The Elephant in the NDP race

The NDP Convention starts tomorrow and everyone’s attention will be focused on the leadership race, naturally. The party with no official party status has to find a way out of wandering the desert, and Avi Lewis is primed to be the one to do it.

This will be no easy task, especially for someone who has virtually no movement leadership experience under his belt. To navigate competing priorities, contradictions, back-stabbing, the pressures that external parties will place on him and being essentially unknown among the general public, the pressure will be enormous for Lewis to pull off what he promises.

Ultimately though, the changes that he proposes won’t be enough. Riding associations can only be so empowered, and candidate vetting can only be so changed. Proof of the challenge is clear: no one’s campaign has managed to break out of the rigid confines of the Social Democratic Left and its tiny group of diehards (who, I have to make clear, I mostly love).

This is especially worrisome given that the Liberal Party has moved closer and closer to the real Big Tent party modelled by the American Democrats, thereby sidelining the reason for the NDP to exist. The leadership’s obsession with war has not spoiled the milk of people who otherwise should be social democrats. NDPers like Dolly Begum and Lori Idlout see the Liberals as their best path forward, all the contradictions inherent included, whereas people like Danielle Martin, Will Greaves and Nate Erksine-Smith see no future for them in the NDP. These people blur the lines of the rigid boundaries in which the NDP operates federally, though provincially, the lines are far more porous, and as many argue, these tiny little holes that let people move from Liberal to NDP and back, are the only things that enable the NDP to hold provincial governments.

While we talk a lot about the NDP trying to be Liberals, we forget that the Liberals are even better at pretending to be social democrats, when it matters. The elasticity of Liberal ideology right now poses an existential threat to the NDP, but it isn’t the only threat and indeed, may not even be the biggest threat. Where the Liberals are threatening would-be NDPer-lefties of the professional and management class, the Conservatives are eating their lunch from below, among the working class. Not Poilievre himself, but the Conservative machine, who has figured out how to talk to Canadians who are suffering the most under the current economic conditions, even if we all know they’re full of shit.

This is the terrain that Lewis will have to navigate as leader, and his campaign hasn’t demonstrated that it even understands this dynamic. That’s probably because they, and really, most NDP activists, don’t seem to realize that the era that gave birth to the NDP and buttressed its relevance, has been gone for more than two decades.

The NDP was born out of the post-war Keynesian economic era, where public funding created a modern Canada that justified the marginalization of more extreme politics (like Communism). Public pensions, healthcare, education were the sandpaper that softened the political spectrum. Extremism (like Fascism, justified as the fight against Communism) had just ravaged Europe and left tens of millions dead. The people wanted peace. But the Liberals and the Conservatives still needed to be pushed to do the right thing, and the NDP grew to meet that challenge.

Today, that era is over. Unions can no longer float the NDP financially, and the party finds itself trying to play on the same terrain as the Liberals and Conservatives, but without the supports and economic context that gave the party legitimacy and power during the previous decades. This is why provincial NDPs are virtually Liberals. This is why "The Message" just isn’t connecting. This is why Canadians have mostly tuned out of the party.

Given that, I think that there are three paths forward for the party.

First, the party maintains the path that it’s on. It atrophies under the weight of unreasonable central control. In-fighting renders it useless. The status quo says that the mere existence of the party is a victory, that just holding office, having riding associations is proof that the NDP is functional. This is the least likely path that Lewis will forge, as it’s the tendency that he has been loudest criticizing. Overwhelmingly, the people voting for him do not want this, none of the other candidates want this, and it is unlikely that he’ll fall in line with everything he has criticized. Though, of course, he may.

Second, the party fulfills Lewis’ vision. It takes Bold stances. It makes Bold pronouncements. It promises Bold things. It gives more power to riding associations, encourages them to do more, and the party exerts less control over everyone than before. This is the most likely path that Lewis will attempt. It will no-doubt be better than the status quo. It should attract better candidates, but it will also risk wasting people’s time on electoral politics rather than building movements in the streets. It will create traps that the party might fall right into. It may inject better politics into the public sphere, but with a collapsing mainstream media, that won’t matter. It may build people’s confidence to demand more, but the risk there is that the Liberals will wisen up, and outmanoeuvre the party again.

Option 2 is also likely because of the push-pull relationship with the provincial parties. Rebuilding the NDP is going to be a monumental task, especially given the pull (and lure of power) that the provincial NDP-liberal parties have over the party. Lewis’ own sister-in-law is a cabinet minister in one of these governments. Any attempts to radically transform the NDP federally will be met with provincial opposition. This may well be an irreconcilable contradiction, and in the struggle to keep these bodies united, the provincial tendencies will win out. That will put pressure on whatever is left of the party apparatus to discipline Lewis and actually force him into Option 1.

