Key NDP thinker largely forgotten

The recently concluded P.E.I. NDP leadership convention failed to acknowledge the death of one of the NDP’s leading intellectuals, James (Jim) Laxer, co-founder of the Waffle movement in the early 1970s, who died unexpectedly this February in Paris.

The Waffle movement attempted to ideologically balance Canadian nationalism and militant socialism to rejuvenate the federal NDP by pushing its policies to the left. The federal NDP, created in 1961, was the child of the prairie CCF, led by Tommy Douglas.

Laxer and Professor Mel Watkins, author of a royal commission on foreign ownership, formulated the Waffle’s economic program which called for putting American transnational corporations under public control and the nationalization Canada’s financial sector. The Waffle raised important issues about political economy, the operation of capitalist economies, and the nature of power, that the NDP has never come to terms with and deliberately avoids.

Control of the NDP was effectively vested in the Lewis family throughout the 1960s, with David Lewis becoming the Leader of the NDP. The 1971 federal NDP leadership convention saw Lewis and Laxer pitted against one another in a vicious and divisive leadership fight. Lewis won with 60 percent of the delegates. This was the high point for the Waffle. After the convention Wafflers and NDYers (Youth) were purged by Lewis from the party.

Today the NDP is a shell of its former self, and has been described as “Liberals in a hurry.” The Waffle movement was the NDP’s last opportunity to be a serious left-wing alternative.

Richard Deaton,

Stanley Bridge