessing the legacy of this deal in the softwood lumber dispute and other disagreements that bring into question Canada’s right to subsidize Crown and private corporations, and to use other instruments of state economic intervention.

Short months after the 1988 election, Bob White, who was then president of the Canadian Auto Workers union, 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, ndp policies dealing with questions of economic strategy effectively disappeared. (Some are still on party policy books, but they are rarely discussed at election time.) Before 1988, under pressure from economic nationalists, the ndp advocated the use of public ownership as a means for Canada to gain control of its resource industries, particularly oil and gas; afterward, it no longer made much of an issue about the essential structure of the economy. Instead, the party became the defender of social programs, medicare in particular. Philosophically, the differences between the ndp and the Liberals blurred to the point that Mackenzie King’s fammous quip that Canada’s social democrats were simply “Liberals in a hurry” had become a reality.

he ndp was unable to translate its vastly improved parliamentary status from 1988 into anything grander. Beginning with the election of 1993, in which the ndp won only nine seats and lost official party status, the result was a decade in the electoral wilderness, a fact the party would do well to remember today.

A protracted recession, the sense that the Conservatives had become arrogant and proto-American, and 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 drastic social-program spending cuts, which an enfeebled ndp could do little about. On the constitutional front, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a Trudeau Liberal, would deal with Quebec. Without any traction in la belle province, the federal ndp largely stood outside 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.