The Written Word
for December 19, 2001

The recent poll that shows the Liberals losing 20 points in popularity is, of course, scoffed at by Liberals as being meaningless. I suppose it is since the next election is 3 ½ years away. What might surprise the government, though, is that the popularity of Premier Campbell is only marginally higher than that of NDP leader Joy MacPhail. As the wise man said, all it takes for cheers to turn to boos is the passage of a little time.

What we tend to forget is that when the next election starts, no one has any seats. Pundits talk as if the NDP have a huge barrier to leap and this simply isn’t necessarily so and won’t be known until a few weeks before May 2005 when popularity is measured more close to the day of reckoning.

Landslides were made to be squandered. The Socreds of which I was a part in December 1975 won a landslide and three and a half years later just squeaked home. John Diefenbaker won a huge landslide in 1957 and piddled it away. Brian Mulroney’s Tories won massively in 1984 and though they won the next election handily by splitting the opposition over free trade, fell to two seats in 1993.

The barrier the NDP must leap is not the Liberals but their own dejectedness. Political popularity is a relative thing – Mair’s Axiom II reads "You don’t have to be a 10 in politics – you can be a 3 if everyone else is a two. In other words Mr Campbell doesn’t need to be popular if Ms MacPhail & co. are unpopular.

Political parties need organization – in fact 79 of them. Though that’s not quite right – they really need organizations in the 50-60 seats where they could, with luck, become competitive. For the NDP to do that they must re-group. And this won’t be easy. For the big beating they took in May this year left psychological wreckage. People lost heart and think they can’t get it together again. Strangely, the party’s remaining strength, that is to say the labour unions, is its weakness. The Labour Union movement has never been able to deliver for the NDP and it is comparatively weak. The NDP have to get the center left active again and this will take leadership.

There is an eerie similarity between the NDP today and the Socreds after W.A.C. Bennett, to the total surprise of his party, was thrashed by Dave Barrett in 1972. For nearly two years there was a morbid torpor hanging over the party. What revived it was unpopularity of the NDP combined with sudden and somewhat surprising leadership from Bill Bennett and Grace McCarthy. This wasn’t charismatic leadership – it was down and dirty hard politics. Grace sold memberships – and did she ever. She was mocked by the media, especially Allan Fotheringham, for flogging 5$ memberships but Grace knew that the money was of secondary importance to the commitment it represented. The Socreds canvassed, canvassed again, then canvassed some more. Like the little train that could, the party slowly began to believe in itself again and the phoenix indeed rose from the ashes of its debacle and, in 1975, thrashed the Barrett government by the same margin they were beaten by in 1972.

That was long ago but politics doesn’t really change. The NDP are in the doldrums and they don’t believe in themselves any more.

I suspect they will stay that way. And, in fairness, they face an obstacle Bill Bennett didn’t face in 1975. Bennett could refer with considerable pride to the accomplishments of his father’s government. The NDP will not want to remind voters of 1991-2000.

And in the end, it may be that fact that prevents the NDP from making a comeback for a couple of elections to come.