There is a common story among my sort of folk, socialists and environmentalists who have been helping the NDP for all or most of the past generation, even after the disappointments and betrayals of the 90s and Canada’s proto-Blairite governments of Harcourt, Clark, Romanow and Calvert.
And the story is this, “The NDP has abandoned its principles. It has sold out. Its leadership are craven approval-seekers who won’t stand up for their principles.” I have to admit that I have been guilty of reinforcing that narrative. But I have come to believe that not only is that story false; it is detrimental because it causes people to make irrational and inefficient political decisions that cost lives.
When we assail BC’s NDP government for handing out $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other villainous, genocidal transnational corporations while telling us that we cannot afford their promised $10/day childcare for at least another decade, we talk about how the NDP has “abandoned its principles.” When Rachel Notley demanded that the federal government ignore and openly defy Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of First Nations, we used the same language, talking about how the NDP had lost its way.
But let us consider for a moment that John Horgan, Notley and their cabinets, caucuses and political staffs are acting in accordance with their principles, that they are doing exactly what they believe in. As I stated when I quit the NDP, the simplest explanation for the decisions New Democrats make when they are in government is that they are doing what they believe in. Given the fact that NDP politicians tend to be far less personally corrupt than Liberals or Tories, we should take this seriously. When Liberals or Conservatives hand big cheques to the corporate sector, when they refuse to provide services in an essential area of the economy and turn it over to market forces, we can usually expect to see someone associated with that decision getting rich soon, usually through a lucrative corporate board appointment after leaving office, rather than old school kickbacks.
But when the NDP announces that it will not provide interurban government bus service south of Prince George when Greyhound pulls out and will let a patchwork of deregulated private fares and grey market ride sharing take its place, nobody thinks Claire Trevena is getting a board appointment or a bag of cash. When Horgan vetoes a public inquiry into money laundering, nobody expects him to join Liberal senator Larry Campbell on the board of the province’s largest casino after he retires. When Notley rigs the Alberta oil royalty review and gets the federal government to spend $4.5 billion on a leaky oil pipeline, nobody expects her to take a seat on the Suncor board when she tires of leading Alberta’s opposition. And when Michelle Mungall creates a fracking review panel that is required to recommend continued fracking, nobody thinks she will be getting one of those seats either.
Should this not suggest to us that the NDP believes more not less strongly in oligopolies and corporate welfare than Liberals and Conservatives do?
The reasons we recoil from this thinking are multiple:
First, we easily succumb to “essence in origins” ideas about politics, especially as we get older. Our theory of who or what a political movement is is linked not to that movement’s actions in the present but instead to its own origin myth, typically located in an idealized past outside of profane space-time. The NDP’s myth is like this. It is the story of how Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan created Canada’s biggest, most successful buyers’ club, Medicare, the linchpin of Canada’s liberal social contract. The NDP brought socialism to Canada, if one buys the idea that eleven networked government health insurance schemes purchasing services from small private companies is “socialism.” Medicare is certainly a good thing but, right away, one can see that it may be a tad over-described.
But essence in origins arguments are silly when discussing permeable organizations of any longevity. One need only look south to the United States. The US Democratic Party was created by America’s one caudillo president, and Donald Trump’s favourite, Andrew Jackson, who abolished the secret ballot, deregulated the medical profession, destroyed the national bank, had his own private army, owned more slaves than any other president, defied the Supreme Court and committed a series of successful and attempted genocides against indigenous people in violation of signed treaties from Florida to Louisiana to Georgia to Tennessee. Beginning in 1848, when US politics began to reorient around the slavery issue, the Democrats became the party of slavery, which they remained until the end of the Civil War, after which time they became the party of the Ku Klux Klan, a mantle they did not finish casting off until the 1980s.
Yet today, the front-runner in their presidential race is an anti-racist, democratic socialist backed by a coalition of trade unions and anti-racist groups. That is because subscription-based big tent political organizations change with their environment; they are a place invaded and abandoned by a succession of social movements based on the needs of the moment.
Why should Canada’s New Democratic Party be any different? It is not like any other political movement’s essence is preserved in amber. A century ago, the Canadian Prairies were a red Liberal wall from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, with huge liberal legislative majorities and a deep bench of Liberal MPs who outnumbered Tories four to one. That’s because the Liberals were against the very Central Canadian manufacturing interests who form the backbone of the party today. The Tories, meanwhile, were hated on the Prairies because of their vociferous opposition to free trade with the US.
