The Poor NDP

One has to feel a little bit sorry for the national NDP who are this weekend meeting in Edmonton to decide their direction and their leadership for the next few years. The leadership is not in much debate. Tom Mulcair will garner enough delegate support to remain as leader if for no other reason than it is not the style of the NDP to dispose of their leaders in public. Whether or not he leads the NDP into the next federal election will be his choice (at least in public) to make. Perhaps a year from now,  Muclair may decide to step down.

The future of the NDP and the policies that will direct that future are far more complicated and therefore much more difficult to predict. On one hand there is the ever bright image of the late Jack Layton who managed to lead the party into the ranks of the official opposition. Unfortunately he did not live long enough to show that he could lead the party into becoming the next government. Therefore his star remains untarnished. That star shines so bright that all leaders are dull in comparison. The memory of what  could have been creates possibilities that might well be impossible to achieve for those who wish to follow in his footsteps.  Almost tasting power may have convinced some party members that all that needs to happen is some minor tweaking and the continual drift towards the centre.

 On the other hand there is Alberta. Who could have thought that in a province where the words "Conservative Party" and "government" were synonymous would vote for the "left". Who could have imagined that a province that spawned and supported the former Prime Minister would chose the NDP to run that province? But they did. And while it is clear that Rachel Notley has strong philosophical roots in traditional NDP values, she is also the premier of a province that is hurting. It is hurting for all kinds of reason including a reluctance to tax its citizens to the same level of other provinces. But the Alberta is mainly hurting because oil is no longer as valued as it once was.  Its value has been reduced primarily because of the glut of oil on the market. However, investing in oil and the needed infrastructure is also less attractive because the western world appears to becoming (finally) aware that it needs to reduce its dependence upon carbon based energy sources.  In the short term the most obvious solution for Alberta is to sell more oil. To do so it must find a way to get its oil to markets based at either end of the country.  For that to happen, the other provinces must agree to either have a lot more trains pulling endless cars filled with heavy dirty crude passing through their towns and cities, or to agree to have pipelines running through or at least near those same towns and cities. There would appear to be no public will for either of those two options.

How can the national NDP stay true to its stated environmental values when some of it members want to sell more oil? How can it mark itself as being innovative and worthy of national leadership when its policies, at the very least, appear to be not in sync with many Canadians.  How can the party expect to be a major player in Canadian politics when it is demonstrating less leadership than the Trudeau led Liberals?  To uphold Premier Notley's demand for support for her province's need to sell oil will alienate potential NDP supporters in other parts of the country. To deny support to that province will at best only confirm Alberta's sense that it is ignored and uncared about by other parts of Canada. It could, in all likelihood, make it very difficult for Notley to get re-elected. I suspect that there is no happy solution to this problem. The only joy for the NDP may be that both of the other national parties are going to be faced with exactly the same dilemma when they are forced to publically deal with this issue.

Of far greater concern for some members of the NDP is the gradual but clear drift towards the centre. The party has a choice. Does it want to have a reasonable chance in the next 10 years of forming a government or does it want to stay true to its socialist roots? It probably cannot do both. Dealing with the choices to be made around supporting Alberta's NDP government become much clearer if the party's goal is no longer to better Jack Layton's success. If the goal of the party were to be the voice of all of us who are concerned about the environment and concerned about the ever increasing inequities within our society, then they would never be elected to run the country. But there would be a clear voice in Parliament defining some core values and every once in a while they might affect government policy.

With the possibility that our voting system will change to something different than the "first past the post system" - Canadians may be able  to vote for a party that (1) has clear socialist values and (2) would have a chance of having enough members to have influence. The NDP need to decide who they want to be. If they don't  there is a very real risk that a splinter party will be formed to assume the leadership vacuum left by the central drifting NDP.

P.S. It has just be reported that the NDP did vote for new leadership. Clearly I was wrong.  I am surprised and more than a bit alarmed. It seems to me that the party members have voted for a new leader - because they think that a new leader will give them a better chance of forming the next government. I fear they are still looking for Jack Layton. I fear that they will continue to sacrifice their political heritage for the possibility of running the country. I think that is a poor trade.