NDP embraces its diversity
HARD WORK at grassroots level goes into building policies at party’s weekend convention in Montreal
Jack Layton T-shirts were on sale, with the late NDP leader’s moustachioed mug silkscreened on white or blue.
Jack Layton limited-edition bobbleheads smiled and bobbled back and forth as delegates ushered past into the party’s first policy convention since his death in 2011.
But as thousands of NDP activists from across Canada gathered for the convention at the Palais des congrès on Saturday, Layton’s spirit was most evident in their enthusiasm to push his Orange Wave further come the next general election — and wash over Justin Trudeau and into the Prime Minister’s office.
“Jack Layton inspired me,” said 22-year-old Carolyn Greve, a delegate from Saskatchewan now studying in Ottawa, who switched from opera singing to political science after the last convention. “I don’t know if he’s the only reason I got involved with the NDP, but he was a very strong part of it. But we’re not just the children of Jack Layton, as people say. We’re also the children of Tommy Douglas, and the children of social democracy.”
With her thick braids, pierced eyebrow and lip, Greve looked like a child compared with some of the party’s stalwarts in attendance.
The honourable Bill Blaikie, an opposition MP for 29 years before retiring from politics in 2011, manned a table selling his new memoir along with other books from the NDP library.
“I’ve been to every convention since 1975,” Blaikie said. “The one thing that strikes me is how many young people are here, and how many people I don’t know. It feels like a national party, and that’s what it is now.”
Given the party’s rise to the status of official Opposition in 2011, thanks largely to the Orange Wave in Quebec that boosted the number of MPs in the province from 1 to 59, Quebecers and francophones were well represented.
Among the diverse crowd were also men in ripped jeans and others in ties. Men in turbans and others in fedoras. Buzz cuts and ponytails. Youth delegates and career MPs — all eating sandwiches.
And there were a lot of women, proud to point out that 40 per cent of NDP members in Parliament are women.
Catherine Roy, one of the homegrown delegates and a political attaché to Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, the MP for Hochelaga, said that diversity is the NDP’s strength — diversity and hard work at the grassroots level to hammer out the party’s politics.
Outside the main hall, where delegates debated proposals on aboriginal rights and proportional representation, then gave their leader, Tom Mulcair, an overwhelming vote of confidence, Roy said the Liberals were getting set to “crown” their leader, Justin Trudeau.
“We’ve got thousands of people here discussing issues over three days,” Roy said. “This is not a party where everything is decided in Toronto. On the other hand, in one day (the Liberals) will meet to crown a leader. That’s not a leadership race. It’s the Star Académie of politics.”
And there is, indeed, dissent in the ranks of the NDP.
One of the proposals to be voted on Sunday was whether to change the language of the NDP’s preamble, to water down the socialist rhetoric and remove references to “socialist ownership” in favour of catchphrases such as “sustainable prosperity” and “rules-based economy.”
But on Saturday, a member of the NDP’s socialist cau- cus handed out pamphlets explaining why the party should keep socialism in its policies and reject austerity.
“At a time when markets are failing, I don’t think we should be putting our faith in them,” he said.
The more socialist elements in the party also tried to force the cancellation of the keynote address by Jeremy Bird, the national field director for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, because of the trillions of dollars Obama spent bailing out banks. That motion was defeated, but the group was back at the convention on Saturday with a large orange banner protesting “Obama’s drone wars.”
Still, speakers such as Australian Labour Minister Bill Shorten and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair presented delegates and the media with an image of a party unified around progressive politics — in opposition to both the governing Conservatives and the up-and-coming Liberals.
Unlike Mulcair, who, in his speech Saturday, seemed to ignore the Liberal threat completely, delegates on the floor made it clear who they felt was the real competition, especially for the youth vote.
“Justin Trudeau has a name, and he has hair, but does he have ideas?” asked Carolyn Greve. “I will put Tom Mulcair onstage against Justin Trudeau any day of the week, anywhere and in any language. In a debate of ideas? Good luck.”