When I wrote in Inroads six months ago laying out the themes of the campaign to come, I suggested that the Tories should focus on the economy and security, the Liberals on their leader and the NDP on a concrete plan that demonstrated their ability to govern.¹ The NDP failed completely. The Liberals succeeded completely. The Tories failed to score on the economy and, unexpectedly, scored an own goal on security, wounding the NDP and allowing Justin Trudeau to soar to a majority.

The longest election campaign in modern history was too long. Unless we want politics dominated by candidates who are retired, independently wealthy or backed by special interests, campaigns need outer limits. The longer the campaign, the less likely parties are to rely on volunteers, increasing the importance of fundraising and professional staff.

The Conservatives failed in their attempt to define their party as the only credible defender of a strong economy. Thrown off by the slide into a “technical recession,” the Conservatives continued their pre-election attacks on Trudeau before descending into fearmongering over the niqab and “barbaric cultural practices.” They undid years of work by Jason Kenney and others to reach out to culturally conservative minority communities. The instigator of Tory fearmongering may have been Australian political consultant Lynton Crosby, veteran of victories for the right in his homeland and the UK. Oddly, Crosby’s firm denied that he was involved and the media never did find out just who was running the campaign for our then-governing party.

For the Conservatives, having failed to maintain focus on the economy and aware that a large majority of Canadians wanted change, security issues were an appealing lifeline. But instead of a terrorist attack against which they would protect the nation, they faced images of drowned children in the Mediterranean and desperate families clawing their way into the West from a shattered Syria. Suddenly Stephen Harper’s record looked more hard-hearted than firm-minded, offering Justin Trudeau the chance to summon the spirit of his father’s multiculturalism.

The New Democrats ran a front-runner campaign, safe in presentation but – I’ll get to this – weak in its foundations. The NDP called for Canadians to “Stop Harper,” and they had a backup chorus in the Liberals, the Greens and the Bloc. As long as Tom Mulcair was lead singer, this helped the party. During early weeks the NDP rose in the polls, peaking at 37 per cent on August 24. When, in mid-September, the niqab decision came down, Mulcair earned credit for bravery from commentators but scorn from a majority of Quebec voters influenced by cultural nationalism and the French tradition of laïcité. The Bloc ran a TV ad against the NDP that was shocking in its negativity: a pipeline dripping oil that congealed into the shape of a niqab-covered woman (the NDP offered qualified support for the proposed West-East pipeline that the Bloc opposed).

From that moment the Conservatives descended to a series of actions that reinforced every negative stereotype the party had created while in power: dividing Canadians between new and “old stock” and promising help lines to report “barbaric cultural practices.”

The New Democrats plunged in Quebec polls, dropping over 11 points between September 18 and October 2. Now, for the first time since early summer, the way to stop Harper looked to be to vote Liberal. While polls in Quebec stabilized, with the NDP moving back into contention there, the Liberals took a clear national lead over both Tories and NDP. The NDP, diverted by a dress code violation, returned to find that a younger, sexier singer had taken charge of the band, with a message that lacked lyrical complexity but had an undeniably catchier beat. It chose simply to carry on louder and more insistently than before: Stop Harper. Okay, said NDP voters across the country, and voted Liberal in droves.

This is ironic, since in areas where it could have faltered – organizing, fundraising and databases – the NDP, traditionally the third party, didn’t. The New Democrats raised money from more small donors than ever before in Canadian history and rolled out a new voter contact database that, unlike previous versions, didn’t crash and burn. While paper candidates in no-hope ridings were scrutinized, the NDP suffered few scandals.

During the writ period six Conservatives, five Liberals and two New Democrats were disqualified for reasons ranging from the serious to the trivial to the very weird (such as disgraced plumber and Conservative candidate Jerry Bance, caught on camera urinating into a client’s cup). Parties have yet to adjust to social media, where low-profile candidates in unwinnable seats now require the same attention from central campaign staff as high-profile stars. Our political system has evolved: privacy is a thing of the past. Either we accept that everyone has done embarrassing things, or we will, in the words of the British political comedy The Thick of It, create a world of political “brushed aluminium cyber-pricks” bred to run for office, men and women with no hinterland, no flaws, no past.

Despite their decimation in 2011, the Liberals remained a national party, in power in six provinces, and continued to be seen as a party that could govern the country. Even the late-campaign revelation that the party’s cochair had offered Energy East advice on how to lobby a non-Tory government had no impact in the polls. Here we come to the NDP’s core problem. The Liberals had to persuade Canadians that their leader was ready, and they succeeded. No one doubted that they were prepared to govern, for good and ill. The NDP leader shone in the House of Commons, but his party’s ability to govern, never even a real possibility until this election, was still much in doubt.

The New Democrats chose to tackle their image as “tax and spenders” with a pledge to balance the budget with only minor tax increases Then they waited three weeks before releasing a “costing document.” The full platform was released ten days before election day, on the Friday before the Thanksgiving long weekend, when millions voted in the advance polls.

The NDP was hit from two sides. The party’s reputation as fiscally irresponsible was ironically enhanced by the balanced budget pledge because it seemed inconsistent with the many expensive programs the party continued to roll out. The left flank of the NDP had long defended deficit spending because the 1990s Chrétien-Martin Liberal government had made deficit elimination a central tenet. This bizarre position ignored the party’s disciplined history in Saskatchewan, from Tommy Douglas to Roy Romanow, and the Liberals cynically exploited the NDP’s internal contradictions and sowed dissent within the NDP by creating the myth, eagerly swallowed by party militants, that Mulcair, a former Liberal, was somehow right-wing.

To make this work the Liberals had to get away with a volte face. The party of Chrétien and Martin, the team that persuaded Canada that balanced books were the key to economic growth, now said, “Oh no, those were different deficits, bad deficits, while Justin Trudeau wants to spend money on good deficits that will be invested in infrastructure.”

Beware of Liberals promising infrastructure. We have been down this poorly paved road before. Next come the cosy contracts, then the bailouts – subsidized with downloading of services and spending cuts.

Most readers will acknowledge that deficit spending is a good idea only under some circumstances, and a bad idea under most circumstances. Giving tax money to bankers through interest payments is worse than investing in programs or giving tax cuts, or just saving up for a rainy day (hello, Alberta!). Programs invested in with borrowed money need to be obvious winners; otherwise you are digging yourself a hole.

So let’s stop the puffery. It’s embarrassing when MP Scott Reid, who had worked for Paul Martin, writes, “The NDP learned exactly nothing from the ill-advised campaign pledge to deliver balanced budgets. That commitment also appeared to be guided by the sake of appearances – to project a certain image, an imagined idea of what people would see as the ‘responsible thing’ instead of being shaped by the sensible, resonant and, yes, winning thing.” Paul Martin himself was wheeled out to stammer his way through a defence of Trudeau’s policies, policies he must find deeply repugnant. The academics and others following this post facto justification (where were the calls for deficit spending earlier this year?) should be equally shame-faced, especially when the Liberal plan includes the need for completely unexplained spending cuts totalling billions of dollars.
NDP claims, postelection, that the party abjured any deficit spending only out of deeply held principle are also embarrassing. As former NDP deputy leader Libby Davies told CBC’s The House two days before the election: “Can you imagine what the reaction would be if the NDP came out with a statement saying, well, we’re going to run deficits? I mean, it would have been mayhem. I think it’s a situation where you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

In the spring I wrote that there was always a risk for an NDP that hadn’t accepted the reality of deficits as an emergency tool only, like an emergency parachute in an airplane. Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane over and over, just because you can, doesn’t instil confidence.

