Fake Left, Go Right

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.

The ndp’s lean years during the Chrétien era featured the growth of a markedly different form of Prairie populism than the one that had spawned the ndp’s ancestor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), in 1932. Seizing on a deep-seated sense of western alienation, the Reform Party threatened both the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal nexus and federalism itself, uniting the centre-left behind the Liberals.

But the decade also featured a phenomenon that might have favoured the ndp had the party been prepared for it. The anti-globalization movement, demanding “fair trade not free trade,” stole headlines. Many of its young supporters, potential ndp backers who were joining civil-society groups, didn’t see enough in ndp policies to support Canada’s only mainstream progressive political party. On top of this, mirroring a tension within the ndp between its Prairie roots and its urban potential, the gap between the values of rural and urban Canada was widening. Young urbanites questioned whether the ndp understood the issues related to contract employment, or that an entire generation, the baby boomers, was preventing young people from gaining access to the halls of power.

Adjustments were clearly necessary, but during this divisive decade ndp strategists remained preoccupied with having “their” issues (child care, the environment, etc.) stolen at election time and then ignored by the ruling Liberals. To this, the body politic responded with a collective shrug—content, it seemed, with having a party of principle that would never be a party of power.

ith the election of Jack Layton as leader in 2003, ndp hopes for the future were rekindled. Here was a talented, energetic, media-savvy politician who understood cities and the environment, and who could go to university campuses and actually draw crowds. In his 2004 book, Speaking Out, Layton provided Canadians with a coherent social-democratic vision, full of workable ideas that promised to restore the ndp’s capacity to debate economic issues and to challenge the priorities of capitalism, if not capitalism itself. What was more, Layton’s rhetoric suggested a keen appreciation that the left was about more than electoral politics. He saw that process politics and reaching out to civil-society groups were critical.

Strangely, in the 2004 election, and much more overtly in 2006, the ndp leader exhibited a penchant for short-term fixes over long-term party-building. He became a servant to the proposition that what was good for working people and for the left was more seats for the ndp—no more, no less. Playing right into Conservative hands, in the 2006 election Layton helped frame the central issue as Liberal scandals. The Canadian Election Study, published just after the election, suggests this issue was responsible for the Conservative victory. It showed that outside Quebec, the proportion of people rating Liberal scandals as salient jumped from 19.7 percent at the conclusion of the 2004 campaign to 30.4 percent at the end of January’s election. (In Quebec, the sponsorship program’s backyard, the centrality of government corruption was never in doubt.) The proportion of people rating Harper positively actually declined slightly, from 48.8 percent to 46.7 percent, and the share seeing him as “just too extreme” barely budged, down from 49.1 percent to 48.3 percent. But this did not matter. While the ndp’s prospects improved, its strategy clearly helped install the Conservative minority government.