Canada's Sober Socialists
WALLER, HAROLD M.
THE NEW ALTERNATIVE Canada's Sober Socialists BY HAROLD M. WALLER Montreal Those members of the Reagan Administration who have been obsessed with Daniel Ortega and his Nicaraguan comrades...
...One receiving heavy emphasis would provide affordable day care for all families needing it...
...In the foreign policy area the most controversial New Democratic proposal is to take Canada out of NATO and NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command, operated jointly with the United States...
...Although his party topped the polls a few months after the election and then continued to hover around the 40 per cent level (probably enough to form a majority in a three-way race), a precipitous decline set in over the summer...
...A midAugust Angus Reid survey put the New Democrats solidly in first place, backed by 44 per cent of the decided voters, as compared with 29 per cent for the Liberals and only 25 per cent for governing PCs (a Gallup poll gave the NDP 41 per cent...
...When Ronald Reagan addressed the Canadian Parliament earlier this year, Broadbent was embarrassed by one NDP member who heckled and jeered the President to protest Star Wars and U. S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras...
...The government would play a much greater role in economic planning and exert increased control over subsidiaries of multinational (mainly U.S...
...Could it be that the red in Canada's redand-white maple leaf flag has a longhidden significance...
...As a matter of fact, a breakthrough in the polls in Quebec was a crucial factor in the NDP's summer takeoff...
...Yet the NDP climb continued as the Liberal position deteriorated...
...The New Democratic Party traces its roots back to the 1943 founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a western rural populist movement with collectivist aims...
...Now people are beginning to ask themselves what it would be like to have a New Democratic government at the national level...
...Now that its platform and personalities have demonstrated an appeal to a broad segment of Canadian voters, the party can no longer be written off as an uneasy alliance of labor and some woolly-minded intellectuals...
...THE NEW ALTERNATIVE Canada's Sober Socialists BY HAROLD M. WALLER Montreal Those members of the Reagan Administration who have been obsessed with Daniel Ortega and his Nicaraguan comrades might do well to turn their vigilant gaze north...
...Apparently his repetitive speechmaking does not strike people as too monotonous, for Broadbent has, at 54, eclipsed the leaders of the two other parties in popularity...
...To present itself as a respectable alternative to the other two parties, the NDP has been playing down traditional socialist nostrums...
...Full employment would be a prime consideration, a balanced budget decidedly secondary...
...Perhaps, though, their criticism is misplaced: If there is any truth to the stereotyped image of Canadians, a Broadbent government in 1989 could turn out to be a case of the bland leading the bland...
...It's time that Canada assumed its security obligations as a separate but equal partner in the defense of North America," declared its spokesman on the issue...
...PC Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has squandered the massive majority his party won in the 1984 election (211 of 282 Commons seats) through a sorry performance that has not only plummeted the Tories to third in the polls but raised doubts about their very suitability to govern...
...All this would seem to confirm the wisdom of the careful efforts by Broadbent and his associates to nudge the NDP toward the center of the political spectrum...
...The labor-oriented policy of breaking off the free trade talks with the United States and replacing them with sector-by-sector negotiations is popular as well, if to a lesser extent...
...Given the reins by the voters, it would reverse the trend of deregulation, privatization and reduced intervention in the economy that has characterized Mulroney's stewardship...
...this seemed to them a short-term aberration, no cause for concern...
...The NDP has traditionally garnered 15-20 per cent of the ballots in Federal elections, winning a solid number of western and Ontario seats y et rarely having enough to do much in Parliament under majority governments...
...The party is seen as Left-wing, yet not alarmingly so...
...And these results were born out in three summer by-elections that the NDP swept (giving it a total of 33 seats in the House of Commons...
...Indeed, it is a real contender to form a government after the next national election, which must be held within two years...
...Staunchly federalist in character, the party has always attracted a goodly number of intellectuals with its socialist idealism...
...Despite the Liberal and Tory slumps, however, an NDP victory in the next election is hardly a foregone conclusion...
...A similar proportion are receptive to the prominent NDP message that the rich should pay more taxes and the poor less, and that there should be a minimum tax on corporations...
...Many had discounted earlier reports that support for the party had risen to 35 per cent, second only to the Liberals...
...Broadbent denies that his party is neutralist, but there is a substantial body of opinion within the NDP critical of the United States' foreign initiatives and sympathetic to Leftwing regimes and movements abroad...
...In 1961 the Federation merged with the Canadian Labor Congress, thereby gaining substantial strength in the country's industrial heartland of Ontario, and became the NDP...
...The NDP surge is at least partly a reflection of serious leadership problems in what have heretofore been Canada's two major parties...
...A perennial third party, the social democratically-oriented NDP stuck to its principles through long years of Liberal domination and the more recent period of Progressive Conservative (PC) ascendancy...
...In speeches, television interviews and other high-level expositions of priorities, party leaders have been emphasizing less doctrinaire measures...
...The party's ability to compete nationally has long been hurt by its weakness in Quebec and the Maritime provinces...
...corporations...
...A high point for the party was the two-year Liberal minority government of 1972-74, when the NDP took credit for using its leverage to force the Liberals to pass more progressive legislation than they would have otherwise...
...The idea may not inspire the comrades to man the barricades, but it does find favor with 72 per cent of the Canadian public...
...Liberal chief John Turner has been faring little better of late...
...Recently the party has tried to compensate for its perceived softness on defense...
...that we mean business...
...they would prefer a return to the combative stance typical of workers' parties elsewhere...
...New Democratic Party Leader John Edward Broadbent (universally called "Ed," as befits the working man's candidate) is a PhD-equipped political scientist who has found the real world of politics to his liking...
...If the NDP finishes a solid second, though, it will be in a position to exercise considerable influence on government policy—not an insignificant prospect, considering that many elements of the party's platform represent radical departures from the usual practice here...
...Harold M. Waller, who writes frequently for the NL on Canadian affairs, is chairman of the Department of Political Science at McGill University...
...All of a sudden, the New Democratic Party (NDP)— firmly on the Left by North American standards—has taken a commanding lead in the public opinion polls...
...By building up its own forces, he continued, Canada would be "sending a strong signal to Moscow...
...The floundering Progressive Conservatives have already raised the specter of a Red Menace—a tactic that seems to have backfired in a country where socialist ideas are not anathema...
...The Prime Minister also has a number of resources at his disposal in setting the stage for an election, including the privilege of selecting the date...
...The NDP's spectacular gains in the polls during the past year caught most pundits by surprise...
...The Canadian electorate has become quite volatile in recent years...
...A number of industries would be nationalized, including major aerospace firms, certain resource and manufacturing companies, a large chartered bank, and possibly Bell Canada and CP Rail (the major private railroad...
...Nevertheless, critics within the party contend that the approach, besides being unfaithful to the NDP heritage, has made for a rather flavorless campaign style...
...This has stimulated renewed calls for Turner to step down in order to stave off a second consecutive defeat...
...Thus at this point the betting still is that either the Liberals or the PCs will recover enough electoral strength to obtain at least a plurality in the House of Commons...
...In fact, three of Canada's 10 provinces have at one time or another had NDP governments, and a fourth was presided over by another avowedly social democratic party for nine years...
...The NDP has made its policy objectives quite clear, especially in the case of economic affairs...
...Underlying the widespread approval of these populist planks is a general feeling among voters that the NDP is more likely to be fair, honest and compassionate than its two rivals...
...Outlasting an earlier generation of NDP leaders, he has for years led his small yet energetic caucus in dogged criticism of a string of governments it deemed insufficiently sensitive to the concerns of the little man, "the average Canadian" as the current slogan puts it...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 14