The Liberals knew the NDP had not reached consensus on fiscal policy, and pirouetted left, trading in their past economic credibility for a promise to intentionally spend Canadian tax money they didn’t have. The New Democrat left promptly went into class betrayal mode, accusing Mulcair of betraying his base. Mulcair wasn’t helped by media that exhibited a strong bias. My favourite headline was “Liberals take lead in Quebec, poll finds.” The numbers the poll reported? The Liberals and NDP tied, with 28 per cent each. More importantly, no one challenged the Liberals’ abandoning 20 years of party economic policy for tactical reasons.

The evidence-based approach that Mulcair had used to good effect when it came to Bill C-51 (read, analyze, then decide) was ditched in mid-campaign. In an interview with Vice News, Mulcair abandoned without warning a careful policy on decriminalizing marijuana (a policy many candidates I spoke with found frustrating and complicated to explain to voters). Similarly, the NDP had moved away from kneejerk opposition to trade deals but, despite never having seen or read it, the party announced that it definitely wouldn’t support the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. On this file the New Democrats were as lucky as the Liberals who, forgetting 1988, claimed they were always in favour of free trade. Neither received much attention from the media.

Coverage of the election degenerated into uncritical reporting of opinion polls and leaders’ tour events. Polls have become to electoral politics what Latin incantations were to the medieval Catholic Church: incomprehensible but impressive. The CBC should be singled out for particular blame, hiring Éric Grenier, of the ThreeHundredEight.com website. Grenier offered spurious riding-by-riding predictions before and during the campaign by extrapolating national polls down to the riding level, based on the results of the previous election. This method allocates party support to areas of historical strength, so that it is likely to make accurate predictions in seats that nearly always vote the same way – the Tories in Alberta, the Liberals in Newfoundland – but is useless in tracking changes. They also convey impressions of party strength that can influence voter opinion, a question that no one, least of all the survey-addicted media, seems interested in exploring. Grénier himself complained that his predictions were being cited as polls.

Strategic voting related to the excessive respect for polls had a major impact on the results. There was an explosion of third-party organizations such as LeadNow that took on the form of American-style PACs, allowing money to be spent in an election beyond the contribution limits. While PACs are usually the creatures of specific industries or unions, LeadNow raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for no purpose other than to campaign for the party best placed to defeat the Conservative candidate in races across Canada.

My misgivings about LeadNow are not partisan: the group endorsed many NDP candidates, some of whom won. My concern is about democracy: polls ignore the millions of reasons why people vote for or against particular parties and candidates, and dumb the discussion down to a horse race. Strategic voting dumbs democracy down to an even lower level: it is the sort of “if you’re not with us you’re against us” point of view that I have disliked about the political right. As former New Brunswick cabinet minister Kelly Lamrock said, “The three non-Conservative parties have platforms that differ on some big issues, from civil rights to economic theory to environmental standards to human rights. Even if you may decide that you can live with more than one of those options, that should happen after a full debate on the merits of each. LeadNow is actively trying to short-circuit those debates. If we stop having those debates in elections, we start to lose the chance to learn from each other.”

A final problem with strategic voting is that it just doesn’t work. Different strategic voting organizations recommended voting for different parties in the same ridings. Some of the targeted ridings elected Conservatives, as Liberal voters were driven to vote for a losing NDP candidate, or vice versa.

A conversation about the value of a vote may be a happy side-effect of the conversation around electoral reform Prime Minister Trudeau says he will initiate. I will be as pleasantly surprised if our education system, media and parties engage in a genuine civic debate as I will be if the Liberals adopt Mixed Member Proportional representation.

Changing how we vote is one of dozens of attention-getting but difficult policies the Liberals flashed across the electoral sky during the campaign. In choosing their priorities, the Liberals will no doubt look to dismantle the NDP, afraid that a party they had always dismissed as do-gooding nobodies came so close to destroying the Big Red Machine. To avoid a repeat of the orange wave they will spend a lot of tax money on shoring up their left bank.

Thus the NDP is a crossroads. The easy route leads back to the comfort of the nostalgic left, complaining that Liberal policies “don’t go far enough!” The harder one continues in the direction taken, toward that place that no party occupies, one that recognizes free trade as a good way to earn money that can be invested in more targeted government programs. The era of big national programs is over and the future lies in fuller devolution, allowing more creativity in the development and implementation of programs across the country.

Looking back on the Stephen Harper decade, we find that he leaves little behind as a legacy. Unlike Brian Mulroney who opened Canada to globalization and tried to deal with the holes in our constitutional fabric, Harper’s lasting contributions will be vandalism of government science and the abolition of the Wheat Board. Other signature policies, from eliminating the long-form census to the Fair Elections Act to the excesses of C-51, will be repealed. The candidates who seek to replace him as Conservative leader will not attach themselves to his legacy. Unlike Thatcher and Reagan, he was unable to change his country’s culture. He had few friends. He will not be missed. Continue reading “Tales of the long campaign” →

You would have to be foolish to predict the shape of the government that will form after the October 19 federal election. Canadian politics continues to surprise – look at the May election in Alberta. We can anticipate that the economy and security will be important. But it will be the leaders, ground game and war rooms that will decide a race that will likely turn on a small number of hard-fought riding-by-riding contests.

I cannot pretend to be neutral: as leader of the New Brunswick NDP, I will be working hard to make Tom Mulcair Canada’s first NDP prime minister. But here I offer a survey of the leaders, the party strategies and machines and the political landscape they’ll battle over during the campaign.

Since the peculiar election of 2011, no party has maintained support above the 40 per cent needed for a comfortable win. Justin Trudeau, gifted with adulatory media coverage but hobbled by repeated gaffes, has returned a shattered Liberal Party to contention, but has been less successful in defining who he is beyond being heir to a famous name. Thomas Mulcair, exceptional in the House of Commons, has maintained support in Quebec and kept the NDP viable as an alternative across Canada, but his party struggles to change long-held negative perceptions. Stephen Harper, who has endured a succession of mistakes and scandals common to a party approaching the end of a decade in power, is undoubtedly a divisive figure, even loathed by many, but his party remains popular in many parts of the country.

Economy

The Conservatives do best on questions of economic management, the issue that heads Canadians’ list of concerns. During the Tory years, high oil and gas prices pumped from Harper’s prairie heartland injected billions into equalization payments for have-not provinces suffering from the decline of the manufacturing and non-petroleum resource sectors. Thousands who made the trek to work in Fort McMurray sent remittance payments home to struggling families in the Atlantic Provinces and elsewhere. Now, with the price of oil hovering around $50 and many of those workers heading home to join the unemployment lines, the economy stands on the edge: disaster hasn’t struck, but it could.

