CANADA'S DEMOCRATIC LEFT INCHES AHEAD

...A rumpled, friendly man with the look of an ex-boxer, Broadbent was a professor of political philosophy until he entered Parliament in 1968...

...Broadbent campaigned as a defender of "ordinary Canadians" against Mulroney and Trudeau's successor, John Turner, both rich corporation lawyers...

...East of Ontario, in contrast, New Democrats have only a few strongholds in the traditional-minded and impoverished Atlantic provinces...

...they are runners-up to right-wing populist regimes in Saskatchewan and British Columbia...

...The technique worked well enough to boost NDP support seven points in a two-month campaign...

...A major component of the NDP's strong standing in national opinion polls is unprecedented support from Quebec...

...Such struggles, however unpopular at the time, are part of the political capital New Democrats have built up...

...In Nova Scotia, where declining industries and an aging work force have almost wiped out a traditional socialist stronghold on Cape Breton Island, government workers in Halifax, a dockyard and government city, have given the NDP a new base...

...Voters in Saskatchewan, the CCF's prairie heartland, defeated their twenty-year-old socialist government in 1964 and the NDP image got much of the blame...

...So far they have provided the party with its major frustrations...

...Most of the seasoned idealists who had built the CCF remained to sustain the new party...

...Ontario and Quebec: Key Provinces THE PROVINCES THE NDP WAS PRIMARILY CREATED to win, Ontario and Quebec, are the key to any party's federal hopes...

...The difference between Ontario and its French-speaking neighbor, Quebec, might seem obvious, but what outsider could explain why Alberta is the only western province never to have had an NDP government...

...Two years later, the party dropped back into third place behind the Liberals...

...A quarter-century ago, the architects of the New Democratic Party aimed for a democratic socialist government in Canada...

...While American unionism has shrunk to less than a fifth of the organizable work force, in Canada about forty percent of workers belong to unions...

...For enemies of the democratic left, union-bashing was a timely substitute for red-baiting...

...Populism and memories of past services can carry Canadian socialists only so far...

...Public-service unionism can have ambiguous political consequences...

...Instead, delegates moved the NDP a couple of notches to the left, with a reiteration of demands to get out of military alliances and new proposals for public ownership, abortion reform, and workers' control...

...The NDP is not a splinter...

...At the same time, the party discipline necessary to operate a parliamentary system makes U.S.-style brokerage politics difficult...

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...Barely a quarter of union members and their families regularly vote for the NDP...

...That may be changing, as the province's energy and agricultural industries struggle with falling prices and a continuing drought...

...New Democrats form the government in the province of Manitoba and the northern Yukon Territory...

...Though such national programs have often been enacted by Liberal or Tory governments, Canadians have had little trouble recognizing that the impetus came from the CCF or NDP...

...In the three most recent national elections, half the Canadians who claimed that Broadbent would make the best prime minister voted Liberal or Conservative because they feared the NDP or its union allies...

...However, public employees have created areas of support for the NDP at a time when both Liberal and Conservative parties have espoused massive deregulation, "down-sizing" government, and privatization...

...CCF strongholds, particularly in urban areas, converted easily to the NDP...

...By 1984, when the NDP faced utter eclipse in the rush to defeat Trudeau's Liberals, party strategists abandoned economic messages in favor of a straight populist appeal...

...In that election, Canada's former socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), saved only eight seats and nine percent of the vote...

...Only in 1976, with the choice of Ed Broadbent, did the NDP have a federal leader who had not been bred in the CCF...

...Cooperative Commonwealth Roots AN EARLIER TORY SWEEP, in 1958, helped conceive the NDP...

...In Canada, no institution that challenges the American norm can expect an easy ride but the NDP is one of the major reasons that the northern half of the continent is different...

...Federal funding and tax rebates for political contributions have helped the NDP shed some of its old poverty...

...Adjusting to Technology ANOTHER PROBLEM IS THE NDP's STRUGGLE to adjust a broad-based socialist party to the age of technological politics...

...NDP candidates won a quarter of the votes in the 1985 election in Ontario, Canada's biggest and richest province...

...Since Canada already has a far larger public sector than Sweden, voters have no illusion that sweeping nationalization is the easy and obvious remedy for a vulnerable resourcebased economy...

...Elected CCFers switched labels and carried on...

...Certainly the Canadian left needed a jolt of political energy and an image that fitted postwar prosperity better than the CCF's depression-era traditions...

...Two leaders later, when the 42-year-old Tory dynasty came to the end of its road in the 1985 Ontario election, the NDP did no better...

...Of course no one, even in the NDP, expects the party to run Canada in the near future...

...It is a commentary on television campaigning that voters loved Broadbent's image but disliked or, more often, ignored what he had to say...

...At the same time, unanimous resolutions did not turn unionists into socialists...

...28 Canadians also cherish a broad range of universal income-maintenance and social programs, ranging from family allowances and unemployment insurance to public prepaid medical insurance...

...Ontario Liberals, normally on the right of the spectrum, filled the vacant center, largely by echoing election promises filched from the NDP...

...In the circumstances, did convention resolutions really matter...

