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NDP nice - but boring
Straight Goods, March 26, 2006 |
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| No breakthroughs, no
spirited public debates, the appearance of dynamism
rather than real dynamism. What did the NDP achieve?
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Jack Layton is such a
likeable and energetic guy. During the recent
election campaign I just wanted to cheer him on with
all the gusto in my heart. A shout of “Go Jack, go!”
by itself could make me feel good. There were
moments, too, particularly when Jack was embracing
or standing with his wife, Olivia Chow, that had a
touch of Camelot to them – Camelot on the Danforth.
The NDP, moreover, increased the number of seats it
held in the House of Commons, from the 19 it won in
the previous election to 29. People talked about how
well the NDP did, maybe not with a buzz of
excitement – all the excitement or dread was about
Harper coming out on top – but at least with
conviction.
Why am I, then, a longtime supporter of the cause –
a lifetime supporter of the cause! – shrugging my
shoulders?
Well, for a start, the NDP’s popular vote hardly
increased at all, from 15.7 per cent in 2004 to just
17.49 per cent, although the party had an
extraordinary political window at hand, what with
the fallout from the Gomery Commission and then
Martin’s and the Liberals’ campaign ineptness. At
one juncture, early in January, the Liberals seemed
to be in free fall. Jack was also much better known
this time, and the media treated him with
gentleness. This didn’t make much difference.
The NDP’s popular vote in BC and Ontario, where they
managed the extra seats, followed the same general
pattern, increasing by only one or two points.
Saskatchewan was a washout, embarrassingly so – a
big fat goose egg in seats just like 2004, in what
was once the CCF-NDP heartland. In Quebec, the party
remained just a shadow. Meanwhile, the Liberals
fared much better than anyone expected in the
circumstances.
This was supposed to have been the “breakthrough
campaign” for the NDP. That’s how it was touted
internally. If only hyperbole and Jack’s enthusiasm
could make it so.
Still, that’s not what left me shrugging. I can take
disappointing election results. What got to me was
that behind the NDP’s tactical manoeuvring and
multi-million dollar budget, Jack and the campaign
didn’t do anything in the only sense that matters –
shifting the country’s political culture from its
right-wing drift. I kept wanting Jack to say
something, anything, that would get a real debate
going about our society and the future – that would
deliver us from a mish-mash of promises by each
party that drowned us all in detail – that would
provide context and help Canadians look at
themselves and their politics in a different way. It
was worse than waiting for Godot. It was as if the
NDP weren’t campaigning at all, just going through
the motions. Indeed, that’s exactly what the NDP was
doing - going through the tactical motions, with
Jack acting the political technician and turning the
party into a sagging bag of boredom.
The NDP was boring...is boring, quite without
inspiration. Now, boring is all right if you’re a
default party like the Liberals – and, in places
like Alberta, the Conservatives - that everyone
votes for if there’s nothing grabbing their
attention or they can’t be bothered thinking. For a
minority party, however, it’s perdition.
Worse, it means surrendering control of the
political culture to the other side.
The epitome of boredom was Jack’s repeating
mechanically “seniors, young people, working
families,” or a variant, in one of the leadership
debates. I squirmed because, while I’m all in favour
of seniors, young people, and working families, the
message was pedestrian and flat, and Jack’s
repeating it like a wind-up doll was so contrived.
We all can guess at the reason for it. Polling
probably showed that the NDP or its policies
generated a positive response in those categories or
to that language, at least in their targeted voting
pool, and the apparatchiks managing the campaign,
being apparatchiks, both seized on that and dumbed
down the delivery of the corresponding message. You
can’t really say, though, that they made Jack do it,
since Jack is the boss. He did it to himself.
Why? Maybe he’s just a miscast municipal politician.
More likely it’s because of a conceit that, by force
of personality and enthusiasm and with a few more
members in the House, he can leverage better
elections results. At least, that’s what he talks
about. To the public, in the campaign, he stressed
how his small caucus had made a difference and, with
added numbers, would make a bigger difference.
Internally he sees adding members to the caucus as a
way of creating larger presence and, the assumption
goes, a further advance the next time around. The
tactical premise, and it’s an apparatchik’s premise,
is to carefully study the entrails dug up by the
pollsters and, focusing on those entrails, finesse
election campaigns. The possibility of taking
advantage of an election campaign and its relatively
level playing field to engage the Canadian public in
debate – to use a campaign not just to solicit votes
but also to shift political perspective – is
excluded.
The tactical premise, in other words, is passiveness
and caution, albeit with a dynamic face – the
appearance of dynamism rather than real dynamism.
There are just a few problems with this. Following
that path, you end up adapting to where majority
public opinion happens to be rather than challenging
the public to think differently, to the point where,
if you did by chance get into power, your freedom of
action would be drastically limited.
Even in its own misconceived terms, the tactic isn’t
likely to work. We already have a case history of
how it plays out, with Ed Broadbent in the 1980s. As
Ed became more and more popular, and the possibility
of a breakthrough seemed at hand, he also became
increasingly cautious. The party pollster and the
apparatchiks became ever more important in this
scheme of things. However, right-wing economic
ideology was on the ascendant, and the caution meant
that no political party in the country was
challenging it, giving that ideology an open field.
In the end, the NDP, rather than becoming government
or even opposition, was marginalized by the
ideological push to the right.
It’s true that in Broadbent’s last election battle,
1988, the party won 43 seats, but only because the
campaigns in Saskatchewan and British Columbia
abandoned his original strategy, which was swayed by
polling, and focused on fighting the Free Trade
Agreement instead. The impressive 1988 result in
seat count, together with the Sturm und Drang of the
FTA debate, overshadowed what was really happening
to political and economic perspective in the country
at the time and hid the deep flaw in Broadbent’s
approach.
The similar approach, this time with Jack Layton,
didn’t work in 2006, either. The NDP is still in
third place federally and a distant fourth in the
number of seats, and the two largest parties are
still the right-wing parties, with the Liberals in
practice almost as right-wing as the Conservatives.
Jack’s energy and likeability only mask how
routinized and lacking in courage the NDP has
become. Meanwhile, notwithstanding Stephen Harper’s
cosmetic makeover, the political culture of the
country has moved incrementally even further to the
right.
What else can you do but shrug?
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Go to Part 2 -
The will to challenge power is missing |
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