The Conservatives take credit for economic stability (however precarious), their capstone a barely balanced budget tabled in April. The budget was otherwise predictable, filled with cotton candy for target voters, including a long-awaited income-splitting tax reform that won’t benefit 85 per cent of Canadians. There’s money for transport in a pitch to urban voters, balanced budget legislation for hard-core conservatives, and a cut in the small business tax. There’s no single strong signal fire. Instead there are many small flashes of light, sending reassuring Morse code messages into the darkness to the 40 per cent of the electorate who will still, after ten years, consider voting for the Conservatives.

To reach those voters, Harper’s campaign will spend heavily on government advertising. Everyone knows that governments will, even should, promote their own work: it’s supposed to be our work too, something we should be proud of. The Conservatives will claim it is a complete coincidence that wave after wave of ads precisely mirror the party’s communications priorities. That’s the problem with the Tories’ campaign: it’s too self-interested. The government is not so much letting the public know what it’s doing as demanding recognition from us for its good work.

It’s a good sign that Canadians dislike this, but there are also good reasons why all parties promise to ban political advertising when they’re in opposition but never do when they’re in government. We dislike the ads and signs because they work, no matter your opinion of Harper’s government. You notice the signs and, in your mind, they add up as accomplishments. You know you’re being manipulated but you’re still being manipulated. It’s annoying.

But the books are balanced. Unemployment is reasonable given historic precedents and global turmoil, although economic fringes such as the Maritimes are afflicted with jobless figures near or over 10 per cent. From Wabush to Victoria, the country’s highways and building sites are dotted with those ubiquitous blue placards signalling federal investment. Harper is walking a tightrope, taking credit for sound management while simultaneously warning of the dangers posed by NDP and Liberal inexperience: you may not like us, but just imagine what would happen if the other folks were in charge.

This is a particular challenge for the NDP, a party suffering from the reality that it has never governed the country and the perception that it is incapable of managing the economy. Facts don’t support the latter claim: at the provincial level, New Democrats have delivered more budget surpluses per year in government than their Liberal or Tory counterparts. The party’s icon, Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, balanced the books before introducing new social programs including the forerunner to medicare. That legacy has been undermined by the Rae government in Ontario and a small but vocal collection of activists who demand the embrace of ever-growing government, deficit spending and punitive taxes as a way to demonstrate solidarity with some long-dead socialist ideal.

That this group, not organized around any leader or policy, does not hold much sway over the party’s day-to-day operations, and never has, does not stop the media from trotting out this or that disaffected Marxist come election time. The left critic will loudly denounce the NDP for, once again, campaigning as a moderate social democratic party, and then – to the delight of the Toronto-centred and Liberal-leaning national media – will usually announce that because the NDP is not left enough they will have to vote Liberal to stop the Conservatives. No, it doesn’t make any sense to me either.

The key to the NDP winning the economic argument in 2015 is more political than policy-based: the party must show competence and discipline during the campaign by sticking to a very short list of commitments and giving a clear “no” to those within the party or the broader left who will, undoubtedly, demand much more. Mulcair has so far stayed firm and on track: rejecting personal or consumption tax increases and embracing reductions in the small business tax while calling for job creation and daycare. Mulcair is well prepared with a list of practical if unexciting consumer protection initiatives, such as reducing ATM fees, which helped Jack Layton establish a middle-class beachhead in 2011. Mulcair’s signature policies, such as a national $15-a-day daycare program, appeal to traditional left voters without alienating moderates.

The Liberals dream of the NDP doing a buffalo jump toward socialism or chewing its own ideological tail off, a spectacle that they hope would divert attention from Trudeau’s meagre and contradictory policy offerings. The Liberals have been all over the economic map in the two years since Trudeau was anointed the fourth in a line of so-far disastrous post-Chrétien saviours. From endorsing the purchase of the Nexen oil company by CNOOC, a corporation controlled by the Chinese military, to contradictory positions on pipelines and free trade, Trudeau talks a lot about the middle class, but his policies – such as the May announcement of higher taxes for the very wealthy and cuts for the middle class – would not help most Canadians. What they do is advance the Liberals’ policy narrative for the campaign.

The Liberals’ policy playbook is clear and well tested. Run to the left with a campaign of loudly progressive words and deliberately vague policies, forcing the NDP to choose between a race to the left or a public confrontation with extreme elements of its own base. Either way Liberals think they can win. Their history as a centrist governing party and – paradoxically – their history of doing the opposite in government from what they say they will do during campaigns allows them to position themselves further to the rhetorical left than the NDP without suffering serious consequences. Simply, most people don’t believe the Liberals when they say they’ll govern from the left; the party long ago learned that people not believing what you say offers distinct political advantages. Mulcair has much less room for movement: any hint of embracing a tax-and-spend platform will send moderate swing voters over to Trudeau.

Security and C-51

Following the attacks on servicemen and Parliament in Quebec and Ottawa in October 2014, the Conservatives pushed Bill C-51 through Parliament, in the process misjudging voters’ willingness to sacrifice real freedoms to protect against unspecified terrorist threats. The legislation faced quick and concerted resistance from a range of unlikely allies, from civil liberties groups to firearms owners and the police. Initial public sympathy was strong: in the face of the October attacks many were willing to listen to any proposal that could stop future attacks. But as the details of the bill become known, support withered. The Conservatives amended the bill, ensuring that nonviolent groups could not be classed as terrorists and removing the power of CSIS to make arrests, but C-51 became a symbol of a government many Canadians see as increasingly authoritarian.

The NDP opposed C-51 and the Liberals supported it. Both parties added caveats, but the NDP was clearer, opposing the bill while offering a detailed critique. With an image of being soft on crime at home and a tendency toward unthinking pacifism abroad, the NDP pushed back, saying it would support laws that made Canada safer from terrorism but that C-51 did not qualify. When the Conservatives used various terrorism-related arrests to emphasize the need for greater law enforcement powers, the NDP pointed out that those plots had been exposed using existing police powers.

Trudeau’s decision to support C-51 (a decision he took before the final draft was even finished) while making speeches in the House opposing it was classic Liberal triangulation. Liberal messaging on C-51 was unsatisfying and arrogant. Trudeau said there was no point opposing the bill because the Conservatives had a majority and, in any case, when Trudeau was prime minister his government would simply repeal the parts of C-51 it didn’t like.

Trudeau’s cavalier approach to the role of an opposition party contributed to his party’s slow but steady decline in the polls from late 2014 onward, with voters who had previously been ready to give him a chance bleeding to the NDP and the Conservatives. While a major terrorist attack on Canada between now and election day would reset this debate, probably at the expense of the NDP, the Liberals have thus far failed in their attempt to use triangulation to differentiate themselves from their opponents.

Leaders

Over the decades, in the face of a single viable opponent, triangulation has worked for the Liberals. Will it work as well facing off against two relatively equal foes? Willingness to absorb ideas from the fringes, from the NDPs penchant for central economic control in the sixties and seventies to Reform-inspired deficit reduction in the nineties, can appear as a virtue when espoused by a government party of the centre, but now that the Liberals are a third party it can simply look like lack of principle.

