You might think that after the NDP’s implosion in the recent election, the high-level operatives that have been running the party for the last two decades would take a beat. Maybe do some soul-searching. Perhaps even canvass the opinions of the party’s disappointed members—not to mention the nearly two million NDP voters whose e-day pencils drifted over to other parties in last month’s vote.
But the party’s class of professional consultants with whom power is concentrated do not recognize a fundamental problem with their approach. These are operatives who cycle between senior staff positions in the federal and provincial parties and financially-lucrative, post-partisan corporate firms, and who have shaped the NDP in their image: more moderate, suspicious of the party’s members as well as social movements, and out of touch with working class realities.
Far from seeing this as a moment for a much-needed reset, they are trying to ensure the leadership race will be hostile to any candidate who might want to lead the NDP in a new direction.
Why is the entire political class terrified of the left in so many liberal democracies? Why do even the “left” parties end up fleeing the left for the centre and right? It seems to have happened in several countries in recent decades, leaving their political systems adrift and directionless, and the appetite among voters for real left-wing politics counts for nothing with party leadership.
Left-leaning policies, parties and politicians have typically aimed to appeal to demographic niches, rather than broadly stated goals that benefit larger subsets of the voting population. Someone like Jenny Kwan, an NDP MP that’s been in her seat for decades now and serves as a ‘minority rights’ type critic, is basically unable to empathize with / represent “average white middle class” voters interests, and it really shows in any communication you have with her. Her political support is almost explicitly rooted in appealing to minority groups, and saying “You have it so much worse than white people, so govt should help you out!”, which gains her enough appeal amongst her various niche sub groups to continue to control the riding (even though her riding has gotten jack shit in terms of fed funding for her entire tenure – they just keep voting against their own interests really).
Because their base has become so entrenched in demographic politics / appealing to racialized groups, any platform that attempts to speak more broadly / appeal to non-racialized groups, presents a potential threat to their underlying base of supporters. Jagmeet, when doing “meet and greets” with the public, instantly and almost exclusively gravitated towards other sikhs – because his support in the party was largely based on his appeal to that particular minority group, who voted en masse for him because he’s Sikh, moreso than his policies/electability.
Put slightly differently, they don’t target “traditional” left leaning economic / political ideologies, because their position in the ‘new’ left is based on appeal to influential minority groups. You don’t need to appeal to “everyone”, or “as many people as possible”, if you can lock down a big minority group, who’ll vote for you just because of your race. So you don’t see them appealing to the broader public interest. And while that approach works in some segments (Like Jenny’s riding, or at NDP conventions), it generally isn’t a winning strategy when replicated across the broader voting public. Jagmeet could win his NDP leadership race, because the people voting there skewed heavily into his niche, but he couldn’t win the more ‘open’ race, because his race-based supporters weren’t a significant enough slice of the broader population to carry it. Even more, the racial-based support block actually serves to alienate voters of other races – you can’t have a bunch of Sikh people goin “Finally one of us is gettin in, we’re gonna see good changes!” without that reading as “We’re voting for our own race because we assume there will be race-based benefits / targeted programs to help us as a result! We’re voting for racism in our favour!”.
And that fear is somewhat justified, unfortunately. I mean, JWR was our first FN AG. She reformed bail to specifically address FN representation in prisons, and is the person responsible for Canada moving to a rotating door for criminals – she literally revised bail to make it so that LE had to let everyone out asap before their official day in court, because she felt some demographics were over-represented in prison. She also mandated race-based reviews of cases, which has resulted in things like a FN dude who stabbed a white stranger in an elevator, killing him… getting zero jail time as a result, because he was FN and his victim a white guy (happened in Vancouver in 2020). These are moves that are explicitly “bad” for the general public, and arguably bad for equity; a FN AG put in policies benefiting her race explicitly to the disadvantage of everyone else / ‘the public at large’. Canada also had Harjit Sajjan from the Liberals, use Canadian spec ops to save non-Canadian Sikhs during the pull out from Kabul – a fairly clear case where he racially discriminated in favour of his own race, to which the Liberal gov said “He’s not racist, cause you wouldn’t call him racist if he wasn’t a Sikh himself!”. Like no shit, someone of a certain race using govt resources to benefit their own race is what people call racist… but not in Left-leaning politician speak. In left leaning politics, it’s ok for minorities to use govt resources that way.
I dunno. I think left leaning parties / politicians have decades of this sort of stuff to try and work through, if they’re seriously wanting to try and appeal to the broader “working class”. And the political base of the party is not really interested in moving in that direction. Sorta like how the dems in the states were so hard up for getting a woman on the ticket, that they torpedo’d Bernie and alienated a crapload of working class voters. Same general vibe.
Because the left tries to take wealth and power from the people with wealth and power and give it to the people without wealth and power. You can probably see how people who already have wealth and power wouldn’t like that.
It’s a mix of leftwing politics losing popularity (this happened in the 70s and 80s all over the world and has since reversed, but see above) and opportunists joining parties that were once full of true believers once they become successful.
Unless youre talking about their support of mass immigration, to depress salaries and raise stock and asset values.
Look at the TSX performance since Covid, that’s all their engineering.
I’ll assure you that leftists want immigrants to have the same protections as citizens so they’re not exploited in the way you’re talking about.
Sorry how do they do that when they actively import ever greater numbers into an existing housing shortage, while stating it is to protect “small business” that ends up being Tim Horton’s and Loblaws?
The UN called it modern slavery, with 30 people to a basement.
Liberals aren’t leftists; they’re somewhere between center and center-left depending on the time of day. The leftist response to this would be “then fix the housing shortage,” which would require reducing house prices almost by definition. Neither liberals nor conservatives want to do that, so you end up with the half-assed response you’re talking about. Lack of housing is a solved problem and there’s frankly no excuse for a first world country to not be able to provide its people with affordable housing, immigration or not. In other words your politicians are actively, intentionally screwing you over by doing nothing to make housing more affordable.
Well sure, I place the blame on the NDP for propping up the Liberals, and not using their power to affect peoples greatest expense. Conservatives at least had a plan to tie immigration to housing completions and force municipals to rezone, but now we have a housing minister saying prices need to rise.
I don’t think the NDP had enough leverage in the government to override the NIMBY vote, but maybe you’re right I don’t know.
I want to note that, as slimy as liberals are, there’s a reason they don’t just stop or drastically slow down immigration and satisfy everyone. Countries like Canada need immigrants to bolster their declining birth rates, so there’s a limit to how much the government can realistically reduce immigration before economic stagnation hits or social services “have to” be cut due to reduced tax revenue. Japan and Korea are probably the best examples of this, so you can look up how stubbornly rejecting migration has damaged their standards of living. The difference between liberals and conservatives on migration is the same as their difference on everything else: Conservatives do things that sound good to their base and make everything worse and liberals take symbolic action because they’re too far down the pockets of the rich to actually solve the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5i0IDn3rzY
It seems they are lying to us none the less. I dont know why we should support a party that lies to the voters.