Canada's left still soul-searching months after 'disastrous election'

In the sunny days of August – some 11 weeks before a federal election that would completely alter Canada’s political pecking order – the future looked bright for the country’s leftwing New Democratic party.

Polls suggested the party was poised to move from the official opposition to leading the government. Across the Atlantic, Jeremy Corbyn was challenging the establishment as the frontrunner for Labour leadership in Britain. And in the US, tens of thousands were flocking to arenas to hear what socialist Bernie Sanders had to say.

Eight months later, as progressive movements around the world gain steam, a very different reality has unfolded for Canada’s NDP. October’s federal election saw the party drop to third-place status. Earlier this week, delegates at the party convention voted to oust party leader Tom Mulcair, offering a glimpse of the soul-searching roiling under the surface of Canada’s left.

“We gave up a once in a lifetime opportunity to win government,” said Cheri DiNovo, a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament and the New Democrat who campaigned for a changing of the guard after what she called a “disastrous federal election”.

The election saw Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party win a majority of seats with 39% of the vote. The Conservatives, led at the time by Stephen Harper, became the official opposition with 32% of the vote. And the NDP won 20% of the vote, sending their seats in parliament plummeting to 44 from 95.

Under Mulcair’s leadership, the party had sought power by shifting towards the centre of the political spectrum, voting to remove the word socialism from its constitution in 2013. It was an uneasy fit for a party known for championing ideas such as universal healthcare, strengthening unemployment insurance and old age pensions.

“To be honest, this last campaign was a real wake-up call to stand by our principles,” said DiNovo, who said she’s not interested in the job of leader. The party has given itself up to two years to find a new leader, during which Mulcair has said he will stay on.

The election campaign saw NDP supporters turn to the Liberals in droves, excited by Trudeau’s centre-left agenda. Months later, Trudeau’s status as a charismatic progressive continues to complicate things for the NDP; leaving them struggling to carve out their place amid global delight over Trudeau’s views on feminism, promises to tackle climate change and revitalise the relationship with Canada’s First Nations.

It’s an entirely predictable reaction, said Stephen Lewis, who led Ontario’s NDP for much of the 1970s, given the legacy left behind by Trudeau’s Conservative predecessors. “When you get an extreme rightwing government in power for 10 years, one that has shredded public policy top to bottom and has taken positions that are hostile to the environment, hostile to social welfare and hostile to the public interest generally,” he said, “Anything that takes its place is a glorious relief.”

Particularly if that relief comes in the form of an attractive, articulate leader, he added. “But that doesn’t last forever.”

He pointed to social movements that have swept across Canada in recent years, from the First Nations-focused protest movement Idle No More to the Occupy movement. “There’s a lot of churning under the surface in Canadian political and public life.” Now the tricky task of translating that energy lies ahead for the NDP.

For many in the party, where to head next is embodied by the Leap Manifesto, a revolutionary plan aimed at tackling the overlapping crises of climate change and inequality. “It’s the best opportunity we’ve ever had to build a better, fairer, more just and equal society,” said Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis, and one of the main proponents of the manifesto, along with his wife, author Naomi Klein. Delegates at the recent convention voted to study the document, a roadmap aimed at weaning the Canadian economy off fossil fuels in the coming decades while addressing economic, racial and gender inequalities more closely in the coming years.

The manifesto has not been without controversy. Its promise to do away with new infrastructure projects for fossil fuels, such as pipelines, rankled the NDP in Alberta – one of the few places in Canada where NDP hold power – and highlighted the tensions that exist among Canada’s left among those pushing for climate change action and labour activists who point to the significant number of jobs that continue to be tied to the extractive economy.

“The government of Alberta repudiates the sections of that document that address energy infrastructure,” Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta – where slumping oil prices sent unemployment rates to a 20-year high earlier this year – told reporters this week. “These ideas will never form any part of policy. They are naive. They are ill-informed. They are tone deaf.”

Lewis saw Notley’s stance as a reflection of Alberta politics. Public pressure has ramped up on the premier and her government to push for a pipeline that could get the province’s oil to tidewater, despite opposition from various parts of the country. “The Alberta government doesn’t have a leap manifesto problem,” Lewis said. “They have a pipeline problem with other parts of the country that don’t want them and they feel that it is politically critical for them to advance this.”

The party should be wary of focusing their attention overwhelmingly on tackling climate change at the expense of other issues such as inequality or housing, said Ed Broadbent, who led the federal NDP for 14 years starting in 1975.

As parties on both the right and left of the Canadian political spectrum debate their future directions, a major challenge will be for the party to keep the pressure on the Liberals.

The NDP’s role as the conscience of Canadian politics is all the more crucial at this moment, he said, given the growing appetite around the world for leftist alternatives. “There’s a real openness on the left of ordinary people demanding change … of wanting elite structures to be totally challenged in a way that was not the case 15 years ago,” he said. “It’s astonishing that in the US now fully 35% of Americans under the age of 30 think socialism is a good thing. Who would have predicted that even five years ago?”