The only option for the long-term survival of the NDP is option three — a radical departure from the status quo. There is no federal survival if the party succumbs to the pressure of the provincial leadership that currently holds power. Rather than focusing on elections, riding associations need to play key roles in riding-wide coalitions that include all kinds of people to work on issues together nonpartisanly. They could become clearing houses, where all issues come together and help coordinate cooperation and activism among groups that normally, don’t talk to one another. They need to combine their forces with local labour councils and other activist networks, but also groups who are not currently, or always, at the table: migrant justice organizations, social agencies, sports groups and clubs, religious organizations, ethnic social societies, unshit small business owners, etc. Together, these local coalitions must then feed into regional assemblies, where organizers actively look at the room, see who isn’t there, and seek out their issues and foster their participation. Regional coalitions feed into the provincial executive, and so on.

Each group is likely to have different issues that they focus on. By being the eyes and ears of their communities, they can feed into national discussions about what matters — not from a theoretical perspective, but from a practical one.

Crucially, the goal in these regroupments isn’t to win elections, it’s to change political culture. It’s to unite people, find leadership, train that leadership and get them to take on roles that can help propagate leftwing policies and ideas. It’s to actively bring people into the movement. This is how you build an engine, without which Bold Ideas wither on the vine and die.

Lewis almost promises to do something like this: “To win we must become a mass movement; anchored by 343 Electoral District Associations, providing solutions required to address constant overlapping crises. We need to empower our EDAs so that they are embedded in year-round local community organizing. Together we must build a movement that outlasts leadership changes and works long-term, towards our common purpose.” But here’s the problem, neither riding associations nor the NDP itself are providing solutions to anything. That isn’t the role of the party. The solutions come from social movement actors. The NDP’s job is to popularize their solutions, not make pronouncements.

Anyone who has spent any time in a local riding association knows that the second the election is done, there’s not a whole lot keeping people excited and engaged. I haven’t spent a ton of time in this world, but the eight or so years that I did (between three elections), showed me that our role was effectively gone outside of nominating a candidate and getting them elected (other than internal party democracy, which at Quebec solidaire is eons beyond the NDP). It isn’t enough to just expect that riding associations will do this — already, many of them are anchored by local activists — what is needed is being explicit about what the NDP expects riding associations to do in between elections: take part in a local, riding- or community-wide coalitions, that are intentionally built by labour, social movements and the NDP together.

However, you can’t just pronounce that these things happen. You have to actually do them, and the reason why I’m not buying what Lewis is promising is that his campaign has not done this. The campaign has been highly centralized, with endorsement after endorsement for a single person, or events where Lewis is the headliner. I don’t care about who endorses Lewis. I want to see who Lewis endorses to build this new party. I want to hear who his spokespeople are in the prairies or for disabled people, or who the campaign chair is for Southwestern Ontario. The campaign has barely brought new people into the NDP which, for me, is a giant red flag that the campaign talk is really just that: all talk.

I may be wrong, but I think that the future of the NDP is going to look like a watered down Option 2, because Option 3 is very, very hard to do. It requires a lot of organizing and a lot of strategy and a shit ton of experience, and the Lewis campaign would have looked much different if they had the capacity and desire to pull something like this off. They were the camp that called for an extra-long race to be able to build a massive campaign. They did, by measure of money and current member support. They did not, if we judge it more broadly.

Economic and political conditions have changed since the 1960s, the 1980s and the 2000s, and yet, the NDP operates as if those days are still within our grasp. The elephant is the room is neoliberalism — the economic transformation that has rendered that era’s version of social democracy ineffective. NDP members need to fight for their leaders to wake up and smell the coffee. It costs double what it used to cost, its sold in a smaller bag but don’t worry, it says “fair trade” on it and who are we to not believe that?

I don’t write this so that I can point to it in three years and say “I told you so” … I have had that experience enough to not need it any more. NDP members have to understand why the party has become so ineffective. If they believe that it was all Jagmeet Singh’s fault or Lucy Watson’s fault or Anne McGrath’s fault or David Eby’s fault, they will learn the wrong lessons and support nonstrategic corrections. In that sense, while Lewis’ campaign creates an opening for changes within the party, he, in and of himself, is not going to be the change that the party needs. The changes need to be radical — that is, they must start from the root — and anything less than that won’t work. It will just amount to another round of Sisyphean politics where people will burn themselves out and realize that there is still nothing to show for it.