...For years, he was the only dialectical match for Canada's former prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau...

...The members they recruited inherited many of the same humane liberal values...

...Delivering on NDP reforms could well make the Liberals popular enough to sweep the province...

...Canadian nationalism is another factor that works for the NDP...

...Ever since Progressives broke the two-party monopoly in 1921, Canada's parliamentary system has learned to accommodate third parties...

...The 1985 NDP convention heard eloquent appeals from party leaders to broaden policies to attract disillusioned left-wing Liberals...

...Support from Unions CANADA HAS A MORE BUOYANT LABOR MOVEMENT than its neighbor...

...Relatively few and scattered by comparison with their American neighbors, Canadians have a tradition of turning to the state for tasks Americans have confided to corporations...

...In both provinces, the NDP remains the only imaginable political alternative...

...Brian Mulroney had eight of them when his party triumphed in 1984...

...When he became NDP leader in 1976, Ed Broadbent's highest policy priority was to endow his party with a persuasive industrial strategy...

...Like other parties of the democratic left, the NDP is short of attractive economic strategies to cope with the post-Keynesian crisis...

...Twenty years of relentless political passion have left Quebeckers exhausted and eager for other diversions...

...There 30 the NDP has organization, effective union backing, and leadership...

...The main difference between the CCF and NDP platforms was the new party's earnest if unavailing attempt to meet the nationalist aspirations of French Canadians, then at the outset of a twenty-year debate over independence...

...An autoworker's son who represents the city of Oshawa, General Motors' Canadian base, Broadbent has an unprofessorial skill in winning the affection of all types of humanity...

...Problems of policy and structure dog all parties of the democratic left...

...If winning Ontario is a prerequisite for winning Canada, the NDP faces another round of waiting...

...The provinces are a special challenge because each has evolved its own political culture...

...Turning "parkers" into real supporters is probably the NDP's toughest current challenge...

...In the other three western provinces, New Democrats form the government in Manitoba and might have regained power in Saskatchewan and British Columbia with younger or more inspired leadership...

...While Brian Mulroney swept 211 of the 282 parliamentary seats, the NDP held its own in thirty constituencies and won 18 percent of the vote...

...Constituents seem to find no fault in a socialist who likes big cigars and fast sports cars...

...Canadians also have a thick streak of faith in government and in collectivist solutions...

...Under the circumstances, the NDP has been remarkably well served...

...The shrewd and eloquent Tommy Douglas, who won five successive elections as premier of Saskatchewan's CCF government, moved to Ottawa in 1961 and led the new party, for a decade...

...Party leaders, more sensitive to Canadian opinion than the rank and file, would like to mute the NDP's formal rejection of NATO, NORAD and other Cold War hangovers, but a 1985 federal convention voted overwhelmingly to sustain the NDP's neutralist policies and there is no sign that party attitudes have changed...

...By 1920, most Canadian railways were publicly owned...

...Election planners bluntly rejected the alternative strategy: try31 ing to convert a doubting electorate to believe in the NDP's economic medicine...

...Government grants and tax deductions have become the party's main source of funds, but the financial tap would turn off if the NDP fell below the minimum share of seats and votes that guarantee official status...

...The most obvious CCF-NDP continuity was in 27 leadership...

...Patient and resolute courting of Quebec nationalists in the 1960s hurt the NDP in the rest of the country and did nothing to deflect Quebec's left from involvement in the separatist Parti Quebecois...

...Labor organizations that had always backed the CCF did more, and after 1961 some unions that had done nothing were prodded into activity...

...Government-run car insurance, an NDP policy, is found in three western provinces and Quebec, and the systems have proved so economical and popular that no subsequent governments have dared scrap them...

...In 1986, the NDP is about half way to that goal...

...CCF or NDP proposals to socialize specific industries and commercial activities often find Canadian opinion ready to be persuaded...

...New Democrats merely held their own...

...In 1958, when the Tories swept Canada, they had already won seven of the ten provinces...

...The neighboring province of Ontario is very different and perhaps even more frustrating...

...Opinion is still divided about the need for a fresh start...

...Only in Nova Scotia, under the NDP's sole woman provincial leader, Alexa McDonough, does the NDP have a hope of early major gains...

...That is partly because no Canadian jurisdiction yet has right-to-work laws and partly because of a dramatic growth in publicsector unions...

...The CLC, Canada's equivalent of the AFL-CIO, helped organize the largest, longest, and hottest political convention Canadians had ever seen: in August 1961, the New Democratic party was born...

...Three of the five largest unions in Canada bargain for federal, provincial, and local government employees, many of whom have the right to strike...

...Given the odds against democratic socialist parties in the North American climate, the NDP's survival is no mean feat...

...By 1975, Petro-Can was a reality and a Conservative threat to dismantle it helped defeat the short-lived Tory government in 1980...

...In 1971, David Lewis, a Montreal Jewish immigrant who was the CCF's greatest national secretary and the NDP's political architect, succeeded him...

...Probably the pluses and minuses of the NDP canceled out...

...Only history can tell whether the second part of the journey will be hard or easy...

...Currently, NDP votes keep the Liberals in power in Ontario, in return for a written pledge to keep those stolen promises...