The Liberals will count on enthusiasm for their leader’s personality to overwhelm doubts about the specifics of what he would do as prime minister. Their 2015 campaign begins and ends with Justin Trudeau: to prove the point, try to visualize the party without him. It’s hard to think of a policy he’s championed except for legalizing marijuana; whatever the virtues of that idea, it’s not the core of a serious agenda to govern.

Yes, the focus on the leader has put the Liberals back in the fight, but party strategists should worry that, after two years and with often astonishingly forgiving media coverage, the Liberal brand remains weak in much of the country: only in seat-poor Atlantic Canada does the party seem guaranteed to gain significant ground. Elsewhere, two- or three-way fights loom. More worrying, the campaign needed to win in, say, francophone Quebec, is very different from the one needed to pick up seats in British Columbia. Choosing the words that ring positive from coast to coast – and avoiding all the rest – is not easy. So far Trudeau has performed poorly on this score, and that must frighten his campaign team.

This odd geographical deafness means Trudeau often speaks as though he’s living in an age not just before the internet but before mass media, giving not just slightly different statements but contradictory ones in front of different audiences in different places. He spoke against the Energy East west-east pipeline in one interview, and in favour of it in another in New Brunswick (where the pipeline will end in a large and job-rich building project at Saint John’s Irving refinery complex).

What was effectively celebrity journalism during the pre-election period, practised by an overstretched and shrinking crew of mainstream journalists whose producers recognize that Trudeau’s pedigree, looks and family drive up fading ratings, will harden into political journalism during the campaign. Gaffes that had been dismissed as opportunities for another flattering hair-flipping photo shoot will be transformed into grilling sessions. Tripped-over sentences will grow into days of headlines. Being a politician with a fawning media fan base is like owning a pet python – eventually you are likely to get eaten.

If Trudeau is skilful, more skilful than he has been to date, he will avoid those gaffes. If not he will have to hope the public is ready to look at him not more deeply but more superficially. He excels as a brand ambassador, heir to a parallel royal family suited to the demands of modern royalty – the good looks and the odd statements, a comfort with fame and a willingness to be famous as an end in itself. Maybe this is what’s wanted in a modern democracy. I hope not.

Mulcair is used to being a political leader. As a Liberal minister in Quebec he was prominent in a province with all the trappings of a small country, with a citizenry much more plugged into politics. The National Assembly is probably the only legislature more hostile than the House of Commons and Mulcair excelled there, earning him the reputation we’re now seeing on display across the country with his parliamentary dismantling of the government case on Senator Duffy and on C-51.

Mulcair’s problem is the opposite of Trudeau’s: it takes little effort to imagine Mulcair as prime minister, no matter your opinion of him or his policies, but it’s harder to see the NDP as a governing party. While we’re used to Liberals running the country, it’s harder to see Trudeau as prime minister. The job requires a manager as well as a performer, someone with the mental agility of an air traffic controller who can keep dozens if not hundreds of policy files and individuals in their mind at any one time, constantly assessing and updating the ways they interact, hopefully guiding them to synchronized landings that will deliver political benefits for the government.

Not many Canadians would question Stephen Harper’s ability to be an air traffic controller – although you might wonder how close together he would guide conflicting planes, from time to time, just to prove that he had the skill to do it. He rarely loses his temper. That iciness might have seemed refreshing ten years ago, in contrast with the manic grins and hand-waving of Paul Martin in his last months, but now it feeds into the Prime Minister’s reputation for malevolence.

Harper has transformed himself from the civil libertarian Reform MP championing small government to the most centralizing prime minister in recent times. He has undermined independent offices, including the Parliamentary Budget Office that he created. After supporting and enhancing reforms to party financing, he presided over a party accused of repeated electoral malpractice, from the “in and out” scandal of 2006 to Pierre Poutine in 2011. It is hard to imagine today’s Stephen Harper allowing the young Stephen Harper, idealistic and outspoken, to remain in his party. It is even harder to imagine that the young Stephen Harper would want to stay.

The scandals have built over the years and will wash over the election as the awful spectacle of the Duffy trial grinds along. The Conservatives will have to campaign on a cheerful message of highways and hope – a campaign that can succeed only if the voters don’t wake up as they did in Quebec in 2011 or Alberta in 2015, using the NDP as the way to deliver a hard slap to entitled establishment parties.

If the NDP performs well over the summer, in Alberta now as much as in Ottawa, that will put extra pressure on the party. The New Democrats have never entered a campaign with a visible path to victory – and few imagined a world where that election would be performed in the shadow of the election of an NDP government in Alberta. The party’s platform and candidates have never been subject to the same scrutiny as those of the Liberals and Conservatives: perpetual opposition offers the chance to for candidates to be ill-disciplined and creative in making promises they know they will not have to keep. The NDP cannot do that in 2015. The full-on national campaigns Jack Layton ran in 2008 and 2011, raising money and spending it well to boost the profile of a party that never before seemed ready to govern – and that, in part, because it never seemed that it really wanted to govern – are a lasting credit to the late leader.

For the first time the NDP as a whole is hungry to win, with a leader used to winning. As a former Liberal, Mulcair was able to win over a very clannish party united in little but dislike for the Liberals. The NDP campaign will be focusing on showing that same persuasive personality to the country. In 2015 there will be local campaigns in places where the NDP has never organized, incumbents with positive track records in nearly a hundred ridings, new candidates with stronger résumés attracted by a more prominent party, the energy of the landslide victory in Alberta and a central campaign that will go dollar to dollar with the Liberals and Tories.

The Liberal Party, until very recently also a party united in little but dislike for (other) Liberals, has closed its eyes, gritted its teeth and come together behind Justin Trudeau. This is an experiment that will either go very well or destroy the party in the form in which it existed from 1867 to 2011. If the Trudeau gamble works, then 2015 will mark the end of a worrying but short anomaly. If it doesn’t, the Liberals will, one hundred years late, follow the example of most European centrist parties and be replaced by a social democratic party as the principal national opposition to conservatives.

The Liberals will fight against that fate in 2015 with a sophisticated voter contact database, a war chest filled with money, a leader who could be an asset and a deep knowledge of the grim fact that this is the old party’s last chance. They will claim that, despite their third-place status, they are the only party that can beat Stephen Harper. Their task is to convince the anti-Conservative majority that this is a sound argument and not continued Liberal entitlement.

The Conservatives will fight hard to maintain their turf; they excel at on-the-ground organizing and have embraced modern campaign and fundraising approaches. As their election skills have modernized, the party has become more comfortable with an authoritarian approach. While Red Tories were grandfathered into the new Conservative Party when the Reform/Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties merged in 2003, they have not reproduced: there is no progressive wing of the Conservative Party striving to be heard, no young MPs ready to inherit the mantle of Hugh Segal or Dalton Camp. Jim Prentice was supposed to be the Reds’ last chance, but that dream died in Alberta in May. Fiscally conservative, small-government but socially liberal and progressive Tories, the ones who show silent but genuine toleration for such things as gay marriage and casual marijuana use, no longer have a comfortable home. Where will they end up?

