Analyze the Canadian left's populism
Jenson, Jane & Papillon, Martin
DURING THE 1997 campaign Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada's federal social democrats, announced her ambitions for the election. She did not expect to form the government nor even to become the...
...As its 1995 Mission Statement indicates, the federal NDP identifies the labor movement as its "partner" and social movements as its "allies...
...The referendum on the Charlottetown in October 1992 brought overwhelming rejection...
...One result of coalitional politics across the popular sector was Audrey McLaughlin's victory at the 1989 NDP leadership convention...
...For instance, can a provincial NDP government promote policies that differ from those of the federal party...
...Contentless Populism McDonough's limited ambitions for the 1997 campaign might have surprised those who have frequently heard the NDP accused of "electoralism," but a closer look reveals them to be quite consistent with the past...
...For several decades the caucus has been the elected voice for the causes of the broad left, becoming, in effect, the parliamentary wing of progressive social movements...
...In 1997 she too ran a campaign focused on social issues, equality, democracy, and community—as well as on the effects of Liberal unemployment insurance reforms...
...By dropping below twelve members, the NDP had forfeited its "official party" status, thereby losing both a large chunk of its financial base and its guaranteed participation in Question Period and House committees...
...For example, the federal party, led by Ed Broadbent at the time, recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" despite opposition from western members and provincial governments...
...Like most social democratic parties in the first postwar decades, the NDP housed proponents of both "revisionism" and "radicalism...
...The political point of this populism is that the NDP must have a significant presence in Parliament to speak for "Us...
...Since the 1980s, however, it has taken on a different tinge...
...The 1997 success at steering through the shoals of populism may be short lived...
...She did not expect to form the government nor even to become the official opposition...
...Her first goal was simply to make a respectable showing, so as to allow the New Democratic Party to move beyond the disastrous 1993 results that took it from forty-three to a mere nine members of Parliament (MPs...
...The NDP still faces the challenge of renewal...
...The stance is now both a response to the divisions inherent in a pluralist party and a result of playing on the terrain of the popular sector, which has its own populist template for interpreting globalization...
...Then in 1992, federal leader Audrey McLaughlin led her caucus to support the Charlottetown Accord, which would have amended the Constitution to recognize Quebec's special status, despite the opposition of many traditional NDP allies in the women's movement, Aboriginal groups, and the western provinces.' Populist politics is not surprising in a federation of relatively autonomous provincial parties, on which the federal party depends for much of its financing...
...Measured against this more limited target, the 1997 election was a success for the new leader...
...2. Elected in 1990 amid high hopes among social movements and labor, Bob Rae's government was deeply disappointing to many supporters...
...This new-style progressive populism upPOLITICS ABROAD dates Us-against-Themism...
...But electoral payoffs have not always been forthcoming...
...Such issues remain controversial...
...Party debates about what economic policy might replace Keynesianism were stillborn...
...Since the mobilizations against the Free Trade Agreement in the mid-1980s, against the Goods and Services Tax in the late 1980s, and for child care and other social programs, the CLC has frequently worked in coalition with the rest of the popular sector...
...She is also a feminist social worker from a provincial party (Nova Scotia) that has never been an NDP stronghold...
...In Canadian political discourse "popular sector" refers to an array of issue-oriented groups and social movements, including labor, anti-poverty organizations, churches, feminists, nationalists, environmentalists, and so on...
...Yet if in 1997 the horizon brightened for the federal NDP, it is still too early to talk of a new day for social democracy in federal politics...
...Thus, New Democrats are the conscience of Parliament, but this role may limit their capacity to articulate a forwardlooking alternative to neoliberalism...
...If New Democrats from central Canada pushed industrial strategies (which would directly benefit Ontario, where the overwhelming proportion of Canada's industrial production is located), those from the West generally had plans for resource-driven development...
...There was language to recognize Aboriginal peoples' inherent right to self-government, the decentralization of powers to the provinces, and another version of the "distinct society" recognition of Quebec...
...It does not depend on developing concrete policies or legislative proposals...
...The more ambitious Charlottetown Accord was devised out of almost a year of consultation and negotiation...
...The accord died in 1990, after much political dispute...
...It will continue to speak for myriad Canadians who are being squeezed by the downsizing "They" (the corporations) are pushing...
...And, it will continue to call for equity for minorities of all kinds who live in a society in which "They" often means able-bodied, heterosexual, white nonimmigrants...
...Nonetheless, the party remains trapped by its left-wing populist past...
...As recognition spread in the 1970s that traditional Keynesianism was unworkable, a debate over its replacement emerged in DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 25 POLITICS ABROAD Canada, as in most other countries...
...This time, at least in Atlantic Canada, angry voters sent an eight-person NDP contingent to Ottawa that is a miniature replica of the party—four MPs in union politics and four in human rights and community activism...
...After 1993 the NDP did launch a search for new directions...
...It stands foursquare for pan-Canadian social programs and against threats to Canada's economic sovereignty coming from the international economy, but the posture is more defensive than propositional...
...More threatening for the New Democrats is the fact that in the 1997 election the Reform Party, with its virulent right-wing populism, scooped up the protest vote everywhere else...
