Was the NDP’s failure one of strategy, or ideology?
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair seems to have successfully waited f or t he electionnight Molotov cocktails to fizzle before emerging from obscurity to offer his personal apologies for the party’s collapse.
“I agree with the overarching assessment that our campaign came up short,” he wrote in a note accompanying an election postmortem. “As leader, I take full responsibility for these shortcomings. I could have done a better job.”
The Campaign Review Memo is largely an exercise in rebuilding party morale — which one can hardly blame them for. The NDP, remember, appeared to have all the momentum after they defeated the Liberals to become the official opposition in 2011. With a country primed for a postConservative shakeup, the NDP seemed poised to win. For the party to go from a historic 103 seats to 44 was a crushing regression. As for the memo, it offers a thorough rundown of the NDP’s technical failures, albeit with a chipper tone and a bright attitude.
The party was, indeed, hampered by t he c ampaign’s extraordinary length and by strategic voting campaigns that often presented the Liberals, rather than the NDP, as the anybodybut- Harper alternative. Yet its main failure was one of messaging.
“Our campaign presented us as c autious c hange, which was out of sync with Canadians’ desire for a dramatic break from the decade of Harper’s rule, a desire we contributed to building,” the memo read.
Indeed, the party’s i nsistence on sticking to balanced budgets proved to be entirely too reasonable and pragmatic for an electorate enamoured by sunny ways, emotive economies and magic deficits.
“Our balanced budget pledge was in part responsible for presenting us as cautious change. It allowed t he Liberals to contrast themselves from the Conservatives more clearly.”
Others will also point to Mulcair’s entirely principled stance on the niqab. While the Conservatives ostentatiously pursued a court case against a niqab- wearing oath- taker and set up “barbaric practices” snitch lines, Mulcair refused to pander. It’s probably correct to point out that this position did not help the NDP in Quebec, which maintains a much more suspicious view toward Islam and its symbols.
This i s, nonetheless, a self- serving position f or Mulcair’s s upporters to take. Most party stalwarts would, I suspect, be very reluctant to call the 2015 campaign principled. Mulcair became former prime minister Stephen Harper’s mirror; someone willing to moderate his values for power, believing — not unwisely — that a centrist platform held the path to victory for a party on its cusp.
This was the correct assessment, by the way. It just so happened that the Liberals maintain the loyalties of the ambiguous median voter much more comfortably than a party beholden to meaningful ideological principles ever could. The memo is interesting, then, for presenting the NDP’s failure as one of strategy rather than design. It glosses over the crisis within the party itself — its fundamental discomfort with being the socialist in a suit.
The loss only reinforces the call for greater ideological purity — perhaps if they had stayed true to their principles, they could have won. Some New Democrats have even called for Mulcair’s resignation. Cheri DiNovo, a provincial NDP MPP from Toronto has gone so far as to call the federal leader “tainted” after the loss. He “has to go” she told the Toronto Star last month, citing his clearly disastrous attempts at centrism in a political era that seems to be hungering for radicalism.
“We’re looking at ( Democratic presidential hopeful) Bernie Sanders south of the border, calling himself a democratic socialist, we’re looking at ( British Labour Leader) Jeremy Corbyn in the U. K. calling himself a democratic s ocialist,” DiNovo told the Star’s Desmond Cole late last year. “We have some serious soulsearching to do.”
Note, here, that these types of i deological objections seemed far more muted when the party appeared to be on the verge of winning. It might also be prudent to point out that neither Sanders nor Corbyn has actually managed to win a general election. In the unlikely event that Sanders even wins the Democratic nomination, we have a very good chance of kowtowing to one President Donald Trump come November.
And in the U. K., bookies and pundits agree that the Conservatives will rule so long as Corbyn remains in power. Stranger things have happened in politics than an oddball win, but the most likely outcome here is that progressives will lose with integrity.
Over here, in the l and t hat has maintained a happy grasp on political sanity, there seems to be no shortage of discontent in the NDP ranks, raising the prospect of a popular coup. Mulcair will be subject to a leadership review when the party holds its convention in April in Edmonton. With no obvious successor and no outward campaigning, chances are he’ll maintain a healthy approval rating and stay on as party leader. The fundamentals are unlikely to change, then. The NDP may spend its time examining the true colour of its inner chakras, only to find there’s no easy way to align them.
(THE NDP’S) MAIN FAILURE WAS ONE OF MESSAGING.
— JEN GERSON THE PARTY IS HAVING A CRISIS OF FAITH. BUT LITTLE IS LIKELY TO CHANGE.