The NDP is going through a slow process of modernization, becoming more moderate by virtue of the party’s growth. The average Canadian is less radical than a traditional New Democrat, and since 2011 more average Canadians have joined the NDP. This trend will only increase with the election of the Alberta NDP. In her victory speech, leader Rachel Notley reached out to businesses and the oil and gas sector as she spoke about First Nations and her pride in leading a caucus with a near-majority of women MLAs.

What is missing for the NDP, and this is a problem for centre-left parties around the world, is a core set of beliefs and values that are clearly connected to the modern world. Ideological parties of left or right need an emotional core to drive them forward, to provide a clear moral compass to guide their policies. Activists who enjoy permanent righteous opposition have found a new home in Elizabeth May’s Green Party. The NDP, which has finally won the affection of a broad cross-section of the people, has to reciprocate that affection.

While the battle between TV ads plays out in September and October, the real battle will be over moderate conservatives, pushed away by the Conservatives but worried by Trudeau as a leader and the NDP as a party. If Harper can convince them that both opposition parties are a dangerous risk, he could remain in 24 Sussex. If Mulcair can show that his new-model NDP is more than a new leader and that he is willing to stand up to his party when needed, he could come ahead. For Trudeau the way is harder: he has to show the country he is a man who has matured, by definition a process that cannot happen overnight. If the election does become a personality contest, the country has a clear choice between a front man and a manager. For soft Tories tired of Harper and his government’s excesses, subscribing to the experience and moderation of Mulcair seems an easier leap than embracing the cosmopolitan flash of Trudeau.

The stark differences between the two leaders will further complicate an election that could return Canada to the minority governments of the last decade. It is hard to imagine a workable NDP-Liberal coalition, regardless of who comes first in the polls and regardless of Trudeau’s ill-advised statements that he would never form a coalition with the NDP. While I believe Mulcair would do what he felt was best for the country, the lightness of Trudeau would make a working relationship between the two men difficult. Couple that with the often-surprising animosity between New Democrats and Liberals at every level, from caucus to grassroots, and cohabitation looks unlikely.

The Liberals and NDP both need to emerge from this election with concrete gains. For the Liberals nothing short of a win will do, while the NDP must build on 2011. For Harper, a loss will mean the end of the line, and a new battle will begin over the future of a Conservative Party that once stretched across the ideological spectrum and across the country. No matter the result it will be a narrower party, shorn of its provincial base in Alberta, that faces the challenges of the world post-October.

With the angry but proudly directionless Occupy Wall Street movement making headlines, it is ironic that Canadian leftists, often united by anti-Americanism, base their political analysis and actions on American realities. Roberta Lexier’s article in Inroads, contrasting Ryan Meili’s bid for leader of the Saskatchewan NDP and Naheed Nenshi’s campaign for mayor of Calgary with the “old style” politics she disdains, draws our attention to this dichotomy.1

Lexier is not commenting on Canadian politics; she and many others on the Canadian left are orbiting a bright and distracting American sun, using American reference points and ignoring the differences between the two countries. Because of this Canadians are deprived of a richer progressive response to today’s political problems. Further, by exalting campaigns that appear game-changing, Lexier contributes to the myth that public protests and campaigns decide political outcomes, not hard work toward a common goal.

Canada shares many problems with the United States: rural and urban poverty, deprivation on First Nations reserves, diminishing economic vigour, confusion over how to deal with a globalized world, declining levels of political participation. But Canada is not the United States, where politics is elite-driven and controlled by multimillionaires. The American system is presidential, ours parliamentary; theirs is corrupted by massive interference from lobbyists while ours, thanks to reforms enacted by Liberal and Conservative governments, severely restricts third-party lobbying and depends on small donors and inexpensive campaigns.

Meili, a young doctor who lost an insurgent campaign against the Saskatchewan NDP establishment, and Nenshi, who emerged from nowhere to win as an unabashed progressive in the Conservative heartland, were influenced by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, a heritage Lexier never acknowledges. From the “money bomb” fundraisers to self-directing groups of volunteers to YouTube videos and the fetishizing of new media, Meili and Nenshi sang from the Democrat’s campaign playbook and the Canadian media joined the chorus, eager for some Obama magic.

All three campaigns were fundamentally conventional. The candidates were professional men who used lofty rhetoric to win volunteers, raise money and get out the vote. Charisma, hardly a recent addition to politicians’ arsenal, allowed people to get swept up in a narrative of change often divorced from policy specifics.

Lexier offers unfavourable comparisons between the Meili and Nenshi races and the 2011 Canadian federal election. While she rightly criticizes the obsession with public opinion polls, arguments over the format of debates and focus on personal scandal in the election campaign, she praises process stories about campaign tools, fundraising techniques and new technology, imbuing them with ideological and transformative powers without any justification.

Facebook cannot change the world. People using Facebook certainly can, but the fetishizing of shiny political tools has led to a decline in citizen engagement in the United States that we should note with caution. Voter contact technology, direct mail strategies and other campaign tools, freed from the campaign finance restrictions that make Canadian politics less exciting but much more affordable, make elections inaccessible to all but the best connected and best funded. This disconnect, as much as any other single cause, has caused the sense of alienation that led to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Lexier should look around: while rightly praised for helping Tunisians coordinate the Facebook Revolution that overthrew Ben Ali’s dictatorship, Facebook has been used by governments in Iran, China and Syria to investigate and disrupt dissident groups. To reinforce the fact that tools have no ideology in themselves, it is worth noting that just as Meili and Nenshi’s campaigns owed a debt to Obama, so did Obama owe one to George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, which used then-revolutionary databases to empower Republican activists in the defeat of the hapless John Kerry. Democrats, in Canada as in Tunisia, have to listen to more than the siren call of organizing techniques and think about the ideas that drive people to want to use those new and potentially exciting tools.

Lexier is looking for transformation in all the wrong places. Campaigns that rely on process instead of ideas give a misleading plasma-screen excitement to the often dull reality of democratic government: reading reports, debating legislation, compromising with bureaucrats, arguing with people within your political party over policies and presentation.

We should not pretend that politics is more accessible or exciting than it is. The left has to learn how to win, then learn how to manage the complexities of the existing system, and then undertake the far more complex task of reforming that system. Simplifying the appearance of governance isn’t engagement: it is manipulation. On the right we have seen this play out through the illusions of control offered by referendums and the populism of the Tea Party. On the left the Occupy Wall Street movement, which sums up what Lexier is looking for, also offers plenty of noise but as little hope of changing the world in favour of the majority.

The self-obsessed Occupy movement, caught up with its ability to inform people about itself, is a lazy alternative to real change, disdaining tools previous generations of progressives fought hard for the right to use. The events themselves are meaningless, if meaning in politics comes from actually changing the world. Sure, we can get a thousand, ten thousand or even a million people out to a town square, but why are we there? Without an ideological framework these protests are harmless releases of political hot air, the energy they could have channelled dissipating like a thousand recycled slogans.

