NDP heads back to the left on TPP

No choice after centrist strategy collapses

That muffled boom you just heard was the sound of the NDP blowing up its centrist strategy.

Make no mistake: the party’s decision to oppose Canada’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership — and not just to oppose it, but to pledge, in a letter to the Conservative trade minister released Friday night, to renounce any agreement that is signed, should it form a government after Oct. 19 — marks a significant change of course, as deliberate as it is risky.

This is a party, after all, that on issue after issue, from balanced budgets to the F-35 contract, has been going out of its way to reassure doubting voters that not a lot would change if it were elected. A couple of points added to the corporate tax rate, perhaps, but a couple of points taken off the small business rate. That sort of thing.

Now here they are vowing to walk away from the largest trade deal Canada will have signed since the original Canada-U.S. agreement — unconditionally, indeed without even seeing what’s in it. It’s possible to hope they’re lying, of course, or to read some wiggle room into Mulcair’s wording, that an NDP government “will not consider itself bound to any agreement” the Conservatives might sign between now and Oct. 19. After all, the party might still decide to proceed with the agreement, even if it did not feel “bound” to.

Likewise, when Mulcair says “an NDP government will not accept any deal that puts our dairy and poultry farms at risk,” it’s always possible it could decide, on closer inspection, that the deal the Con- servatives negotiated did not do that. After all, the Liberals pulled much the same trick with regard to NAFTA.

But it’s risky to read too much into these things. Whatever the semantic possibilities, what’s significant is what the party wants to be understood from the letter: that it would tear up a major trade deal just days after it was negotiated, at whatever cost to Canada’s long-term economic interests. That’s big.

Indeed, if I thought they meant it, I’d say it disqualified them for office. This is no mere promise to run minor budget deficits for a couple of years, in the style of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. It would cut us out of what would be the largest free trade area in the world: bigger than either NAFTA or the European Union, nearly as big as the two combined.

In short, this is not the act of a centrist party, or at least of a party that wants to be perceived as such. In taking this move, with two weeks left in the campaign, the NDP risks alienating many of the voters who had been willing, for the first time, to give the party a look. But what option does it have?

Most polls now put the party in third place, with about 26 or 27 per cent support. A month ago, it was in first place, in the mid-30s. If it is prepared to blow up the strategy on which it has been running until now, it may be because it has proven a cataclysmic failure. Or rather, it may be because the assumptions on which it was based have turned out to be false.

Recall that at the start of the campaign the Liberals looked like they were well out of it. The bloom was off the Trudeau rose, the freshness that had once charmed and in- trigued the electorate revealed as mere callowness. The NDP appears to have assumed that, now that it was time to choose a government, the voters would want something more substantial. Something like Tom Mulcair.

The strategy, then, was to gather up the “change” vote, largely on the strength of the NDP’s perceived winnability, while reassuring wavering centrists and even centre-right voters of the party’s newfound sobriety. With Quebec solidly in its camp — assumption No. 2 — it was well placed to reach out to voters in Ontario and the West.

So on Aug. 25, with the NDP at the peak of its popularity — a Forum Research poll released that day had them at 40 per cent — it must have seemed like the seal on the deal when Mulcair announced that, not only would an NDP government balance the budget over the life of its first mandate, as one might have expected him to say, but that it would do so in its first year, and every year after that. Ghost of Bob Rae, begone!

Yet the Liberals seem to have seen something rather different in it. The same day, the party suddenly let it be known that, notwithstanding its previous support for balanced budgets, it was now prepared to plunge the country back into deficit, just as it was climbing out of the last one. The amounts, as it was later revealed, were relatively trivial. But what was important was the signal. The Liberals, once the cautious centrists, were seizing the mantle of change.

You can trace the NDP’s decline from there, a slide exacerbated by the performance of the two leaders in the debates: Mulcair soft-spoken, often smiling uncomfortably, sticking to the centrist line; Trudeau shouting, interrupting, insisting on the urgency of “real change,” right away.

And then the niqab torpedo struck, devastating the party’s support among the Quebec nationalists it had thought were its own. Not only had it failed to break through as hoped in Ontario, but now its existing base was at risk. It can’t very well backtrack on the niqab — not without alienating and disheartening its supporters elsewhere in the country.

But it can energize them, by coming out guns blazing against the TPP. It’s hugely risky, granted. But what has it got to lose?

The Liberals were seizing the mantle of change