Post Election Analysis:
A small window opens for the Left
by Nathan Rao
Elections provide a snapshot of the broader political scene and relationship of forces. In the absence of a major domestic or international crisis, the framework of an election is set well before the campaign begins. A break with capitalism or neo-liberalism was on the margins of this year’s federal election, and not just because of the narrow parameters within which the main parties defined their campaigns. There are only small pockets of support across the country for such a radical break. While present within a number of local NDP campaigns during the election, they have no common framework or credible independent profile inside or outside the NDP - with the noteworthy exception of the Union des forces progressistes (UFP) in Quebec. This is a product of two decades of uninterrupted neo-liberal attacks and restructuring - but also of the radical Left’s weaknesses and failures.
Nonetheless, these elections were not “business as usual” as far as the broad Left (including the radical Left) was concerned. It was clear that this year’s contest would be different from the federal elections of 1997 and 2000. The sudden drop in support for the Liberal government soon after Paul Martin was sworn in as Prime Minister suggested a level of political volatility not seen since the collapse of the hetereogeneous alliance around the Mulroney Tories in the early 1990s.
Would a revitalized NDP under Jack Layton and resurgent Quebec sovereignists galvanize the apparently sizeable section of the electorate seeking to punish the Liberals “from the left”? Would they become a real factor in relation to a minority government, building further momentum in the process? After years of stagnation and decline, the broad Left looked to the June 28th elections with enthusiasm and anticipation.
In the end, after more than a decade in power during which they pushed the neo-liberal transformation of the country much further than the Mulroney Tories could ever have, the centre-Right Liberals did indeed suffer a partial reversal. They now lead the country’s first minority government in a quarter century. This is cause for some satisfaction, and it is significant that a large segment of the hostility toward the Martin Liberals was expressed through the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois BQ), both of which improved their results substantially over the 2000 elections.
Another cause for celebration is the failure of the hard-Right - this time under the banner of the Conservative Party and Stephen Harper - to make a major breakthrough, in spite of having formally overcome vote-splitting at the polls and being the object of a reported surge in voter intentions midway through the campaign.
The reversal of Liberal fortunes, the ongoing difficulties of the hard-Right, and the improved scores of the NDP and BQ have created a little breathing room for the broad Left. However, except perhaps in Quebec, the Martin Liberals are nowhere near as vulnerable as the media storm around the sponsorship scandal led many commentators to conclude. There is a strong likelihood that this reversal will be temporary, a product of the difficult transition within Liberal ranks from the ChrЋtien to the Martin team.
Many predicted that the transition from the Chretien to the Martin team would not be a smooth one. Chretien’s success lay in his ability to push the neo-liberal transformation of the country, while incarnating a measure of continuity with the populist Liberal Party of the Trudeau years. This was the Third Way adapted to local conditions, in a league with the Clinton Democrats in the US, the Blair Labour Party in Britain and, more recently, the Schroder SPD in Germany.
However, this project of aggressive neoliberalism with a populist face was held together by the authoritarian and erratic figure of Chretien himself, who could not remain head of government forever. Was his work now complete? Could he hand the reins of party and government over to the new generation of technocrats and spin doctors around Paul Martin? The answers were not at all clear, all the more so since the years of neo-liberalism had eroded what remained of the political and social base of the old welfare-state “Just Society” party of yesteryear.
Further, the Liberals drew strength from the weakness and division of their opposition and a relatively favorable economic and international climate. Some combination of economic difficulties, international pressures, Western regionalism, shifting corporate allegiances, Quebec nationalism and Left resurgence would undo Liberal fortunes sooner or later.
It has been rather later than sooner, and the Liberals have been able to hang on despite a slight drop in support in Ontario, the country’s vote-rich service and manufacturing heartland, thanks to more or less stable scores overall in the rest of the country outside Quebec. Even in Quebec, they have hardly collapsed, in spite of the perfect storm that raged over their heads. The Liberals have considerable margin to manoeuvre, faced once again with a divided opposition whose different components will support this or that government initiative.
It is tempting for a Left in disarray to see Liberal resilience as an expression of the strength of left-wing, progressive opinion, a last line of defense against hard-Right victory. Yet the same Ontario electorate that keeps the Liberals in power in Ottawa, brought in back-to-back hard-Right Harris governments provincially, followed by a more mainstream yet equally determined neo-liberal government under the McGuinty Liberals. It would probably be closer to the truth to say that the federal Liberals are the capitalist party best suited to the country’s complicated conditions and Canadian capital’s place and aspirations in the world. If Bay Street and the decisive southern Ontario middle-class electorate one day feel otherwise, they will turn to the Conservatives or some successor formation.
Quebec, the weak link?
News of the death of Quebec’s national aspirations has been greatly exaggerated. The BQ’s strong showing signals the return of the “Quebec national question” to the centre of Canadian political life, and echoes recent mass social protests against the Charest provincial government by the trade unions, social movements and other traditionally sovereignist sectors.
It has been less than five years since the passage of the Clarity Act, “Plan B” in the Chretien government’s post-referendum strategy. It was designed and promoted as the nail in the coffin of “secessionist” feeling in Quebec. As for “Plan A”, the increased presence of the federal government in Quebec, notably through the distribution of Canadian flags, the less said the better.
