The NDP’s poisoned chalice

Should Thomas Mulcair immediately step down as leader of the federal NDP? Certainly. He should have done so l ast April, shortly after his party stuck a blade in his back and left him for dead.

When the New Democratic Party disavowed Mulcair at its convention in Edmonton, giving him just 48 per cent support in a mandatory leadership review, they robbed him of what power he’d possessed, as the leader of a 44- seat caucus in the House of Commons. They stripped him of his authority and dignity. They insulted him — the man who’d worked tirelessly to bring them to the threshold of power and won them their second- best electoral showing ever, in terms of number of seats. I half expected him to take the stage that night and flip the assembled orange masses the bird.

Instead, Mulcair swallowed his pride and soldiered on, as a caretaker leader. In the Commons, he barely missed a beat. And he set about picking up the pieces after last October’s federal election defeat. In doing this, he rendered yet another service to his party, which was in disarray and unprepared for a leadership change.

A series of luminaries — among them Brian Topp, Nathan Cullen and Megan Leslie — indicated they had no interest in the job. Meanwhile, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, the champagne-socialist power duo who’d seized the Edmonton convention agenda with such panache with their Leap Manifesto, had by then vanished back into the mist.

And now, after a summer during which federal New Democrats have been neither seen nor heard much at all, as fundraising continued to lag the other major parties by a wide margin and support slipped to 13 per cent, the wolves are circling. In a story by my National Post colleagues John Ivison and Jen Gerson, anonymous Dippers ventured Mulcair’s days as interim leader are numbered. The big guy must step it up several notches, or stand down.

Can they be serious? Who in her or his right mind will take the poisoned chalice?

There’s to be no new permanent leader until the fall of next year. The party’s base has been consumed and partially digested by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s centre- left- leaning Liberals. And its flirtation with the aforementioned Leap document, a leap off a cliff, has made it unelectable.

The putative new interim leader cannot be a candidate for the permanent leadership. He or she can therefore look forward to working tirelessly for a year, under the most intense scrutiny, then — whether good, bad or indifferent — handing off to the next doomed messiah. This is beyond thankless.

Here’s what would make far more sense, at this juncture: leave Mulcair alone. He’s earned that. Let him step aside or not step aside, in his own time. Let him do what he does best, which is to ask pointed questions in the House of Commons in the session to come. While he does this, throw your in- tellectual and emotional energies into deciding who you are.

“But we know who we are,” NDP partisans will mutter. “We are a social democratic party. We are the party that upholds the interests of workers. We are the party of the little guy.”

Except that’s balderdash. You were handed a historic opportunity last spring, in the person of Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley, to uphold the interests of workers and the little guy. Notley explicitly asked for your support in her efforts to get her province’s workers back on the job in the resource sector, in a way that is environmentally responsible.

Yet you repudiated her by embracing Leap, as surely as you did Mulcair. Unemployment in Alberta is now closing in on nine per cent, compared with seven per cent nationally. The federal Liberals are getting nowhere on pipelines. It is a problem you can still seize.

Here’s how that could look: the federal NDP, at the caucus level, embraces Notley’s project, symbolically turning back the clock on last spring’s disaster.

It shouldn’t be so hard, given that she remains NDP royalty and her chief of staff, Topp, was runner- up to Mulcair for the leadership in 2012. These links reestablished, the federal NDP then gets solidly behind the idea of a national west- east pipeline, which was its goto energy proposal before the Keystone XL project ran afoul of the Obama administration.

The pitch to the party’s old base? First, construction will yield thousands of well-paid private-sector jobs. Second, it will be done under the aegis of a carbon- reduction regime administered by an NDP provincial government. Third, support would be contingent on Ottawa’s aggressively fostering downstream industries, including refining, in Canada — a notion New Democrats have long supported.

It would be a sharp turn away from the silk- pantaloon socialism that underlay both Mulcair’s ouster and the embrace of Leap last April. It would be, many would say, a huge climbdown. So? The NDP as it stands is irrelevant. Knifing Mulcair a second time won’t change that. A constructive proposal for jobs just might.

THE PARTY IS A DISASTER, BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO FIX THINGS.