Jury still out on NDP makeover
MONTREAL— Writing earlier this week about the emergence of starkly different federal visions for the country one year after the last election, reborn NDP strategist Brian Topp noted that “Canada’s progressive majority is reconsolidating around the team that Jack Layton led into official Opposition last May.”
Whether Topp believes some credit is due to his former leadership rival for the recent resumption of this reconsolidation was left unsaid.
Post-leadership, Topp has so far succeeded in wading back in the public debate with topical commentary without mentioning Tom Mulcair by name. But that has to be increasingly hard to do.
It is all well to talk about Layton’s team but less than 100 days into the tenure of his successor, that team has very much become Mulcair’s caucus and the transition has involved a substantial recast of his predecessor’s populist approach.
On that score, the NDP’s decision to sit out the Quebec spring is more than a show of relative discipline on the part of a rookie provincial caucus. It is emblematic of a deeper change.
One does not have to go far down the virtual memory lane to find video evidence of Layton encouraging students to rise up against post-secondary tuition fees.
In the lead-up to the leadership vote, most of Mulcair’s main opponents had pledged their support to the Quebec students.
Finance critic Peggy Nash shot a campaign video to show solidarity with the student cause and foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar sported the movement’s red square.
In a debate at Montreal’s Concordia University, House leader Nathan Cullen described Premier Jean Charest and Prime Minister Stephen Harper as co-partners in the promotion of ignorance.
He pledged that if the students went on strike, he would stand with them. “Activate people is what we do best as New Democrats,” Cullen argued at the time. It seems his new leader begs to differ. In spite of the pro-student fighting words of senior members of his team, Mulcair won the argument without a public fight with his shadow cabinet. That might not have been possible if he had not deflected his caucus’s attention and energy into an offensive on Canada’s approach to the development of its resources. That placed the new NDP leader in the eye of the first storm of his tenure. But it also raised a point around which his caucus could coalesce instead of brooding about the call to go missing in action on the social barricades in Quebec. Polls that show that Mulcair is enjoying one of the most successful leadership honeymoons in a long time have also helped. Notwithstanding his decision to sit out the Quebec spring, NDP fortunes have soared in his home province and the party is (marginally) ahead of the Conservatives in national voting intentions. So far at least, a less activist NDP is turning out to be more successful than its previous incarnation. But the party is also living in an artificial paradise created by the Liberal leadership vacuum. The Canadian Alliance was poll- ing under 20 per cent before Stephen Harper became its leader in 2002. The NDP itself was sliding back to third place in the lead-up to its March leadership vote. Both saw their fortunes improve substantially once the changing of the guard was completed. From an NDP perspective, the ideal Liberal leader would be a centre-right figure liable to erode the Conservative right flank while Mulcair moves the party closer to the centre. But the most prominent potential aspirants to the post — including interim leader Bob Rae and Justin Trudeau — hail from the same left of centre constituency as the NDP leader. Just about every inch of ground the New Democrats have gained outside Quebec since their leadership convention has been at the expense of the Liberals. Until the latter present the country with a permanent leader, the jury will remain out on the effectiveness of Mulcair’s makeover of the NDP. Topp’s guarded silence on his former rival’s opening moves suggests that the NDP establishment is also reserving judgment.
Thursday and Saturday.