Mulcair’s plans to renew party irk NDP old guard
If Broadbent’s attack on Mulcair succeeds, the Liberal Party will benefit
Jack Layton, among other talents, played a not-bad 12-string guitar and had a pleasant baritone. One of his favourite tunes, a comedic lament, was something he called the NDP Bluges. Canadians love the New Democrats between elections, Layton would croon, with mock sorrow. But on voting day they flee to Liberal red or Conservative blue, leaving the orange high and dry.
NDP patriarch Ed Broadbent, apparently, would like for his beloved New Democrats to keep warbling that song in perpetuity. How else to explain Broadbent’s extraordinary and uncharacteristically nasty 11th-hour intervention in the NDP leadership race? Brian Topp, Broadbent’s favourite, has promised to hew to the NDP’S history as a tax-and-spend, niche party of the left. Thomas Mulcair wants to renew and refurbish, with a view to forming government. This, and little else, will be at issue this weekend at the party’s leadership convention in Toronto.
Hanging in the balance is whether, horrors, Canada’s New Democrats seek to emulate something like the growth track of Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain, which took power in a landslide in 1997 and held it for 10 years (until Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, edged the party back toward its socialist roots), or remains essentially a protest party. If Broadbent succeeds in kneecapping Mulcair, he will likely have ensured that the Liberals remain the government-in-waiting for most Canadian centrist progressives. That will have been a good weekend’s work on Bob Rae’s behalf.
In repeated interviews with national media, including Postmedia News, Broadbent suggested he vehemently wishes for the NDP to remain a party of the Left, which presumably means higher taxes, and greater equality, which presumably means more state intervention in the economy than we now enjoy, or suffer, depending on your point of view. Broadbent has chastised Blair’s New Labour party for its excessive “marketization” of the British economy, deeming that to have been a failure.
To state the obvious: Really? Wasn’t it New Labour that introduced a minimum wage in Britain? Didn’t Blair’s government lead the way in ending state discrimination against gays? Did it not devolve power to the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments? And wasn’t there something about a lasting peace in Northern Ireland?
Like his ideological cousin Bill Clinton, Blair presided over years of low interest rates, low inflation, economic stability and dependable job growth. Of course, in crass electoral terms, Blair achieved more than most democratically elected politicians in Britain, or anywhere, ever do, who are not named Jean Chrétien: He won three successive majorities.
Now let’s look at Mulcair who, though his relationship with his party may conjure parallels with the early Blair, is not, actually, Blair.
Indeed, shockingly, Mulcair’s economic plan reads as though it was authored by a Canadian New Democrat. He promises to impose a capand-trade system to combat climate change, for example. He pledges to eliminate subsidies for oil and gas companies, and to bolster environmental protection.
On his watch, he says, half of all appointments to the boards of Crown corporations will be women. He wants to lower the cost of post-secondary education, establish a national daycare program based on the Quebec model, link business-tax incentives to job creation, and double the maximum benefit under the Canada pension plan. He does not appear to be, in fact, a conservative.
Where Mulcair differs from Topp and the rest, is in tone. He lists the core of his platform as “sustainability, prosperity and economic justice.”
Prosperity, perhaps, is a dirty word among true believers, because of the tacit assumption that wealth creation is not cursed. Also, Mulcair, personally, is a different type than the NDP, with their pious genuflections to consensus, may be used to. In Quebec City he was a brawler. Broadbent suggests the prickly Mulcair is disliked by those who’ve worked with him and is therefore unfit to run the NDP caucus, let alone the country.
The root of this, though, goes beyond personality, it seems to me. Mulcair has dared to speak truth to a party establishment that isn’t having any of it. His message is one that Tony Blair understood, and that most Canadians who are not left-wing ideologues believe: Without making concessions to and indeed supporting the free market, no progressive project can succeed, because social programs cost money. It is not, as Don Cherry might say, rocket surgery. But for Broadbent, who took the NDP to 43 seats in 1988 but could not get beyond that, it’s heresy.
Broadbent is respected across the political spectrum and for good reason. But his attack on Mulcair shows appalling j udgment. It is, plainly, dumb. It increases the likelihood that, should Mulcair lose, the NDP will lose Quebec. Should Mulcair win, fence-mending will now be far more difficult. Most of all, the Conservatives will revel in this fracas, and recognize its spirit. They would have expressed it this way: He’s just visiting.