DESMOND MORTON
The Gazette
The Gazette Board of Contributors Desmond Morton Is director of the McGill Centre for the Study of Canada. The views of contributors are not necessarily those of The Gazette.
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Reactions to the Nov. 27 election have ranged from a loud cockadoodle from our prime minister to an equally predictable pout by newspaper magnate Conrad Black, whose massive investment in managing Canadian opinion netted the Canadian Alliance only six new seats, none of them where the National Post circulates widely.
The election was not meaningless. The bulk of the losses fell on the three small parties and, barring a major change of heart or shrewd tactics, Canadians have delayed a U.S.-style party system by a parliamentary term. After 2005, Canadians might have to choose between a right-wing and a righter-wing party, just as Americans are stuck with Democrats and Republicans.
The biggest missing piece will be the NDP. Having played a major role in giving Canadians much of what they like best about Canada, from old-age pensions to medicare, until 1993, New Democrats could count on a fifth of Canadian voters.
Since they were shut out of Quebec by the so-called national issue, the real share, from Ontario to the Pacific, was more like a quarter. When Canadians rated NDP leaders against the current PM, Ed Broadbent, David Lewis or Tommy Douglas sometimes topped the polls. Ten years ago, the NDP governed in Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan and waited its turn to come back in Manitoba.
Since 1993, the NDP can count on barely half to a third of its former vote; it lost federal-party status between 1993 and 1997; and next time it could disappear, as part of it almost certainly will next spring when British Columbians vote. Last month, as Alexa McDonough dutifully preached on the threat to medicare, voters had already concluded that only the Liberals could do something about it. Only in Manitoba, where Gary Doer's government is more popular than when first elected, did the NDP gain votes - and in Windsor, Ont., where union members gave a popular local lawyer a chance.
Where did NDP voters go? Some, believe it or not, went to Reform as a western protest party, and, as social conservatives, they have stayed. A lot more went Liberal, to get rid of the Tories in 1993 and to stop Stockwell Day in 2000. Polarization a la Jean Chretien worked. For a decade, little-known leaders and an uninspired defence of old social programs and modern diversity was hardly a draw for working people caught up in a greed-based economy and single-issue politics.
Meanwhile, in Ontario and, later, in British Columbia, time-honoured claims that the NDP couldn't manage a lemonade stand seemed to come true. Traditional NDP supporters, confident their party was different, were dismayed by arrogance and incompetence in office. No wonder they left.
Shaken and dismayed, remaining NDPers have begun scolding each other and their leader. Some claim the New Democrats must be relaunched or at least renamed. What is new about a 40-year-old party? Others, like Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove, want a return to socialist roots, if anyone can find them.
And what is socialism? A Montreal crowd applauded Fidel Castro last October when he was a pallbearer for Pierre Trudeau, but not many people want his kind of regime here. These days, social-democratic governments in Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are hardly to the left of Jean Chretien.
Currently, the bourgeois capitalism the left deplored holds all the good cards. Not since mediaeval Europe has one ideology occupied so much territory. In ex-Communist countries, former apparatchiks still run the businesses, but now capitalism legitimizes their drive to enrich themselves.
Capitalism has created the global market Karl Marx predicted 150 years ago when his Communist Manifesto claimed, "In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
"In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in very direction, universal interdependence of nations."
Many young idealists who never heard of Marx also insist that, as the rich get richer and greedier, capitalism will be killed by its own contradictions. They went to Seattle and Prague to make the point and they will do so again in Quebec this spring. But what is the alternative? Marx might have been a shrewd prophet, but the alternative his disciples devised utterly failed. Even social democracy - the middle way - needs more than a facelift.
For 40 years, the NDP has coasted on the faded green platform it adopted in 1961 and on policies the old CCF kitchen-tested in Saskatchewan after 1944. The last big push on program-making dried up in the early 1970s after the expulsion of the so-called Waffle Movement. While party conventions have since approved acres of resolutions, who knows what the NDP really stands for - or why anyone should care?
Having relevant ideas is not all that a party needs, but nothing else will save the NDP from oblivion.
- Desmond Morton is director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
by Dr. Desmond Morton
Was Director
he McGill Institute for the study of Canada
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