Fake Left, Go Right

Though author and social activist Naomi Klein had similar reservations about Layton’s tactics, she reasons that his strategy was “pretty much vindicated by his having won so many seats.” Klein speculates that Canadians may have a growing appreciation of minority governments and that the ndp could win many more seats in the next election.

“Why not” she asks. “The party stands for what many Canadians want.” At the same time, however, Klein insists that Layton “has a lot to prove. He must show that he can be a counterweight to Harper.” Moreover, the Canadian left requires a “strategy of revival” akin to the ones adopted in places like Mexico and France. In those countries there is considerably more policy interplay between social movements and political parties. The left, Klein contends, needs to be “more than a conference and less than a party.”

lein’s comments echo debates from years ago. In many respects the 2006 ndp election strategy had its origins in the political wars of the 1980s, wars that culminated in the landmark free trade election of 1988. Until that decade, strategic voting was not an important consideration in federal election campaigns, for the simple reason that left-leaning Canadians were no more alarmed by the prospect of a Tory government than a Liberal one. Conservative leaders like John Diefenbaker, Robert Stanfield, and Joe Clark were in the Red Tory tradition: fiscally conservative, socially progressive, and not joined at the hip to big business. They were no greater anathema to the left than the Liberals, and so during the election of 1984, leader Ed Broadbent painted his ndp as the only genuine alternative by dubbing the Liberals and Conservatives the “Bobbsey twins of Bay Street.” It was good politics and the ndp won thirty seats, managing to resist Brian Mulroney’s Conservative tide, which left the Liberals with a mere forty MPs.

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.