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Some people who suggest the party has fundamentally changed believe that these changes have been grounded in a secretive, elite-level hijacking of the party that has taken place behind closed doors, a conspiracy of staffers, cabinet ministers and powerful causus members stealing the party’s agenda from under the noses of a naïve socialist membership. I do not think this is helpful for two reasons.
First, I think it is simply inaccurate. I see no deceptions or conspiracies when I interact with the party at high levels. Second, it absolves people like me of responsibility for our willful blindness, rose-coloured glasses and lazy, naïve political praxis.
What if we took the radical step of deducing the NDP’s principles not by way of nostalgic or conspiratorial thinking but instead by listening to the party’s spokespeople and believing them?
The reality is that, in the post-Cold War era, the NDP’s public rhetoric and their actions in government have not been divergent at all. Prior to his election as BC premier, Mike Harcourt told the Vancouver Board of Trade that “the NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” Later when his government made its major austerity course correction and brought in a set of punitive and draconian welfare reforms, Harcourt explained that their purpose was to crack down on “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” What if the reason the NDP attacked BC’s underclass and used government policy to increase the number of homeless from 11,000 to 27,000 was because they really did think that the very poor were subhuman animals and that redistributing wealth was wrong? Why did the party’s left-wing supporters need to concoct a narrative in which the NDP was having to strategically abandon its principles so it could live to fight another day? Why not just believe the party when it told us its principles had changed?
In fact, let me go further: what if the NDP actually makes major sacrifices to avoid telling baldfaced lies to its supporters? The NDP might have got more votes if John Horgan had promised to cancel the Site C dam rather than putting forward a confusing policy whereby he equivocated and suggested a government regulatory commission would make the decision—voters like simple, direct promises, not process-oriented double-talk, even when they disagree. But Horgan chose to make a promise that would permit him to more honestly proceed with the megaproject. Let us consider proportional representation in the same light; rather than promise PR, the NDP promised a process that they could then rig to defeat the system, so as to avoid breaking a promise.
When asked what her biggest regret in government was, Notley stated it was her opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline through Northern BC. What if we take seriously Notley’s claimed conversion to the need to build as many pipelines as possible to as many places as possible? Does this not make it easier to explain her government’s lawsuits, boycotts and ad campaigns attacking the BC government, activists and First Nations?
What if, when Claire Trevana tells residents of the Cariboo Plateau and Highland Valley that the do not deserve bus service unless the free market can support it, she actually means it, that the NDP genuinely believes in the justice meted out by the invisible-handed god? What if, when Michelle Mungall, states that fracking must continue at all costs because no party that wants to win elections would allow it to stop, we consider the possibility that she believes that a party that does not support fracking does not deserve to win? When Carole James says we “cannot afford” $10/day childcare for the next decade but we can afford $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other profitable petro giants, we have to consider the possibility that she believes that working parents deserve government help less than these transnational corporations do. When Notley says Canada cannot afford Pharmacare without more pipelines and that she opposes building a national Pharmacare program until they are built, consider the possibility that this is not just information about her being in the tank for the oil industry but about how the party feels about national social programs, austerity and poor people’s access to medication.
We go to great lengths to perform a folk exegesis on the pronouncements of NDP officials so that we can understand them to be statements of practicality, unrelated to values and principles. We do that work. Nobody asks us to. We just do it for ourselves. The idea that the NDP wants to do something different than its actions in government and election platforms say has no evidentiary basis. This belief is derived not from evidence but from wishful thinking by social movement activists who do not want to face the work of creating new electoral political strategies and organizations.
And one need not simply look to NDP officials. Look at the people who have joined the party since the early 1990s. Go to a riding association meeting in a swing seat and listen to individual members. They will tell you they like what the party stands for and what it does. They will justify the $2000 entry fee people have to pay to seek the party’s nomination in their riding. They might even quote party president Craig Keating and suggest that people who do not have $2000 handy in their bank account are not “serious people,” that cash on hand is a far better indication of candidate suitability than the ability to recruit new members and turn them out to a meeting.
If you want to understand what Canada’s New Democratic Party stands for, I urge you to Believe New Democrats. They are trying to tell us what they believe in and we are refusing to listen.
