Trump’s triumph may save NDP
President Donald J. Trump, arch- nemesis of the Canadian Left? Not really. More likely Trump’s rise is the very lifeline Canada’s woebegone New Democrats, and their allies in the labour movement, have been waiting for.
Last April, shortly before Thomas Mulcair was ousted as NDP leader — he continues to head the party as caretaker, ahead of a leadership race to take place next year — he denounced the Republican populist disrupter and urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to do the same. Trudeau demurred, keeping his Trump cards near his vest, where they remain.
But a curious pattern has emerged since last week’s upset by the Trump-Pence ticket, and the GOP’s taking control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. Canadian leftists have begun appropriating Trump’s political gain for their own purposes. It’s a surprisingly seamless fit.
Mulcair, no one’s idea of a rabble-rousing populist, hasn’t changed his stance — much. He continues to urge Trudeau to “stand up” to Trump. “I think when you see the type of racist, sexist comments that were made by Mr. Trump during the campaign those are things we don’t want here in Canada, ” Mulcair told The Canadian Press last week.
But other social-democratic eminences, including potential NDP leadership prospect Charlie Angus and union veteran Sid Ryan, have sounded a distinctly different note. They’re not embracing Trump, by any stretch. But they are embracing the mantle of angry, working-class support that won him the economically hard-pressed U.S. rust belt.
In a video posted to YouTube, Angus said he felt “dazed and malaised” in the wake of the presidential election. He added he believes the result was less an embrace of Trump than it was a “defeat for the progressive political class that didn’t seem to know how to talk to, to talk with and talk for people who felt they were being written off the political map of the nation.”
Angus singles out Ohio and Michigan, discounting the notion the swing to Trump in these rust-belt states was no more than “white noise, white anger and white trash.” It was, Angus argues, a cry of workingclass alienation from progressive elites.
Sid Ryan, past president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, struck a similar note in a Huffington Post op-ed. “I reject the notion that it was a ‘white-lash’ by voters, a racist reflex against minorities and people of colour,” Ryan writes. “It was, in large measure, the working class all across America, white, black and Latino, sending a big ‘F-you!’ to politicians and insiders who have used ‘free’ trade agreements to ship American jobs offshore.”
In the past week I have heard from several American voters for whom the order of preference was 1) Sanders 2) Trump 3) Clinton. Post-election data confirms the Trumpquake was less a GOP advance than it was a Democratic collapse.
The play for the NDP in Canada, given a leader with the chops to pull it off, is straightforward: Pull a Bernie Sanders, hoovering up working-class resentment of elites, globalization and free trade, while avoiding the xenophobia and crude misogyny.
In downtown Toronto, such a message might not penetrate. But in southwestern Ontario, where formerly prosperous cities such as London and Chatham have been gutted by factory closings, it could find an ear — particularly if given a pluralist, Canadian nationalist lustre.
Thus far, the NDP leadership race has been mostly notable for the number of party grandees — among them 2012 contenders Brian Topp, Nathan Cullen, Megan Leslie and Paul Dewar — who’ve backed away. B.C. MP Peter Julian is exploring a bid. Niki Ashton, Ruth Ellen Brosseau and Angus are often mentioned as potential candidates.
Of the group, Angus stands out. Timmins, Ont.born, he is a musician by trade, giving him a slightly outside-the-box vibe. As the NDP’s critic for indigenous and northern affairs he has been a passionate, effective advocate for redress for aboriginal Canadians. His forays in the Commons tend to cut through the noise.
It’s no leap to imagine Angus or someone like him leading a workingclass insurgency against the Queens’s Park Liberal carpetbaggers, with the long-term decline of Ontario manufacturing as the primary motivating fuel.
Whether such a movement could unseat Trudeau in 2019 is impossible to guess, three years out. It might simply bring the NDP back from the near dead to split the progressive vote, thus handing the win to the Conservatives — some of whom, most notably Kellie Leitch, are attempting their own Trumpist variations.
We can assert, however, that Trump and Sanders offer the Tories and NDP possible pathways to votegetting that are further right and left, respectively, than either of these parties has gone in recent memory — leaving the Trudeau Liberals straddling a widening, and increasingly lonely, centre.
In 2015 that centre held, albeit with a leftward tilt. How long this can continue, in the aftermath of the Trumpquake, is now the biggest imponderable in Canadian politics.
THOSE ARE THINGS WE DON’T WANT HERE IN CANADA.