From the moment I first arrived in Canada in 1954, I
have had a rather equivocal attitude towards, and relationship with, the New
Democratic Party (at that time called the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.)
I have, of course, supported it, since you
don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize
that the Party’s very existence is has been a bulwark against the
Americanization of Canada, if only because
the NDP has kept alive in the Canadian political discourse ideas of
social democracy that are held to be anathema in the United States.
I have joined it, from time to time, quit
it just as often, and have generally found that it suffers from the dilemma of
social democratic parties in other countries in that by the time it gets to
power, if it ever does, it proves to have been hardly worth the effort, so many
compromises have they desperately made in the struggle to get elected.
I
have joined and quit, at various times, the Labour parties in New Zealand and
Britain, and my doubts were precisely described recently by Gary Younge, of The Guardian. He was critical of those who keep talking
about Jeremy Corbyn personally, as if, could they only get rid of the king all
would be well, and then “Labour would resuscitate its programme of milquetoast
managerialism, whereby it was indifferent to its members, ambivalent about austerity at home, and
hawkish about wars abroad.”
In Canada, the situation has been even
worse: the NDP has had this tendency to trust leaders whose hearts are
obviously elsewhere. The only Canadian election that my side ever won was in
Ontario, and the leader Bob Rae messed up so totally that he eventually joined the
Liberal party, where he should have been from the first, and where he has since
become a sort of grandee-manqué,
undertaking heavily significant foreign missions of one kind or another. More
recently, because of Tom Mulcair’s rhetorical brilliance in the House of
Commons, the party ignored his Liberal Party past, only to find that he led them
into the last election with a Liberal party program even further to the right
than the Liberal’s own platform, having meantime stage-managed the
disappearance of the dreaded word “socialism” from the party’s constitution.
Needless to say, although they had been the Official Opposition, they came in
third, shattering all hopes of an electoral breakthrough.
Even more alarming has been the NDP
tendency towards dynastic politics. Before the recent leadership campaign I was
dismayed to learn from one young
enthusiast of the extreme left that their candidate for leader was Avi
Lewis, the son of one-time Ontario provincial leader Stephen Lewis, and
grandson of the second federal NDP leader David Lewis. Both of these forebears were men of brilliant
talents, but the prospect of the party being seized by a family dynasty is one
that caused the heart of a progressive --- certainly of this one, at any rate
--- to seize up. In the event, wiser heads prevailed, for that would have been
something new even in the checkered history of social democracy in the English-speaking
world.
Avi Lewis, a documentary film-maker, and
his wife Naomi Klein were the brains behind the so-called Leap Manifesto, a
bold outline of the way they believe Canada should develop. They presented
their Manifesto at an NDP conference two years ago, and were shrugged off: as I
implied above, the NDP is a tightly-controlled party with a tendency towards
“milquetoast managerialism,” to quote Gary Younge again. But Ms. Klein has won
a global audience with her superb books, especially The Shock Doctrine in which she relentlessly exposes the capitalist
method by which corporations and the governments they control seize on any sort
of seismic shock --- a hurricane, an earthquake, a failed revolution for
example --- to move in, seize control of the tottering infra-structure of a
vulnerable country, and impose American-approved measures that leave the local
economy helpless before the depredations of big money. Not only did Ms. Klein
explain this with persuasive examples, but she established that it was a method
that has been dreamed up by the leading economists emanating for the most part
from the University of Chicago, whose
guru was economist Milton Friedman. (The outstanding example of this
method was in Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union, the resultant
chaos and catastrophic decline of the economy being almost entirely caused by
the ministrations of American economists called in to set the country on the
path to capitalism.)
So now, with last weekend’s NDP policy
convention all set, along come three people purporting to have been key figures
in the rise of Bernie Sanders in the U.S and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, to announce
that they believe, the Leap Manifesto in hand, that the time is ripe for a
renewal of the NDP. My own feeling is that they must be underestimating the
grip held on the party by milquetoast managerialism, so, either to prove me
right or wrong, I lined up before my TV over the weekend to see which way the Party
would jump.
