But the decade also featured a phenomenon that might have favoured the ndp had the party been prepared for it. The anti-globalization movement, demanding “fair trade not free trade,” stole headlines. Many of its young supporters, potential ndp backers who were joining civil-society groups, didn’t see enough in ndp policies to support Canada’s only mainstream progressive political party. On top of this, mirroring a tension within the ndp between its Prairie roots and its urban potential, the gap between the values of rural and urban Canada was widening. Young urbanites questioned whether the ndp understood the issues related to contract employment, or that an entire generation, the baby boomers, was preventing young people from gaining access to the halls of power.
Adjustments were clearly necessary, but during this divisive decade ndp strategists remained preoccupied with having “their” issues (child care, the environment, etc.) stolen at election time and then ignored by the ruling Liberals. To this, the body politic responded with a collective shrug—content, it seemed, with having a party of principle that would never be a party of power.
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ith the election of Jack Layton as leader in 2003, ndp hopes for the future were rekindled. Here was a talented, energetic, media-savvy politician who understood cities and the environment, and who could go to university campuses and actually draw crowds. In his 2004 book, Speaking Out, Layton provided Canadians with a coherent social-democratic vision, full of workable ideas that promised to restore the ndp’s capacity to debate economic issues and to challenge the priorities of capitalism, if not capitalism itself. What was more, Layton’s rhetoric suggested a keen appreciation that the left was about more than electoral politics. He saw that process politics and reaching out to civil-society groups were critical.Strangely, in the 2004 election, and much more overtly in 2006, the ndp leader exhibited a penchant for short-term fixes over long-term party-building. He became a servant to the proposition that what was good for working people and for the left was more seats for the ndp—no more, no less. Playing right into Conservative hands, in the 2006 election Layton helped frame the central issue as Liberal scandals. The Canadian Election Study, published just after the election, suggests this issue was responsible for the Conservative victory. It showed that outside Quebec, the proportion of people rating Liberal scandals as salient jumped from 19.7 percent at the conclusion of the 2004 campaign to 30.4 percent at the end of January’s election. (In Quebec, the sponsorship program’s backyard, the centrality of government corruption was never in doubt.) The proportion of people rating Harper positively actually declined slightly, from 48.8 percent to 46.7 percent, and the share seeing him as “just too extreme” barely budged, down from 49.1 percent to 48.3 percent. But this did not matter. While the ndp’s prospects improved, its strategy clearly helped install the Conservative minority government.
Analysts agree that the major turning point in the campaign came in late December with the rcmp’s letter to ndp MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis informing her that a criminal probe was being launched about possible leaks from Ralph Goodale’s finance department on new income-trust rules. Wasylycia-Leis had written to the rcmp to request an investigation and when the Mounties, in a questionable move during an election campaign, wrote her back, she released the letter to the media. The Liberals never recovered.
In the last week of the campaign, Layton advocated strategic voting, urging traditional Liberals to lend the ndp their vote while the Liberals went into the “repair shop” for refitting. To cap it off, in what was billed as his last statement as an MP, Ed Broadbent declared that power “should be taken away” from the Liberals, that the party “no longer [had] the moral authority to deserve people’s votes.” He said not a word about what a Harper government would mean for the country.
What was the ndp leadership playing at Did it actually prefer a Conservative victory Unlikely as it may seem, there are reasons for thinking so. Since the founding of the ccf, social democrats have dreamt that one day their party would replace the Liberals as one of the nation’s two major political vehicles. Inspired by Britain’s Labour Party, which had relegated that country’s once-mighty Liberal Party to middling status following World War I, ccfers saw this as the natural course of Canadian political development. For a few years following the founding of the New Democratic Party in 1961, with Tommy Douglas as its first leader, the dream returned, only to fade as a result of relatively weak election results in 1962, 1963, and 1965. The dream was extinguished when Pierre Trudeau swept to power in 1968.
In the industrialized world, Canada is that rare case where a centrist party has been dominant for many decades, borrowing ideas from the left and the right. Rarely innovative, always adaptive, the federal Liberals have been the bane of their opponents, detested by ndp and Conservative insiders alike for their lack of principle. Under Layton, ndp strategists have resumed the search for the Holy Grail: the realignment of Canadian politics around the centre-left pillar of the ndp through the marginalization of the Liberals. If history and international experience are indicators, for this dream to become reality the ndp will have to move even further to the centre and to abandon its half-remembered social-democratic aspirations.
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good measure of just how far the ndp has journeyed from the left to the centre as a result of free trade is government treatment of the oil industry. When it held the balance of power from 1972 to 1974, the party, led by David Lewis, pushed for the creation of a national oil company. Having won back its majority, Trudeau’s Liberal government completed the launch of Petro-Canada as a publicly owned petroleum company in 1975. Though no longer under direct ndp pressure, the Liberals aggressively built PetroCan, which acquired the assets of foreign-owned oil companies in Canada in the process. Within a few years, PetroCan grew into a vertically integrated company that operated in all aspects of the oil business, from exploration to production to retailing. PetroCan’s purpose was clear: to establish a public window on an industry that regularly restated estimates of Canadian oil and natural gas reserves to suit its purposes. Around the same time, Ottawa froze the price of domestic oil well below the world level while exporting to the US at the world price. The policy sheltered Canadian consumers from the full impact of the quadrupling of world oil prices between the fall of 1973 and the summer of 1974. Ottawa collected the difference between the domestic and international market prices as an export tax. That these Liberal moves would be considered terribly radical today—and by oil companies, horrifying—shows just how tame Canadian economic policy has become since the free-trade election. Layton’s ndp wouldn’t dare advocate such policies, and not just because a two-price system would violate the rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the successor to Mulroney’s first free trade deal. It would represent too much interference with the operations of the market. Too radical for today’s ndp but all in a term’s work for the Trudeau Liberals.
And yet such policies, modified to meet environmental goals and to pay proper royalties to Alberta and other petroleum-producing provinces, make eminent sense in our age of spiralling petroleum prices and record high profits for the oil companies. High energy prices have forced poorer Canadians in the Atlantic provinces and elsewhere to have to choose between food and home heating. One of the reasons so many people are jaundiced about reports of how well our economy is performing is the bite energy prices take out of their incomes. Over the past two decades, the real incomes of wage and salary earners have barely kept up with inflation, while the incomes and, more impressively, the accumulated wealth of corporate executives have soared.
(The members of the Calgary Petroleum Club are laughing all the way to the bank. And now the political party that was built in their backyard, the party whose policies they adore, is in power. Is it possible that the reason that Stephen Harper won’t release the names and contributions of donors to his 2002 run for the Canadian Alliance leadership is that so many Big Oil names are on the list Certainly, Layton didn’t make an issue of Harper’s connections to Big Oil during the campaign.)
