Singh needs a platform
Jagmeet Singh’s definitive byelection victory settles the question of whether he will lead New Democrats into October’s federal election. The question now for the NDP is what it will stand for.
Until Monday, it was not clear that Singh would remain at the head of his party. Under his leadership, fundraising stagnated and the NDP’s popularity sagged.
To most Canadians, Singh remained invisible. When he did emerge into the spotlight, he too often appeared defensive and ill- prepared.
At times, he seemed at odds with the party’s federal caucus. He also managed to engage in a feud with virtually the entire Saskatchewan wing of the NDP over an issue — the social awkwardness shown by Regina MP Erin Weir toward women — that was essentially trivial.
If Singh had not won the Burnaby South byelection, he would have found it near- impossible to stay on as leader.
But he did win the Vancouver- area riding, capturing 39 per cent of the vote. That gives him a seat in the Commons. More important, it should earn him a reprieve from critics within the party.
At a time when socialism is no longer a dirty word, it also gives the NDP a chance to define itself as a serious leftwing alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives.
The NDP’s roots lie in the prairie populism and Fabian socialism of the old Co- operative Commonwealth Federation. But the party has never been entirely comfortable with its socialist antecedents.
Nor has it always been at ease with its ties to organized labour.
That has made language important. The party tends to avoid terms like “working class” as too Red. It prefers instead to speak of “working families” or “ordinary Canadians” or “everyday families.”
For years, the party warred internally over whether to keep the word “socialism” in its constitution. In the end, it settled on a compromise that talked of the party’s “social democratic and democratic socialist traditions.”
Under the leadership of Jack Layton and later Thomas Mulcair, the NDP focused on replacing the Liberals as Canada’s centre- left party — and almost succeeded.
But the 2015 election, which saw the Liberals under Justin Trudeau successfully feint to the left, demonstrated the key limitation of this strategy: It’s hard to out- Liberal the Liberals.
Oddly enough, as the NDP continues to try and avoid sounding too left- wing, socialism has become fashionable again in the U. S. and Britain.
In the U. S., seven contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination — including avowed socialist Bernie Sanders — have signed onto something called the Green New Deal. Among other things, it calls for the federal government to provide a good- paying job to whoever wants one.
In Britain, much to the dismay of the right- wing press, young people are attracted to unions, government intervention and old- style democratic socialists like Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn. When the LEAP Manifesto, a Canadian precursor of the Green New Deal, came out in 2015, its call for moving immediately to a zero carbon- emission economy was dismissed as utopian. It now seems prescient.
Where is Singh in all of this? In his successful 2017 bid for the party leadership, he produced policy papers on standard issues, such as the old age pension. But when speaking, he preferred to focus on broad rhetorical themes like love and courage.
During the Burnaby South byelection campaign, he talked of the need for affordable housing, an important issue in Greater Vancouver. Speaking on CBC the day after his victory, he spoke of a policy trifecta: affordable housing, fighting climate change and universal pharmacare.
Perhaps this is where the NDP is going in the upcoming election campaign. If so, it will have to square some circles. In particular, it will need to show how it would reinvent Alberta’s entire carbonbased economy in a zero- emission world.
It will also, however, have to be bold. The NDP can only get so far by calling Trudeau’s Liberals untrustworthy. It will have to sketch out a compelling but plausible vision of its own. That is the reaffirmed leader’s main task.