« January 2007 | Main | March 2007 »
February 09, 2007
Why John Waugh is right
Here we go again. Somebody scolds the NDP for not doing enough to help elect Liberals. New Democrats huff and puff that it's not their job to elect Liberals, who are bunch of reactionary stooges anyway, and anyone who says otherwise is probably a Liberal.
Well, let me establish my bona fides. I've been a New Democrat for as long as I've known what the words meant. I canvassed and dropped leaflets for Peter Kormos in 1988, for Rob Dobrucki in 1993, for Jack Layton and Olivia Chow in 1997. I was a delegate to the 1996 Ontario leadership convention. I was on the executive of the Ontario New Democratic Youth in 1996-97. You could look it up.
Why? Because I believe in things like national pharmacare, wage insurance, card checks, debt relief, rent subsidies, and progressive taxation. Because I believe that the overriding goal of any political movement must be to redress injustice, to defend the weak, to heal the pains and agonies that torment our world.
I have never voted Liberal because, while many Liberals share these goals, many others do not. Even those that do are often all too willing to let them slip, to pander to prejudices and ignorances, in the worst case to perpetuate the evils they should be fighting.
But the NDP is not without its problems either. Chief among them is a maddening inability to listen to what its public is actually saying. An inescapable fact of Canadian political life is that a substantial percentage of the population casts their ballot primarily to oppose the Conservative party.
In 1988, they wanted to stop free trade. In 1993, they wanted the Mulroneyite bastards out. Today, they don't want a government that would give more freedom to markets than to people. They believe Stephen Harper would destroy the fabric of this country if he had a majority, and they will vote however it takes to stop him.
The NDP thinks of itself as the only progressive party and Liberals and Conservatives as barely distinguishable reactionaries; choosing between them would be like, as Tommy Douglas famously put it, a mouse choosing the colour of cat. But that was in a different era, when the United States under Roosevelt was an inspiration to progressives rather than a repulsion, before neoconservatism in all its incarnations started to destroy our world.
The ideas of Reagan or Thatcher or Bush crossed the border to become Mulroney, Harris, and Harper. It is impossible to ignore these ideas. Progressives must fight them, or they will be defeated. Yet, even in the heat of the 1988 campaign, the Liberals and NDP could not swallow their pride and come to any kind of alliance, such as a non-competition pact. They spent enough of that campaign sniping at each other for the Tories to laugh all the way to the PMO.
Today New Democrats like to ask why it's their duty to elect Liberals. It is not. It is their duty, however, to prevent the election of Conservatives. More generally, it is their duty to put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of their party. If NDP truly wants to give disadvantaged Canadians what they want, rather than what the NDP thinks they should want, it must heed this message.
This is not to say the NDP should simply merge with the Liberals - the ideological differences are too great, and Canadians do not expect this. Rather, the party should be prepared to work with Liberals to figure out the best way of defeating extremist right-wing parties. One obvious solution is non-competition agreements, where in selected ridings one of the two parties agrees not to run a candidate.
The NDP would be perfectly within its rights to demand cabinet seats in return, bringing it more power than it has ever had before. Indeed, many Canadians would welcome a Liberal-NDP coalition government - many more, in fact, than would be prepared to accept a purely NDP government, even a minority one. Canada's best and most popular governments, for the past 70 years, have been Liberal minorities propped up by the NDP. Failure to form an alliance more often than not leads to electoral disaster - witness the 1990s, or 1974, or the 1987 Ontario election.
It does no good for the NDP to stubbornly stick its head in the sand and behave like a northern version of Ralph Nader. It hurts the progressive agenda, it hurts the NDP, and it hurts Canada.
Posted by Tyrone at 12:17 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack