CKNW Editorial
for April 16, 2001

This has been a disastrous 14 months for the NDP since Ujjal Dosanjh took over. By waiting for something good to turn up, the NDP has stepped on one land mine after another. Mr Dosanjh, in assessing his party’s position a year ago, made an elementary mistake – good things just don’t happen to governments. No matter what good they may do, the public usually sees governments as an enemy. It’s idle speculation I suppose but surely the NDP could have won between 20-30 seats had the election been a year ago. But they made the same mistakes the Socreds did in 1986 when they stretched their winning streak for one more term by selecting Bill Vander Zalm who won when the Socreds should have lost, rebuilt, then won again. Indeed the hardest lesson for a political party to learn, once it’s attained power, when and how to lose to the best long term advantage of the party.

The NDP will, after the election, face an impossible task. I don’t think they’ll be back for a long time, if ever. Something will take its place and I’ll talk about that in a future editorial but in the meantime I don’t see how they can re-invent themselves.

The Labour Party in Britain re-invented itself but it did so when out of power yet at a time when they were still a viable force. Under first Neil Kinnock, then John Smith and finally Tony Blair the party understood that its greatest political strength was in fact its mortal enemy – namely the Trade Union. It took a new Labour Act by Margaret Thatcher to convince them. This legislation, bitterly hated by the union bosses, in fact proved very popular with the rank and file. Able to do something the NDP find difficult, namely count, Kinnock realized that the Union leaders were staunch supporters but the workers voted Tory. He also understood that, even shorn of their traditional power, the unions had nowhere to go. Risking that Unions would break with the Labour party – one, the Miners, badly weakened by economic conditions and under the discredited Arthur Scargill did but while that would have mattered a decade or so back, it was irrelevant by the 80s and 90s – Kinnock broke the unions lock on the party. Sure there were some noisy dissidents like Tony Benn but they were voices of a past never to be revisited. In doing this, the Labour Party tossed out its famous Clause 4 which talked about taking over the means of production and suddenly it became two things - a party of the center-left … and highly electable.

The NDP is in tatters right across the country. Their leadership convention a year ago February was an eye opener. All candidates, including Gordon Wilson, fell all over themselves to portray themselves as having just come up for air from a Welsh coal mine and looked, in the bargain, as if they were seeking the support of a working class Britain in the 1920s. The convention, while it appeared to bind the wounds within – barely – revealed a party so out of touch with reality that if could have been scripted and sold as comedy.

The NDP, if it wants to re-capture the center-left must make an unusual move – it must actually appeal to the center-left. Union leaders, and especially Jim Sinclair, make out as if they represent that group but while these leaders can deliver votes at an NDP convention they can’t deliver them at election time. I’m sure that the brighter people amongst the NDP leadership know this but they don’t know how to handle it. And, considering that the Unions still hold the levers of the party’s machinery this is understandable.

It’s probably too late to do anything to save the party. When you have people like Buzz Hargrove threatening the leader of the national party and getting away with it I would think that the traditional non-union supporter of the NDP would have to conclude that another party was the only answer.

The NDP, to win, must not only capture the union worker – who is seen as an elite by many other traditional NDP supporters - but also the non union sector, the white collar worker, the young, the old and the so-called intelligentsia called, in my father’s day, parlour pinks. These people, for the most part, look upon the Union leaders as adversaries not comrades. They want better lives for themselves and better social policies not laws that make the elite in the party better off.

It is axiomatic that no party can win elections with their supporters alone. Nor, perhaps putting it another way, can the right win with the far right nor the left with the far left. It is the large, amorphous center that is the prize. Most often, it is not by appealing to them that works so much as refraining from pissing them off. This is what the NDP has done and done big time. It is scarcely going to win back this alienated and large segment of the voters by going back to basics, all of which are a half century or more out of date. In fact, as things are now about the only target the NDP have are those who demonstrate against globalization … whose only other characteristic is that they don’t vote or, if they do, do so for other reasons. Free trade is here – so is globalization. With them have come many benefits and many problems. Most people understand that carrying a placard and risking pepper spray to stop the unstoppable won’t solve the problems.

Probably the very best thing that can happen to the NDP in the election is to be all but wiped out, If they win 15-20 seats the temptation will be to stick with the old ways. If they’re wiped out they may be forced to regroup and reinvent themselves or simply join the Socreds on the political dump heap.