Saving the NDP in a few simple steps

Party activists need to fight to restore party democracy

The NDP has a new leader: MP Don Davies. He will serve in the interim as the party stickhandles a leadership election.

Davies is maybe the right pick. Maybe not. The interim leader barely matters. The floor of qualifications for an interim leader are that 1. they aren’t probably going to run for leader and 2. they have a moderate level of support among the caucus.

Now, he might meet both of those criteria, but we know that the party didn’t actually put that criteria to action. On Twitter, MP for Winnipeg-Centre Leah Gazan tweeted that she found out that Davies was elected interim leader from journalists. Leah Gazan: powerhouse, progressive North Star, one of the very few NDP MPs to actually get elected, found out through the press that her party had selected its next leader.

This is par for the course for this party. When the NDP inked their supply and confidence deal with the Liberals, MPs didn’t have a chance to vote on the deal, or offer their opinions on it, or debate whether or not they wanted to drive the nail of irrelevance into the NDP coffin. Similarly, some MPs found out about the deal when journalists started calling them.

There is a crisis of democracy within the NDP and there has been for years. From a shadowy leadership that perpetually fails upward to regularly ignoring the demands of its members, from conventions stacked with delegates who hold riding credentials for ridings they’ve never actually been to, to the antidemocratic tactics that the party brass uses to keep uppity people from seeking nominations, the party’s internal democracy is dead. And the impact of this can be seen in every move that the party makes.

When faced with a crisis of democracy, the only option is for the members to flex their democratic muscle.

The question though is how. In theory, that answer is simple.

First, there needs to be an emergency, national call of every NDP riding association in Canada that is fed up with how the party organizes. Ignore the elected leadership — go right to the grassroots. To prepare for the call, every riding association should be asked to develop some number of top concerns. The concerns should all be submitted to an impromptu secretariat, who can order them and rank them in terms of popularity, and then guide a national call through a discussion about these issues.

This group could decide to do many things: establish a national provisional executive, make their demands formally known to the executive, call for the resignation of the executive (why didn’t they do that alongside Singh??), identify which MPs are interested in this project and lean heavily on them.

Then, with the demands in hand, they force a national convention. This convention will be hand-to-hand combat to fight over the future of the party. The brass needs to be swept out (which means there must be a group who is ready to be swept in) and through your riding-by-riding organizing, you build enough confidence and power to actually do it through voting on the floor. You build up the solidarity necessary to resist the dirty tricks of people being bused in or leadership fuckery with the agenda or whatever, and force the conversation on the terms decided by this national group of dissenters.

Of course, this is hard work. The only way to take the NDP back from the neoliberal careerists that have controlled it for decades is to be diligent. Take no short cuts. But it’s also extremely possible. It just requires the work.

And of course, people will whine: we have no money! We can’t do these things! To which the reply should be laughing in that person’s face. You might not have the money to have a PR agency brand your convention for $80,000, or the money to take over a convention centre in Toronto or Ottawa, but my god. If the NDP goes down because people have forgotten how to do anything with no money, then the party is truly sunk.

And it might be that the party is truly sunk. I think that that possibility needs to stay on the table too. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s still possible to take it over. Of my million projects and priorities, saving the NDP isn’t on my personal list, but I know it is on the list of many great people and good activists in this country.

One of the things that Canada’s English left sucks at, is accepting collapse and then engaging in rebirth. Refusing to allow things to collapse means that many of our progressive institutions hobble along like a dog whose legs were hit by a car, and that is begging to be put out its misery. But rebirth is absolutely critical to the sustainability of any political movement. Just look at Mark Carney’s political ascent, or Pierre Poilievre’s new lease on life when he ditched his glasses. Those weren’t just aesthetic changes — those were the manifestations of internal changes that helped both parties to surpass a political problem or obstacle.

When you don’t have any path for renewal, when people whose work has been bad refuse to leave the party, then you get stagnation that is so corrosive that it becomes self immolation. The bureaucracy exists solely to protect itself. That’s bad for any organization but is especially bad for the only credible political party that occupies the entire centre to left space within Canada (and here, I again remind everyone that the fact that the NDP and Greens have not yet merged is proof that no one in either party’s leadership is actually serious about Doing Politics).

The NDP needs to wander the desert for a little while, let a few people die from starvation and fundamentally change how it operates. Democracy needs to be restored within the party, which will have a big impact on how it interacts with Canadians more broadley. The only path towards restoring internal democracy is for members to assert their democratic right to direct the future of their party. And to do that, members cannot wait for the party brass to call the shots — not unless they want to see the party slide even further into irrelevance.