Vancouver Province
for October 25, 2001

The British Columbia wing of the New Democratic Party will wait a couple of years before selecting a new leader. This, it’s said, will give time for new leadership prospects to appear. In the meantime Joy McPhail will perform the unenviable task of leading what’s left, which is to say precious little.

I happen to like Joy McPhail although I must say that to my knowledge she has never had mind sex with me. However in fairness, when you compare the looks and money of Bill Vander Zalm, with whom she declared such a relationship some years ago, to my relative poverty and disheveled hirsute appearance one can well understand her discrimination. I also happen to think that Ms McPhail is about the only New Democrat of any note who could form and lead a new opposition party in this province. The BC NDP, joined at the hip to a national party that’s perpetually tied to an anti American, anti free trade dogma with war chants that take one back to 19^th century Welsh coal mining days, is dead. It’s also dead because of Harcourt/Clark/Miller and Dosanjh.

Gordon Campbell knew that any connection with the Federal Liberal Party was fatal and bust his ass to appear independent. He understood that even though he might have beaten the NDP no matter what, for staying power he had to look and be like the old B.C. Social Credit Party.

I think Joy McPhail is now in a position to begin building a new party. To start with, she has nothing to lose. The old guard of the local NDP will show her no gratitude for loyally slaving away at lost causes for the next few years. Ms McPhail made too many enemies for sitting out the last days of the NDP in self imposed exile on the backbenches. Moreover she needn’t worry about her seatmate Jenny Kwan, a lightweight she doesn’t much care for anyway.

There is a vacuum on the center left and if there isn’t one now there will be. The Green Party can’t move in because despite the bleatings of its leader, Adriane Clarkson, it is a one-issue party. The NDP can’t occupy it because it is so out of touch with reality it marginalizes itself. Moreover it has so badly blotted its copybook it’s hard to see how it could ever mount a comeback. The field is open.

The temptation of any "new left" movement is to go after the noisy, youthful left of Naomi Klein that protests things for a living. This is not a new movement – just a new cause of the young. It’s adherents display two historic characteristics endemic such movements – they don’t vote and they grow up to be stockbrokers.

The constituency to be tapped by May 2005, the next election date, is one that is not mad at business by instinct and training, is not therefore anti-American but shares with the NDP a passion for human rights, a compassion for the underprivileged and a hearty distrust of the "establishment". This large group accepts globalization but articulates concerns, accepts free trade though with a jaundiced eye, and looks upon the "establishment" of the left with the same distrust as it regards that of the right. Moreover they do vote and crave a political home.

This group was first recognized by Neil Kinnock and John Smith of the British Labour Party back in the eighties. The beneficiary has been, of course, Tony Blair. But unlike Ms McPhail they had a powerful party to work with and the trick was to reform within, the carrot for reformers being the large group of voters that was tired of the stark choice of Margaret Thatcher or Union leaders. It was a struggle to the death, literally for John Smith, but the result has been New Labour, which, in less than a decade, has become the natural governing party of Britain.

Ms McPhail’s job, should she accept the challenge, is to form a new party with a new name and a new catechism; a party of the left to be sure but not a party of the 1930s.

The hard part, as with all things, is overcoming inertia. Ms McPhail, if she goes this route, will either have something or be politically washed up.

If she doesn’t take this path she’ll just be washed up