Evidence of the protests’ harmlessness was confirmed on October 10 when Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, owned by the massive multinational Unilever, endorsed the Occupy movement. If the movement has one point of policy consensus it is the evils of massive multinationals. Ben and Jerry’s board know they can sell more ice cream by appealing to progressive consumers, and do it without any danger to their corporate interests.

Public protest has always been a last resort. When successful it is a literal demonstration of public force, reminding governments that they must listen to a clearly articulated set of demands. Such protests are a reminder that the group making speeches today will tomorrow knock down the doors of parliament. Muammar Gaddafi fell victim to this lesson; Syria’s Assad is still trying to resist it. In both cases the demand from the public was clear: your regime must go.

The Occupy movement enjoys no such clarity or resolve. Here the street protests are the first and last step; the protesters have no demands, and will neither organize politically nor arm themselves to overthrow their governments if ignored. Politicians know this so-called insurrection will, at worst, continue to be loud but ineffectual, or soon disintegrate into squabbling factions. This has already started, as trade unions that want to turn the Occupy movement into a voice for progressive taxation are angrily rebuffed by others who see any message as co-option.

Conservative columnist David Brooks, in a recent column called “The Limits of Empathy,” compared the anorexia of empathy with the transformative power of what he calls a code, which he might as well have referred to by its old-fashioned name: ideology. Empathy, the morally relative position of feeling the pain of everyone while simultaneously recusing yourself from any responsibility to address it, defines the core of the Occupy movement. The absence of an ideological focus is why it is doomed to fail.

The left must remember that our goal is action in the service of change, not discussion in the service of more discussion. Policies and programs are more important than fancy new technology: if we get the ideas right we will recruit the volunteers and raise the money to get the job done. Without the unifying ideas we are wasting time and energy. I do not underestimate how hard it will be to develop those new ideas: people are rightfully suspicious of politicians offering answers and we are at a period when what it means to be conservative or progressive is changing rapidly. Elsewhere in this issue of Inroads I have written some ideas on that score, and I hope others will follow suit.

Lexier is cynical; I am not. I became Leader of New Brunswick’s New Democrats earlier in 2011 with a campaign team led by young people, dominated by women and supported by volunteers who sacrificed their time – in some cases quitting their jobs – to make our shared dream for a better province real. We fought entrenched interests, brought in new volunteers and made it clear that politics is a battle and that no group with power gives it up voluntarily. We studied and used new campaign tools, but didn’t fetishize them – our province, like our country, needs courage and application, not iPhone apps.

Sacrifice and organization in service to a clear set of policies: this was the spartan approach of Tommy Douglas and other successful reformers. They made Canada one of the richest and fairest countries in the history of this planet. The system Lexier decries for its dullness has shown it can be harnessed by the people: we leap ahead as a country when we seize the tools already at our disposal. The saddest truth brought to light by the Occupy movement is our collective failure to realize that we, the public, the 99 per cent the movement talks about, already occupy this country. We just need to move in and make the renovations. We’ll need building supplies and tools to finish the rebuilding but most of all what we need, and what we’re missing, is an architect’s design. When that’s finished, and if our plans are rejected by that one per cent, then let’s go to the streets. Until then, let’s get to work.

Continue reading “Without policies and programs, a movement is meaningless” →

May 2, 2011. Jack Layton led the federal New Democrats beyond the limitations of their history, and within sight of the promised land of government. Just over one hundred days later, his death opened the New Democrats to a leadership contest at a point when the party is stronger and more vulnerable than at any time in history. The choice it makes in March 2012, at its leadership convention in Toronto, will be a good sign of whether the party is ready to challenge the Conservatives for government or will sink back into obscurity.

Only one candidate is positioned to complete Layton’s transformation of the NDP into a party that can take on Stephen Harper. To become leader Thomas Mulcair will have to overcome the suspicions of a very tribal party and develop a new base for a party uncomfortable with change. But change used to be, and could be again, the driving force for Canada’s progressive party. Change is needed. Canada needs a party able to speak for the 99 per cent, not with slogans but with real reforms. A party that translates the values of a caring and cooperative Canada, where social justice is another way of describing the way people want their country to be: their communities, their relationships, their lives. Canada became a rich country despite the problems of exploitation and exclusion because we have been a progressive country, overcoming our problems together, becoming better.

New Democrats who see balanced books and strong social programs as complementary, not contradictory, are scattered across Canada. While the Saskatchewan and Manitoba branches of the NDP have long inspired social democrats with their combination of solid financial management and efficient, activist government, the NDP elsewhere has tended toward woolly thinking. Sensible socialists have had recent successes. In 2009 Nova Scotia became the first new province to elect a NDP government since Ontario in 1990. Unlike now-Liberal Bob Rae, who alternately appeased and enraged the union movement, business and just about every other group, Darrell Dexter has managed a careful government, even paying down provincial debt after an unexpected budget surplus in 2011.

For most of its history the federal NDP was the less serious option for ambitious prairie New Democrats. It became a playground for the more extreme activists, held at bay by an often rigid party establishment experienced in deflecting new energy and ideas. In Regina and Winnipeg, and sometimes in other provinces, the NDP offered a path to power. Ottawa offered the sterility of a party comfortable with its also-ran status.

A decade ago British sociologist Anthony Giddens described Canada’s federal New Democrats as “the last unreconstructed social democratic party in the Western world.” By that he meant the party had not confronted the failures of centralized economic planning, or absorbed the energy of the New Left movements of the 1960s. Before returning to New Brunswick and politics in my home province, I worked for ten years with a major international NGO (the National Democratic Institute) offering advice on political party development in many developing countries. My experience is that most parties have a lot in common. But the NDP stands out as the only party I have worked with where winning elections is not a key goal for members. Many are honestly comfortable with the New Democrats serving as the self-appointed “conscience” of Parliament. The NDP may revere Tommy Douglas, but except in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon and, decades later, Nova Scotia, his ambition had minimal impact on NDP leaders.

This reflects the federal NDP’s complicated past. Its precursor, the federal Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), was the underachieving brother to a Saskatchewan party used to winning consecutive majorities. Decimated by the Diefenbaker landslide in 1958, the federal CCF, in partnership with the Canadian Labour Congress, created the New Democratic Party. Godfather to the CCF-labour marriage was David Lewis, who persuaded Tommy Douglas to leave Regina, after four terms as premier, to become the new party’s first leader.

When Douglas made the move to Ottawa, he found a very different party from the one he left behind. Shaped by an uneasy alliance of trade unions and intellectuals, this party did not look to Saskatchewan for inspiration but to the British Labour Party. After a mid-1940s spike in support, the Ontario CCF was weakened by fierce internal battles with the Communists, leaving the party a marginal player in the province. Nonetheless, the Ontario party exerted a large influence on the new federal party. Staff and financial support, most critically from the auto and steel workers unions, flowed from Toronto to Ottawa and back again.

Because it so dominated thinking among Ontario New Democrats, the history of the British Labour Party bears mention. Born in 1900, it was a creation of the Trades Union Congress. Riven by infighting, it did replace Britain’s crumbling Liberals as one of two dominant parties but realized only two transformative election victories, in 1945 and 1997.

