Debacle for New Democrats
Party’s early success in campaign went seriously off the rails, writes Chris Selley.
It is often said that losing government to a Trudeau would be Stephen Harper’s worst nightmare. But it can’t feel any better for Thomas Mulcair. Justin Trudeau didn’t just win an utterly improbable majority on Monday. He galumphed straight through Thomas Mulcair’s backyard and all over his carefully tended flower beds in the process.
The early results were catastrophic for the NDP: the vote share in Atlantic Canada was down 15 per cent and they were shut out, losing deputy leader Megan Leslie and high- profile MPs Peter Stoffer, Jack Harris and Robert Chisholm. It was a bad omen and an accurate one.
At deadline, the NDP was leading in just 12 seats in Quebec, down from the 59 it won in 2011; the Liberals led in 46, up from seven. Nationwide the numbers were no less astonishing: the NDP led in just 32 seats, 71 fewer than four years ago; the Liberals led in 180, a gain of 146. Toronto stalwarts Peggy Nash, Craig Scott and Andrew Cash seats were in danger of losing, as was Mulcair in Outremont, Nycole Turmel in Hull and Paul Dewar in Ottawa. Olivia Chow never had a chance in Toronto- Fort York against Adam Vaughan, and if Olivia Chow doesn’t have a chance in downtown Toronto then something has gone off the rails.
Clearly it isn’t just a Quebec defeat. But Quebec will sting the most. Jack Layton’s grand plan to woo soft- nationalist voters back into national politics through asymmetrical federalism and a softer line on sovereignty referendums has backfired spectacularly. The NDP have been passed over for precisely the blokes they were trying to differentiate themselves from: to some extent the Conservatives ( nine seats, up from five), and to a massive extent the Liberals under Trudeau ( 47 seats up from seven).
That’s the Trudeau of multiculturalism, bane of Quebec’s cultural nationalists; the Trudeau of symmetrical federalism ( in theory, anyway); the Trudeau of the Clarity Act; Trudeau, friend to niqabi new citizens.
By rights, a better result would have given Mulcair a second chance. Canadians were giving him serious consideration, polls showed — and rightly so. He’s an impressive, serious presence in Canadian politics. If he was outperformed by Trudeau, he didn’t perform badly.
But this debacle will surely seal his demise, not least because he ran a campaign that was in some ways to the right of the Liberals — notably promising balanced budgets at all costs and assailing Trudeau’s plan to invest deficits in infrastructure — and fell flat on his beardy face. The NDP are unlikely to run a similar campaign next time around. The party’s port flank will be in full revolt, and Mulcair is constitutionally unsuited to running much to the left anyway.
That said, it’s tough to see how this outcome could easily have been avoided — not when so many Canadians across the country were so eager, first and foremost, for a change, and not when such remarkable numbers of them were willing to vote Liberal. The NDP’s tack right and the Liberals’ tack left may have enhanced the impression among anti- Harper voters that the best way to get rid of the prime minister was simply to vote for the party in the best position to accomplish that. That’s a vicious cycle: the better the Liberals did, the better they did.
And by the time Mulcair was spewing fire at the Trans- Pacific Partnership, in an attempt to rally his left- wing base, he was straying dangerously close to incoherence. What sort of party opposes a free trade deal it hasn’t read yet while assailing the party to its right for wanting to run modest deficits? Federally, the NDP don’t have a history in government. Mushy centrism has always been the Liberals’ stock in trade. If it’s not a comfortable bed, exactly, it’s usually been a safe, warm and dry one — as long as you stay asleep, anyway.
The fact is, the modern NDP is a very difficult thing to sell. Its bedrock social- democratic principles should be an easy sell in Quebec, which it needs, but on several hot- button issues it is distinctly offside in popular opinion. Quebecers like niqab bans even more than other Canadians; ditto the Conservatives’ anti- terrorism legislation. The NDP’s decline in the polls started long before the Federal Court ruling threw niqabs directly into the fray, and in the end it can only have played a minor role: the Liberals offer no refuge for the anti- niqabists.
A Liberal minority would have at least come with a shiny silver lining for the NDP — the balance of power it lost four years ago, leading so many Dippers to wonder amid their euphoria just what the hell they had done. That isn’t a position to which any party would publicly aspire in the long term. But there’s no shame in it. Plenty of NDP supporters have been happy with it in the past. And just look what happens to our federal political parties when they gain real power: they jettison any principles they have, they become corrupt, they accept power as a goal in and of itself.
But if the Liberals are beginning a new dynasty with this majority, then it’s an open question what the NDP can ever hope to accomplish on its own, except in occasional periods of minority governance. What a difference four years makes.