MULCAIR SENDS MEA CULPA LETTER TO SUPPORTERS
• NDP leader Tom Mulcair has written a letter to supporters taking responsibility for the dismal results of the October election campaign and saying he could have done better.
The note follows the release of an interim report from an NDP group that says the campaign failed to resonate with voters.
Mulcair, who has been peppered with questions about his own political future after the Oct. 19 vote, said the report provides a convincing summary of some of the lapses in the campaign’s preparation and execution.
“I agree with the overarching assessment that our campaign came up short,” he said. “As leader, I take full responsibility for these shortcomings. I could have done a better job.”
Rebecca Blaikie, the party’s president who is leading the election postmortem, told party faithful Tuesday that many believe the NDP presented “cautious change” as opposed to “real change” that the Liberals claimed to offer.
They feel the campaign lacked a strong, simple narrative that made it more difficult to present a co-ordinated national campaign, she said.
A full report is expected to be released in March, just ahead of the party’s April convention in Edmonton, where Mulcair will face a review to determine his future as leader.
Mulcair maintains he is committed to staying at the helm and that he will make the changes needed to ensure the mistakes of the election campaign aren’t repeated.
As the party continues to soul search, several thorny questions need to be addressed. For example, how did the party go into the election with its highest seat count in history, 103, as well as richer coffers than ever before, and win only 44 seats?
One concern is that the party spent too much energy trying to avoid mistakes in the lead-up to the election, Mulcair said in his letter.
“I believe this contributed directly to that sense of cautiousness that is referred to in the interim report,” Mulcair said. “We must embrace a more proactive approach, one where caucus members are invited to initiate projects that help us reach out to the people we represent.”
Mulcair agreed the party’s balanced-budget pledge was a problem during the campaign — a change from a televised interview Tuesday, in which he would not concede this was a mistake.
“We are addressing the important observation from the interim report that the campaign lacked an overarching narrative that could easily communicate our progressive proposals,” he said. “This became apparent when our commitment to balancing the budget overshadowed our social democratic economic vision.”