The most powerful advocate of the British Labour Party as model for the NDP was David Lewis. Born in Poland and raised in the Jewish Bund tradition of socialism, he came to Canada when his family fled eastern Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution. A brilliant student, he attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and immersed himself in Labour politics. He rejected the offer of a safe Labour seat so he could return to Canada to build the CCF. Where Douglas’s rhetoric inspired the party, Lewis built the structures and party culture that endured for 50 years. Lewis believed a formal trade union alliance was essential to building a social democratic party, and that non-Communist unions were an organizational force to protect the left from the then-powerful Communist movement.

In a series of lengthy battles, first as organizer and then as leader, Lewis purged the party, and the unions over which he and his supporters had influence, of Communists. They did this in the name of a social democracy that could best be defined as “Liberals in a hurry.” This model of iron discipline in protection of a tepid ideology failed. The NDP continued to languish in third place.

By the time he was angling to replace Douglas as leader in the early 1970s, Lewis’s command-and-control style of politics had gone out of style, replaced by the cacophony of the sixties New Left. The Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada, known by its nickname “the Waffle,” called for a radical move to the left, and brought the voices of feminists, young people and new social movements into the NDP, where they clashed with the party old guard. At the 1971 convention, it took Lewis four ballots and the concerted efforts of organized labour to beat back Waffle candidate Jim Laxer and become leader.

Party elders had struggled against Communism in the forties and fifties; now a new generation of activists had prevailed in battle with a new generation of leftists. For aspiring NDP leaders the lesson to be drawn from the war against the Waffle was the danger of new ideas and new policies. The way to get ahead was to be a professional organizer, preferably with a background in or connections to a trade union. The party presented a false choice: embrace a stagnant party culture that offered promotion or choose the life of a powerless activist. Many chose to leave the party altogether – to join single-interest groups or even move to the Liberals, where they could speak freely and have some hope of being part of a party in power. New Democrats scorn social democrats who defect to the Liberals; we should have looked inward and asked why the NDP was so flawed that the Liberals looked appealing.

The battle with the Waffle made the NDP the most conservative party in Canada. While the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives experimented with new ideas, policies and structures, the New Democrats dug in. Personal and professional connections trumped talent. Centre-left ideas circa 1970 became party dogma: universal health care, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, distrust of provincial power and of markets.

Drawing on Marx’s 18th Brumaire, if the evolution of the post-1917 Russian Bolsheviks was tragedy on a Napoleonic scale, the post-1970 evolution of the NDP was farce in the tradition of Napoleon III. Both Bolsheviks and NDP were transformed from parties of ideas and ideals into parties of apparatchiks. Through the leadership of Ed Broadbent, Audrey McLaughlin and Alexa McDonough, organizers ran the party, centralizing power in the leader’s office. Sometimes the party achieved a random resonance with the public, as when Broadbent took the party to short-lived leads in 1980s opinion polls. These spikes in popularity confirmed to party insiders that all was well. When the public subsequently abandoned its flirtation with the party, insiders took this as a sign, not that a change in our approach was needed, but that Canada was still not mature enough to appreciate our worldview.

NDP leaders became adept at listening to the subtle signals from internal factions. The demands of public sector trade unions and Toronto intellectuals were balanced with grousing from provincial party sections not aligned with the federal party’s positions. The NDP became a brokerage party in the same mould as the Liberals, but brokering the interests of party factions instead of the Canadian electorate.

This is the party Jack Layton inherited in 2003. He was elected without the support of many unions, who stood behind longtime MP Bill Blaikie. Despite his long history in the party and his experience as a Toronto city councillor, Layton was seen as an outsider. He was linked to the 2002 New Politics Initiative (NPI), which had called for the creation of a new party from a New Democratic Party that, in the 2000 general election, had slipped to 13 seats and 8.5 per cent of the vote. The NPI’s call for new links with the emerging antiglobalization movement and its support from the small, Trotskyist NDP Socialist Caucus contributed to concerns that the Waffle had been reincarnated in a new century.

Layton became leader in 2003 thanks to a party reform movement called NDProgress, created just before the 2000 election and dedicated to modernization of the party. The leaders of the group – I was one of them – were frustrated party staff or activists. We looked with envy to the innovative campaign tactics and recast ideas proposed by the Bill Clinton Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour.

NDProgress recognized that structural change must precede policy renewal. The major demand was “one member one vote,” which meant the elimination of union bloc voting at party conventions. Who could object to the principle of one person having one vote, or limiting the power of groups to influence the self-styled people’s party? The process of objecting to the reforms would strengthen the call for change. Despite a last-ditch effort by some unions to quash the reform at the Winnipeg convention in November 2001, the new system was put in place. Layton won on the first ballot in 2003 with 53.5 per cent of the vote. Without the NDProgress reforms, he would likely have lost.

The team around Layton was a mix of the old and the new. Party reformers, including a much-needed group of young people with roots in student politics, mixed with elders like Broadbent who, despite his establishment status, recognized that the NDP’s fire had grown so dim it was in danger of blowing out. Layton ran four election campaigns. The New Democrats grew incrementally in the first three, winning 19 seats in 2004, 29 in 2006 and 37 in 2008. The popular vote rose modestly from 16 per cent in 2004 to 18 per cent in 2008. Layton brought energy to the leadership that had not been seen since Broadbent in his prime. The party looked and sounded different, and much more professional, than anything that had come before.

Layton’s inner circle, including the 2006 and 2008 campaign director and now leadership candidate Brian Topp, were nervous reformers aware of how conservative our party can be. They admired the British Labour Party for its communications and public image departments; they were not interested in replicating Tony Blair’s experiment in prodding his party to think differently. On gaining power within Labour, Blair aggressively confronted the flaws behind many of Labour’s central policies and embraced new policies never imagined by the party’s previous generation. Immediately on winning the leadership, he pushed changes to Labour’s constitution, replacing an explicitly socialist preamble written in 1918 with a more modern communitarian version. With Blair promising to quit as leader if his reform was rejected, the new preamble was approved in a party-wide referendum by 58 per cent. To his party and his country, Blair had confirmed his reputation as a tough-minded reformer.

In contrast, under Layton policy reform, when it took place, happened by stealth or on the fringes, with easy-to-sell campaigns that, among other initiatives, proposed limits to ATM fees. Layton waited until 2011, eight years and four elections after he became leader, to introduce changes to the NDP’s preamble comparable to those Blair had introduced. There was no referendum, no consultation; the old preamble simply disappeared from the party’s website. A new version was floated just two days before the party’s 2011 convention in Vancouver. In the face of likely defeat Topp, the newly elected party president, tabled the new clause.

From 2004 to 2011 there had been little time for serious policy debate: minority governments meant ever-looming campaigns that discouraged party dissidents. Weaknesses in the NDP platform were largely overlooked by the media and political class, except in the context of Layton’s efforts to use his deal-making skills, honed by years at Toronto City Hall, to exact concessions from the Liberals and the Conservatives. Even Layton’s opponents conceded he was more successful than any New Democrat had been since David Lewis with his tactical manoeuvres during Pierre Trudeau’s 1972–74 minority government.

