Federal NDP leadership contest analysis

The Daily Twigg  Vol. 1 No. 31  March 23, 2012

Federal NDP leadership contest displays
debate between jobs or social priorities

By John Twigg

The federal New Democratic Party leadership convention on today and tomorrow in Toronto, and being carried live on CPAC and in large part on CBC Newsworld, is more interesting than usual because the outcome is not a foregone conclusion, and because the outcome will have significant impacts on future directions of Canadian politics as well as on politics here in B.C.

Seven candidates are seeking votes from 132,000 NDP members, only 4,620 of whom are at the convention, and the bulk of whom will be voting live online, though tens of thousands have voted in advance online or by mail using preferential ballots.

That is a fairly democratic process, in keeping with the party's name, but the contest has been a bit of a bloody battle behind the scenes, some of which has spilled out in public too as leadership rivals have stooped to denigrating certain opponents, mainly old-boy warhorses taking cheap shots at perceived front-runner Thomas Mulcair, a Quebec-based MP, because he has dared to suggest the "new" democratic party needs to move in some new policy directions in order to win the next election.

Indeed that debate about which directions the party should move in - i.e. towards the centre or towards pragmatism or farther to the left - is the crux of the contest - and the crux of the challenges facing the B.C. New Democrats too as they prepare a platform for the 2013 provincial election.

"I'm from the New Democratic wing of the NDP," said early front-runner Brian Topp, which seemed to be a defining line in the contest and perhaps a turning point against him too because the sarcasm was seen as inappropriate inside what should be a family, a point touched on briefly by surging B.C.-based candidate Nathan Cullen in his showcase closing speech this morning.

"I'm a proud New Democrat and an unapologetic social democrat too," Topp said in his final speech, claiming that to make a win in the next election worthwhile the party must campaign on clear policies such as a progressive tax system and shutting down coal-fired power plants, adding in french that the party must stay true to its values.

"In order to defeat our enemies we shouldn't have to become like them," is a theme Topp and others often used to slam Mulcair and Cullen for advocating crafting new policies to reach out to liberal Liberals in Mulcair's case, or even crafting electoral arrangements such as running joint candidates with Liberals and Greens against Conservatives in Cullen's case, though almost all of the candidates in one way or another favour reaching out to people who haven't voted NDP before or who simply haven't voted, as candidate Paul Dewar put it in his closing speech.

That maturity reflects the emerging perception that the New Democrats are on the verge of becoming the next government in waiting following their surprising breakthrough into Official Opposition status in the last federal election, aided largely by the stunning orange-wave breakthrough in Quebec achieved by recently-deceased leader Jack Layton and then lone Quebec MP Mulcair. The NDP emerged with 103 seats, a gain of 66, of which 59 were in Quebec. The Conservatives have 166 seats, Liberals 34, Bloc Quebecois 4, and Green 1, which means the NDP is still far from taking power.

More recently the NDP won the byelection in Toronto-Danforth (Layton's former seat) with about 60% of the vote, and an opinion poll had the New Democrats tied with the Conservatives in national popular vote, so what seemed unthinkable only a few years ago - an NDP national government - is now at least in sight, which helps explain why so many candidates were trying so hard to win the leadership, and why the party membership has soared (also aided by the B.C. NDP's leadership contest last year which helped boost B.C. NDP membership to about 38,000 - the largest provincial bloc in the party).

Topp was the early leader, quickly releasing a long list of endorsements headed by former leader Ed Broadbent, former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and longtime B.C. MP Libby Davies, but Topp was seen to have given a poor performance at the B.C. NDP convention in Vancouver last year and since then he has struggled to regain momentum. Initially he was not a dynamic speaker or strong debater and his lack of a seat in Parliament raised doubts about whether he could adequately combat Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Topp's campaign suffered a serious setback in the last week when a somewhat senile-looking Broadbent, apparently responding to backroom polling information, went public with a flameout against Mulcair, warning of such things as Mulcair's supposedly dangerous temper tantrums - a blunder that Topp so far has not rectified, though he did try to mitigate it in his closing speech by opening with praise for his opponents' campaigns.