The result is certainly gratifying for the largely sovereignist and independentist Left in Quebec, and for those outside Quebec who defended Quebec’s national rights during the 1995 referendum and against the Clarity Act in 1999-2000. For us, it was not only an elementary question of solidarity and democratic rights, but also a vital strategic matter: no alliance against neo-liberalism and its state is possible in this country without a strong commitment to establishing relations of equality and respect between the country’s dominant English-speaking nation, the subordinate QuЋbЋcois nation and the oppressed Aboriginal peoples.
This is the necessary starting point; whether this will take the form of separate states or a radical multinational overhaul of the federation will be settled through common work and discussion over the long term. There should be no underestimating the huge difficulties that lie ahead of us. Inside Quebec, despite the broadly Left-progressive profile of the BQ under former Maoist and union organizer Gilles Duceppe, and the massive street protests against the hard-Right Charest government, the sovereignty camp has yet to emerge from the neoliberal and conservative-nationalist (as opposed to progressive-sovereignist) dead-end into which the Parizeau-Bouchard-Landry PQ governments led it until their defeat in 2003.
Outside Quebec, there is a marked change in tone towards the sovereignists in some Left and left-liberal circles, exemplified by Jack Layton’s initially strong re-statement of his opposition to the Clarity Act. But, after a decade of “one nation” nationalism in office, it will still be a long uphill battle against the accumulated forces of bad faith, political expedience and plain misunderstanding within much of English-Canadian opinion, including within the broad Left. Still, the election result and the ongoing protest movement in QuЋbec give the Left new opportunities to do serious work around these difficult matters.
The Left in an Impasse
This election settles very little for the Left. Not since the historic “Free Trade election” of 1988 have such a wide range of forces from the political and social-movement Left mobilized for an NDP campaign, including a number of young people involved in the anti-globalization and anti-war protests of recent years. While the results are an improvement over 2000, they are only marginally better than in 1997 (in the popular vote, though not in seats) and certainly not enough to signal a revival after 15 years of declining fortunes. This is surely a major disappointment.
To be sure, with the Marxist-Leninists scoring 0.07 percent of the popular vote and the Communist Party 0.03 percent, the independent radical Left is in no position to lecture anyone on electoral success.
But there is clearly a strong case to be made against relying so heavily on election results and parliamentary horsetrading at a time when mass movements and a strategic project for real radical change are in such dire need of rethinking, rebuilding and renewal.
While Layton has hovered over traditional left-right tensions within the party, he has tended to be identified with the left. During the campaign, though, he gave in to sniping from within the party leadership and a corporate-media furor and backed down from his rejection of the Clarity Act and his stance in favour of a timid inheritance tax.
It was clear even before the campaign began that the NDP was angling for some kind of special relationship with, or even inside, a Liberal minority government. The thinking seemed to be that the Layton-led party could somehow replicate the success of David Miller’s Toronto mayoral campaign on the federal level. Yet the party made very limited gains among the left-liberal urbanites that were key to the Miller victory. Target and “message” this “demographic” all you want, but don’t be surprised when they run into the arms of the Liberals at the slightest hint of an invasion of barbaric reactionary hordes from the West. Indeed, most of the party’s gains were not made among such people but in places with a longer tradition of trade-unionism and working-class politics: Hamilton, Windsor, Sault Sainte Marie, Skeena.
Even in relation to its own moderate electoralist approach, then, the federal NDP is clearly quite confounded within the new neo-liberal dispensation. It is an electoralist party unable to achieve significant electoral success, let alone victory. However, it may carve out a comfortable niche within neo-liberalism, as a parliamentary rump in Ottawa on the centre-Right Liberals’ left flank, added to a handful of like-minded provincial and municipal governments.
Many NDP members and voters do not want this. Still, the new party-financing law provides the financial basis, and acts as a disincentive for establishing a deeper and more dynamic relationship with renewed and strengthened trade unions and social movements. In such a context, though certainly just in most respects, the fight for proportional representation (PR) could become yet another conduit for distancing the party from its social roots and ensconcing it further within the machinery of Parliament and the state. In both instances - party-financing and PR - the obnoxious eco-capitalist transformation of the Greens should give pause for thought to those who see nothing but left-wing goodness flowing from these measures.
By rights, a wide-ranging debate should now open up in and around the NDP. But there continues to be a near absence of grassroots activity and discussion in the party, in spite of the recent huge influx of new members. Moreover, due to the dissolution of the New Politics Initiative (NPI), the weakness and fragmentation of the independent radical Left, the decline in most of the protest movements of recent years, and the ongoing problems of the trade unions and social movements, such a debate is just as likely to herald a further shift in the direction of electoralism, parliamentary hijinks and reliance on media and the Internet.
It is important to stress that Left success is ultimately more likely to flow from combining short-term ongoing resistance to the corporate and military agenda with a medium-term strategic-organizational project aimed at breaking outright with neo-liberalism. Central to such a project is a revival of the youth-led protest movements of recent years, percolating back up through broader social-movement and class struggles of the kind we have recently seen in Quebec, British Columbia and Newfoundland. As well, we will have to be in a position to challenge the NDP’s monopoly over the party-electoral expression of such developments.