Building the NDP across Canada coincided with Layton’s efforts in Quebec, where it had been shut out for decades. The Quebec left was more open to decentralization within Canada and to free trade with the United States. They found the anti–free trade and centralizing Anglo-dominated NDP an uncomfortable home. Quebec social democrats rose to leadership positions in the Parti Québécois and Quebec Liberal Party in the 1970s, but subsequently lost influence.

In Layton’s first two elections there were behind-the-scenes gains in Quebec. The skeleton of an organization appeared. The party appealed to those Quebecers who wanted social democracy, not separatism, and who were tired of the Bloc Québécois’s monotonous drumbeat. A symbolic gesture: the federal party passed the Sherbrooke Declaration in 2005, emphasizing the right of Quebec to separate if it wished on the basis of a 50-per-cent-plus-1 vote – effectively reversing the party caucus’s previous support for the Clarity Act enacted in the wake of the 1995 referendum.

In 2006 Thomas Mulcair, the prominent Quebec Liberal and environmentalist, joined the party after leaving Premier Jean Charest’s cabinet in a dispute over development in a provincial park. Against the odds, the fiery lawyer ran and won in a 2007 byelection in Outremont, becoming only the second New Democrat ever to win a seat in the province. Winning reelection in the 2008 general election, Mulcair showed that the NDP in Quebec had become an organizational, if not yet an electoral, force.

As late as early April 2011, the NDP was seen as an also-ran in the May 2 election. It was frequently stated that Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe and Layton were as extraneous to the real choice of who should be prime minister as Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.

There will be arguments over what caused the Quebec NDP campaign to spring back to life over the Easter weekend. The Bloc campaign was stale; Ignatieff was not catching on and the Liberal campaign was battered from sustained Conservative attack. Quebecers warmed to Layton’s astonishing cheerfulness and eagerness and his command of colloquial Quebec French. Francophone Quebecers made a shift comparable to that which swept Mulroney’s Conservatives to power in 1984 and the Bloc to Official Opposition status in 1993.

Layton deserves credit for the fact that the Quebec NDP was ready to ride the wave that broke on May 2. The team he assembled, led provincially by Mulcair and organized by Raymond Guardia, a union man now managing Topp’s leadership bid, was stretched tight but well resourced. The media did their best to push the party off balance, but did not succeed.

The party’s new discipline was apparent when the 103-strong NDP Official Opposition ran an efficient filibuster against back-to-work legislation directed at the postal workers in June. It was on show again when the party voted unanimously to support the United Nations mission in Libya, a hard pill to swallow for a party with a strong pacifist wing. Over a terrible summer marked by the announcement of Jack Layton’s new cancer and then his death, the party was professional, united and calm.

There are parallels between the start of the NDP leadership campaign now under way and the 1994 Labour Party campaign that brought Blair to the leadership. In both cases, the former leader died unexpectedly. In 1994 Tony Blair, then working with Gordon Brown as a tag-team of modernizers inside the Labour Party, took advantage of the days after the death of John Smith. Brown had been seen as Smith’s natural successor, but he refused to mobilize his troops until after Smith’s funeral. This gave Blair’s supporters a week to frame the coming race. While many were shocked and some were offended, Blair’s initial success persuaded Brown not to contest the leadership.

Brian Topp did something similar. A longtime union leader and party organizer, he had no public profile. With Ed Broadbent at this side he seized the initiative and announced his candidacy quickly. In the weeks after his announcement Topp bludgeoned the party with endorsements from one heavyweight after another: former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow was supposed to sew up the prairie pragmatist vote while Vancouver MP Libby Davies, standard bearer for the party’s old left, was supposed to sew up the left.

Topp, like Blair, needed to keep his heavyweight challenger out of the race. Here the parallel stops. Topp failed to stop Mulcair’s entry, in part because – unlike Blair and Brown – Topp and Mulcair have little in common. Out of convenience or conviction, Topp has become the voice of the status quo: he has gone so far as to defend the right of unions to preserve their bloc vote in the leadership race, despite that right having disappeared six years before. In contrast Mulcair has stated positions that, while not exceptional to regular Canadians, violate the NDP’s unwritten conventions. He has praised free trade, noting environmental protections in NAFTA he had helped draft. He has made it clear he wanted the NDP to move beyond its base. He has recounted how he told the head of the Steelworkers union that he would stand against special voting rights for any group within the party.

Topp’s failure to keep Mulcair out of the race has led to a crowded field. Topp secured support from Lewis’s union, the Steelworkers. But the Lewis machine has fragmented. Peggy Nash, a bilingual MP and former Canadian Auto Workers leader, entered the race, pitting the two big private sector unions against each other. Another candidate, Robert Chisholm, who led the Nova Scotia NDP to Official Opposition status in 1998, worked for many years for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. This fragmentation of union support between different candidates is unprecedented, and a sign of the challenges facing the NDP. Of Topp, Nash and Mulcair, the three fluently bilingual candidates with potential national organization, only Mulcair is offering a shift from a party obsessed with preserving its internal orthodoxy to one that is intent on changing Canada.

To win, Mulcair will have to sign up thousands of new members. He is at a disadvantage in a race where many existing members are comfortable with the old nostrums. But if Canada is a fundamentally social democratic country – as I believe – then Mulcair is far more likely to turn social democracy into a national force than Topp or Nash. Mulcair can cross partisan lines. If the NDP is going to occupy 24 Sussex Drive, the path is through the concerns of regular Canadians, not the interest groups courted traditionally by the NDP or now by the Occupy movement. Mulcair has the potential to turn Layton’s calls for a “kindler gentler Canada” into programs, plans and results that will change lives.

My hope is that New Democrats new and old will break our tradition of back-room dealing, and openly confront some serious questions: What do Canadians want from our federal government? How will we pay for rising health costs as the baby boomers age? When we talk about the public sector, is our first responsibility to protect public servants or public services? Are Canadians ready to overhaul the tax code and support a meaningful carbon tax? Will we confront the deprivation on reserves and the reality of poverty among urban Aboriginals? What responsibility do we have toward each other, to the citizens of other provinces and other countries? How will this be reflected in our foreign aid and military policies?

Mulcair is best placed to answer these questions. He is emphatic in stating the importance of sound financial management. As Tommy Douglas and Allan Blakeney never tired of saying, if you’re running a social democratic government you don’t want to be in debt to bankers. On the environment, Mulcair has an international record in government. In the pursuit of social justice, we can leave the lamentations to the Occupy movement. Canada’s problems are clear; our job as social democrats is to build broad support around solutions and then get the job done. For too long all Canadian parties have been offering a “Father knows best” style of government that infantilizes voters, suggesting we can have it all: low taxes, more generous social programs, a constantly rising share of GDP devoted to health costs. We cannot. A Thomas Mulcair–led NDP offers a national party that will embrace the challenges of the 21st century the way Tommy Douglas embraced the challenges of the 20th.

Photo: M.J. Coldwell and David Lewis looking over some papers together, September 1947