...MARTIN PAPILLON is a graduate student in political science at the Universite de Montréal and a parliamentary intern in the House of Commons, Ottawa...
...In consequence, beginning in the mid1970s when state spending and state interven26 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 tion were challenged by deficit talk and neoliberalism, the NDP steadily divested itself of a capacity for economic analysis...
...Renewal or More of the Same...
...In Canada, this programmatic pluralism has been magnified by the diverse socioeconomic conditions faced by the different provincial wings of the party, some of which (particularly in the western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia) regularly win office...
...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 27...
...For the first time ever NDP candidates in the Atlantic provinces toppled Liberal cabinet ministers as well as other sitting MPs to take eight ridings...
...In the 1993 election, when the Liberals promised to roll back the hated neoconservative agenda of the Mulroney government, many popular-sector activists, seeking to maximize the probability of political change voted Liberal...
...It is therefore likely that the federal NDP will enter the next century with its left-wing populism intact...
...In election campaigns economic themes were carefully avoided...
...The party focused instead on defending existing social programs...
...Usually carefully nonpartisan, social movements (with the exception of labor) and issue-oriented groups rarely endorse any party...
...At the same time, popular-sector anger, particularly from the labor movement, at Bob Rae's Ontario New Democratic government cut deeply into the federal NDP's base.' McLaughlin's 1992 "defection" to the side of the "elites" in support of the Charlottetown Accord dismayed many coalition partners...
...In the ten elections between its founding in 1961 and 1988, the NDP's popular vote averaged 17 percent...
...Instead of smoothing over division, as populism was designed to do, efforts to represent all of the broad left provoked electoral problems and debate about the NDP's identity...
...When Broadbent became leader of the federal party in 1975, Us-againstThemism was used to attract protest votes...
...Following a number of years of rocky relations, an internal review by the Canadian Labor Congress (CLC) led it in 1995 explicitly to reaffirm its status as a "founding partner" of the NDP...
...The strategy of uniting protest voters in the Atlantic provinces exploits what may only be a temporary backlash against the Liberals...
...In this round of constitutional politics, many more items were brought into negotiation...
...It will speak for many Canadians who fear that universal access to high-quality health care is crumbling in the face of "Their" (right-wing governments') cutbacks and privatizations...
...A recent example of such conflicts—one among many—came when the New Democratic government of British Columbia decided to open the first-growth Clayoquot Sound to clear-cut logging...
...Coalition Politics Populism is now deeply entrenched in the federal party...
...She had the support of labor leaders less because she rejected corporate-driven economic trends and wanted to preserve the social safety net than because as a feminist social worker from the Yukon she represented positions on reproductive choice, racial equality, gay rights, and Aboriginal claims that union leaders considered essential for successful coalition building...
...But if this populism of the left provides a necessary voice for justice and democracy in these hard times of cutbacks and renewed intolerance, it lacks, like all populism, a clear set of philosophical principles around which to organize choices among "Our" own competing interests...
...Increasingly, strategists crafted campaigns around social justice themes—and around "Ed," seeking to cash in on Broadbent's personal popularity...
...Despite the 1993 loss and the subsequent debates, the 1995 convention, presented as an act of reunion, basically voted to stay the course...
...Nor does the CLC confine its political action to working with the NDP...
...1. The Meech Lake Accord, agreed to by the ten provincial premiers and Prime Minister Mulroney in 1987, would have inserted a recognition of Quebec as a "distinct society" into the Constitution...
...McDonough claimed that, with even a small contingent in the House of Commons the NDP could speak for progressive forces against the right-wing, market-oriented policies of the other parties...
...The party started to rely on the advice of pollsters and hired consultants, whose soundings uncovered voter distrust of the NDP's economic program but positive assessments of its defense of social programs...
...An "Us" against "Them" discourse with very little content offers the federal NDP a way to avoid policy controversy...
...The leader's disarmingly frank campaign statements effectively released the federal NDP from any pretense that its short-term aim was to govern, something the federal party has never come close to doing...
...The strategic thinking that generated contentless populism is still deeply entrenched in the NDP...
...The New Democrats' contentless populism initially had two sources: internal pluralism and electoralism...
...The guiding notion is that both the economy and politics are run by elites dedicated to undermining Canada's traditions of social justice and its economic sovereignty in the name of market values...
...Facing potential division, Alexa McDonough was chosen as the compromise candidate to lead the party into the next century...
...This decision provoked longtime federal MP Svend Robinson to join frontline protests against the NDP government of his home province...
...The campaign against the accord was led by the rightwing populist Reform Party and several social movements...
...Nonetheless, neither the New Democrats nor the unions treat the NDP as a party of labor...
...The second source of contentless populism is electoral strategy...
...Constitutional politics also ran afoul of internal pluralism...
...JANE JENSON teaches political science at the Université de Montréal...
...In particular, imposition of a "social contract" on public-sector workers, which suspended their collective agreements and unilaterally imposed wage cutbacks, provoked immense anger...
...McLaughlin's short term as leader was strewn with problems relating to the popular sector...
...The NDP's populism promotes a vision of society divided between the "Us" of ordinary Canadians and the "Them" of powerful economic, political and transnational elites...
...There are now twenty-one New Democrats in the House...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
