Common theme in 2016 stunners
If we remember 2016 years from now — if, in other words, our concerted efforts to blot out the memory of this wretched year fail — it will surely be for the huge political surprises it brought.
This was the year of Brexit, after all, or at least of a majority vote for Britain’s departure from the European Union. (Our British friends will spend 2017 discovering, in great detail, that the vote and the thing are not the same.)
And it was the year Donald Trump was elected president. I like to think of this latter event, which I sure didn’t see coming, in terms of three Time magazine cover lines on Trump. In chronological order: “Meltdown,” “Total Meltdown” and “Person of the Year.”
These are complex events. It would be glib to generalize. But one thing they both had in common was the cheerful refusal of voters to do what the conventional wisdom or the political establishment said they must. (I’m aware that darker impulses, including plain racism, drove some number of voters in both cases. I persist in thinking that’s not the only thing that was going on.)
These two outbursts of iconoclastic populism, the Trump and Brexit surprises, have echoes in earlier electoral upsets closer to home.
Rob Ford’s election as mayor of Toronto, say, or even the 2015 elections of Rachel Notley in Alberta and Justin Trudeau federally.
And I don’t think it’s too big of a stretch to see precedent for these votes in the 1992 referendum on the constitutional amendments proposed in the Charlottetown Accord. Every mainstream political party in Canada campaigned for Charlottetown. Just about every newspaper urged voters to support it. They declined. The consequences of the accord’s failure were hard to foresee and seemed nasty. Voters didn’t care.
There’s another event in 2016 that matches this pattern — a sudden surge in voter passion, and damn the consequences. It’s less consequential than Brexit or Trump, and it was the work of people who would be revolted by the outcome of those votes, but I think it fits the pattern. It’s the Edmonton convention in April at which members of the NDP voted to fire Tom Mulcair as their leader.
In that vote, the NDP decided to toss itself off a cliff and hope a parachute would materialize on the way down. The party had no strategy, no clear Plan B and it based its decision on a gut reaction more than on a clear evaluation of Mulcair’s strengths and weaknesses.
Under Mulcair the NDP had spent much of 2015 leading the other parties in pre-election polls. Under him, the NDP wound up with more seats than Jack Layton had won in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
Mulcair is, as everyone knows, the most formidable opposition MP in the House of Commons, which is why the NDP asked him to stick around for a couple of years after they made a great show of firing him. No successor will know any province’s political culture as well as Mulcair knows Quebec’s. None, including the likely francophone candidates, speaks French as eloquently as he does, but frankly, none speaks English as well as he does either.
I’m rehearsing these arguments one more time purely for nostalgia’s sake. I know nobody will be persuaded by them, although I hope some New Democrats feel at least a momentary pang of regret.
This was not a vote about competence. It was about tribe. Mulcair didn’t smell like a New Democrat to New Democrats.
After the debacle, I asked Jennifer Hollett, the sometime Toronto NDP candidate, to write something for my old employer Maclean’s to ex- plain what had happened. She wrote that 2015 was a “three-peat” for Toronto-area New Democrats who’d already watched the provincial party under Andrea Horwath and the NDP’s favoured Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow lose big in 2014. “We campaigned by watering down our leaders and language, writing ballot-box questions that other candidates could answer,” she wrote. “As we tried to grow, we lost our authenticity.”
“Authenticity” is turning into a powerful rallying cry in today’s politics. “Pragmatism” can’t keep up. I maintain that the NDP is in a terrible fix and that they brought it on themselves. But it’s hard for an outsider to argue with insiders’ gut feeling that Mulcair didn’t feel like one of their own.
There will be more moments in 2017 when finger-wagging from responsible outsiders fails to stop voters from keeping their own counsel. In some ways it’s a healthy instinct. At least that’s what I keep trying to tell myself. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.