That's a problem because such acrimony could make it difficult for whoever wins the contest to quickly build a united team afterwards, and it probably further helped Mulcair when he reacted with restraint and dignity and stuck to his messaging that the federal New Democrats need to develop a coherent and pragmatic economic program that could enable them to win the next federal election.

While opponents such as Topp tried to portray Mulcair as not socialist enough, his program is still clearly progressive such as by addressing climate change in a way that would work in the real world too, such as adopting a cap-and-trade system, and linking tax incentives for business to job creation. He has said the gist of his campaign is "sustainability, prosperity and economic justice."

Mulcair, a very intelligent and fluently bilingual former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister (in the environment portfolio), resonates well when he argues the NDP needs to take care to keep and even enlarge its breakthrough wins in Quebec but also to reach out to other new areas of support such as the 65 per cent of young people who simply do not vote now, and to voters in the Prairies who have more or less abandoned the party in what used to be its stronghold area.

Mulcair also has by far the largest number of MPs supporting him - 43 to Topp's 13 - and he has some other notable supporters too, such as B.C. MLAs Mike Farnworth, Jenny Kwan and Rob Fleming, former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt and longtime Saskatchewan MP Lorne Nystrom who are arguably more populist than doctrinaire, as well as quite a few trade union members reflecting Mulcair's roots there.

Rather than move the party to the left or to the centre, Mulcair talks of modernizing it, which seems to embrace both a policy shift towards populism and a psychological shift inside the party in which the head office and hard-left old-guard would no longer hold so much sway over constituencies and regions, such as when the national campaign argued for a national daycare program even though Quebec already had such a plan, which Mulcair addressed by dropping that plank from the Quebec campaign.

Though it's a point most people might miss, Mulcair's use of the term "economic justice" instead of "social justice" is a sort of code or sign that he will not be campaigning first and foremost for such things as women's rights or LGBTQ issues and instead would be focussing more on such things as job creation and tax reform.

"The number one issue is jobs," a video for Mulcair said and he was about the only main candidate to say so directly though Topp mentioned "using resources for jobs in a Canada that is much more economically and socially equal."

So perhaps the choice for New Democrats comes down to whether the leader should be someone who will appeal to populist priorities such as job creation or someone who will appeal to traditional party priorities such as gender and sexual orientation issues.

It's not that Mulcair or anyone else is opposed to gender equity and human rights for homosexuals, it is a question of what policies the party should emphasize in its campaign content if it wants to win the next election and thereby really make some real differences in Canadian life.

The answer to that dilemma may be determined overnight if the first ballot voting determines a winner, which will be announced early tomorrow morning around 6:30 a.m. B.C. time, but more likely it will be determined by a second or third or even fourth ballot, in which case B.C.'s Nathan Cullen, who appears to be in third place, probably could determine the outcome by signalling a choice for one or the other.

A wild card has also appeared in the form of Broadbent telling a CBC-TV panel interview this afternoon that he stands by his earlier statements that Mulcair's leadership talents are in doubt, especially after claiming that Mulcair's convention speech "bombed" because he read it and seemed to run out of time, but that was rebutted by former leader Alexa McDonough on the same panel and then Nystrom later noted that Broadbent's earlier criticisms had backfired against Topp and his reiterated remarks could do so again.

Those feuds seemed to epitomize remarks a few days ago by former prominent New Democrat Stephen Lewis who said such comments from party warhorses troubled him and he feels it is time for the party to make a generational change, meaning that guys like Broadbent should let go. Though Mulcair at 57 is not a young man, he does represent a new direction from new blood.

Which side will win? That will be interesting to see, and then it will be further interesting to see if or how that influences the B.C. NDP platform too.


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