One thing that became immediately clear was
that whoever the party grandees are, they have a firm grip on what they are
doing. As the resolutions ground on, Saturday morning, time was obviously of
the essence. I waited for signs of the Leap Manifesto, but none came. All I
could discover were the usual signs that the party was avoiding any confrontation
with major issues. Evidently, the biggest issue on the table for the NDP right
now is the question of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, over which NDP provincial
governments in BC and Alberta are in disagreement. It might be recalled that
Justin Trudeau’s support for building the pipeline through Vancouver and
allowing Tar Sands bitumen to be exported to the Far East, with all its attendant
risks to the glorious B.C. coastline, was
the decision that prompted famed environmentalist Bill McKibben to denounce the
Canadian Prime Minister and his Environment Minister Catherine McKenna for “stunning
hypocrisy”, for talking out of both sides of their mouths, as it were,
pretending to be concerned about climate change while approving expansion of
the most polluting single source of emissions anywhere in the world. (Their
weasel language was even more disgusting, the tar sands emission being referred
to by McKenna only as “getting our resources to market.”) Here, surely, is an
issue for the NDP, if they are such staunch environmentalists as they have
always claimed to be, a perfect opportunity to slam the Prime Minister. But no,
here when they have a chance to make a decision, the backroom boys made good and
sure that no such motion would ever come to the floor.
Time is always of the essence at these
annual meetings, and so it was at this moment.
The disposal of resolutions ground on its merry way, until one middle-aged
delegate who had obviously learned his politics in the union, stood up and
shouted “right to strike, right to strike, how much time do we have and are we
going to get to that resolution?” He was
told it was fifth on the list, they had half an hour and maybe they would reach
it. He retired, and “right to strike” was never heard of again, unless it came
up while the convention was off-air, which I don’t believe.
Later in the day there was dissatisfaction
expressed at the work of the committee that surveyed the huge list of proposed
resolutions and “prioritised” them, that is to say, shuffling off any
resolutions that might be embarrassing to the party hierarchy for later (which
is to say, no) consideration. This is a well-worn annual-conference technique,
of course, but what was interesting were the subjects that were shuffled
off-stage. Prominent among them were the huge number of resolutions expressing
support for the Palestinian struggle: here, for God’s sake, was an item that
deserved the support of the NDP, supporting the struggle of an oppressed
people: and yet…. .the grip of the foreign affairs spokeswoman, Helene Laverdiere,
a supporter of Jagmeet Singh in the leadership race, appears to be invulnerable:
a stout supporter of the entire American foreign affairs package --- on Israel,
Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria --- striking positions that are obviously at odds with
NDP traditions, if not policies, she apparently was able to ensure that no support
for the Palestinians would be expressed at this policy convention.
The following day, as anguished delegates
tried to force through a new method of prioritizing resolutions, came a short
but impassioned intervention from Niki Ashton, who ran so good a race for the
leadership but fell before the better organizing talents of Jagmeet Singh: If
we do not change this system we will be confronted, she said, with repeating “the
debacle we saw yesterday when 37 party resolutions wanting justice for the
Palestinians were ignored, and the only one opposing that managed to get the
issue sidelined.”
Talk about milquetoast managerialism: it’s
not just a good phrase from an English journalist, it is something that was demonstrated
on Saturday to be alive and well in the NDP in Canada.
I’m not sure if I am a member at the
moment. If not, I won’t be hurrying to rejoin, rather awaiting some sign that
the party has broken with the neoliberal economic and social agenda that is the
dominant narrative of Western world politics, and opposition to which was the
motive for its original formation by the union movement.
As for the Leap Manifesto: I can understand
why it might have appealed to Becky Bond, the Sanders supporter, who is anxious
to pretend that Sanders has started a revolution, rather than just hearkened
back to the New Deal. As I read it, it is nothing more than a radical wish-list
of things we would like Canadian governments to do to meet the immense
challenges that lie ahead in face of the
development of oligarchy, the onrush of technology, and the degeneration of our
life-support systems here on earth.
Of more relevance to the Leapers in Canada might
be the support of Adam King and Emma Rees, the two activists from Britain’s Momentum movement, an extra-Parliamentary
movement of support that stands behind Corbyn and the Labour left. The NDP has its Socialist Caucus (ndpsocialists.ca),
which, to judge by the weekend convention, could use some advice from Momentum as to how to pressure the Party
to restore its basic purpose in life.
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