...Although most Canadians still prefer the Liberals or the Progressive Conservatives (known locally as the Tories), the NDP can count on backing from about one voter in five...

...Large chunks of Canada's badly fragmented labor movement spurned the CLC's directive...

...At times, in self-preservation, the party has surrendered to a contemporary preference for image over substance...

...By the autumn of 1986, disillusionment with Mulroney's performance had boosted NDP standing in nationwide opinion polls to 28 per cent...

...The NDP's 1973 demand for a nationalized oil company to buffer future OPEC price shocks and give Canadians a share in their own energy industry was one such example...

...It is an old Canadian rule...

...As Saskatchewan premier and then as NDP national leader, Tommy Douglas fought the bitter, bruising battles with a hostile medical establishment that led to Canada's current Medicare...

...The NDP, which won 16 of 79 legislature seats on May 8th, is now Alberta's "official opposition" or governmentin-waiting...

...Neither do Canadians who regularly tell pollsters that they prefer Broadbent over his Liberal and Tory rivals...

...By 1979, its main lines were clear: Canada could at least produce most of the mining machinery, oil rigs, and farm equipment her resource-based economy traditionally imported...

...Visitors who find Canadians 29 almost indistinguishable from their neighbors have a point, but Canadian critics of Ronald Reagan's diplomatic style or of the excesses of corporate capitalism are numerous and their views are usually echoed by the NDP...

...To get all the way, it needs about twice as many federal votes and two or three more provinces where the party is at least the alternative government...

...In 1975 under Stephen Lewis, David Lewis's son and the current Canadian ambassador to the UN, the NDP came second in a three-way race, not far behind an entrenched Conservative regime...

...In Canada's most recent federal election, held September 1984, the NDP survived a Progressive Conservative landslide that for a time threatened to bury the party in the same grave as an unpopular Liberal administration...

...The NDP's solution, promoted by both of Broadbent's predecessors, is that socialism must prove itself in the provinces before it can hope to take the stage in Ottawa...

...Their preferences do not convert to votes...

...Torn between old Liberal and weak new Tory loyalties and disillusioned by separatism, voters are parking their votes with the NDP...

...One explanation for the consistently right-wing tone of its politics is that Alberta is Canada's Texas, with oil, cattle and a steady influx of Americans...

...That was motive enough for worried CCF leaders to echo urgings from the executive of the Canadian Labor Congress (CLC) to help create a new, more broadly-based party with formal labor links...

...It no longer looks impossible...

...NDP governments have also found themselves in adversary roles that they never had to play with such loyal backers as the United Steelworkers or the UAW...

...Would the party imperil that status by obeying fatally wrongheaded convention resolutions...

...Civil service laws enforce political neutrality on public employees, unionized or not...

...The problem, as Broadbent and his advisers know, is that Canadians like the benefits of socialism but they cling to the postwar faith that capitalism somehow delivers the means to pay for them...

...It has plenty of work in the interval...

...Ed Broadbent, federal leader since 1976, inherited the thankless task of maintaining a national presence and the daily parliamentary battle while the more hopeful struggles occur in the provinces...

...One reason was that the Tories, pushed by small town and rural supporters, turned right...

...Canadian unions, for example, had made repeated attempts to vent their frustrations in a labor party before the CLC-CCF marriage finally produced the New Democrats...

...As it was, the NDP narrowly won the popular vote in Saskatchewan and held 42 per cent in British Columbia against opponents who deliberately buried their right-wing records in a blaze of populist imagery...

...Without a convincing economic strategy for Canada and especially for the vulnerable, resource-based western provinces New Democrats may soon be governing, democratic socialism will be in serious trouble...

...How do New Democrats keep the grass roots from withering when pollsters and media consultants can tell politicians how to win elections...

...Like others in the western democracies, the Canadian instinct in tough times is to squeeze social spending rather than socialize the economy...

...The New Democrats are lucky to have them...

...The strategy, with its emphasis on job creation, made little perceptible difference to the NDP showing in the 1979 and 1980 elections...

...When that dream was rejected in a 1980 referendum, the once-militant Quebec left seems to have dissolved in disillusionment...

...By 1971, even Saskatchewan was ready to give its New Democrats eleven more years of power...

...As an electorally competitive socialist party, the NDP has to wrestle with public instincts...

...So long as radical Quebeckers pondered independence, the NDP was irrelevant...

...The constituency that includes Ottawa's Parliament Hill is now held by the NDP...

...Even Conservative governments helped create the Bank of Canada, Ontario Hydro (Canada's biggest utility), and the state-run broadcasting system, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...

...In turn, the NDP has mastered sophisticated communications techniques...

...The NDP, like the CCF before it, has defended Canada's cultural institutions, in publishing and broadcasting, from continental takeover...

...The struggle between ideology and pragmatism is not new in the NDP or its counterparts, but technology has given the pragmatists new influence...

...Computerized fund-raising has given the NDP a broader base of financial contributors than either of its two more powerful rivals...

...Broadbent's 1984 strategy, based on the slogan of "ordinary Canadians," reflected careful survey work...