Jagmeet, The NDP, And Broken To Be Rebuilt

On The NDP's Internal Crisis

It will be of exactly zero shock to anyone who has ever met me that I spend a lot of time in therapy, and a lot more working through my clusterfuck of a mind. It’s why I started writing fiction, it’s why I still write this Substack, it’s why I do what I do. For me, my mind gets restless when unused, and so the best way to keep it from fixating on bullshit is to write, is to be problem-solving, and is to be working towards something. But that’s now, with the benefits of having gotten my mentals to a reasonable position.

At first, I had to be broken down, because to do a renovation properly isn’t to pray the foundation is fine, it’s to strip it to the bones and rebuild everything, brick by brick. It’s taken years to get to a place where I am happy with my mental state, and it could still collapse on me, but for now, I’m in as good a place as I’ve been for over a decade. As an adult, I’ve never been in a better place.

The problem is, I can look back at the demolition and be happy it happened – I can be happy now, knowing the end result, but I lived through hell for years and years, all because it takes a lot longer to rebuild something than to break something, and living through the instability that this method of therapy was horrible at the time. Fortunately, it worked, so, small victories, but I get the reluctance to avoid it if you can.

The reason I finally did it was because the status quo was so intolerable to me that the living hell of being broken didn’t seem so bad anymore. In the same way an athlete will play through an injury if he can be 85% his usual self and won’t if that slips to 65%, I tolerated the status quo until I couldn’t anymore, and then I let someone break me, all to rebuild me.

I just gotta wonder when the NDP will decide to do this, because I officially do not know what the NDP is anymore.

…

This is not a column about Jagmeet Singh, although I maintain he needs to resign.

It’s a column about how, post-Jack, the NDP has had two leaders and no direction, because neither leadership contest was a fight about the future, it’s been a fight about personalities. What was the great policy debate of the 2017 NDP leadership election? It wasn’t about Leap, it wasn’t about Quebec, it wasn’t about the NDP’s role in a world where union power is diminished and more and more people work as freelancers and independent contractors such that there could be no union to help them, even if they weren’t in a state of feeble ineptitude. Jagmeet won because he’s nice, which is a fucking betrayal of the point. But this isn’t about him.

The NDP’s electoral map has always been tense, as they have to appeal to Toronto and Timmins, Windsor and Western University, Parkdale and Powell River, but now, the schism has become a whole sale forest fire, as the culturally conservative workers of the rural and regional towns and cities clash with the socially liberal wants of the young, hipster, student politics of Parkdale, Halifax, Danforth, and every University campus in this country. And the NDP’s solution is to ask exactly 0 questions about the party they want to be from here. Zero.

What’s the “right” answer? Depends on whether you want the votes of people who will scream that Trans Rights Are Human Rights till their dying breathe, or people who cringe any time trans rights issues are brought up. Do you want an electoral strategy to save Charlie Angus, flip the two Windsor area seats you’ve lost in recent years, and that will win back the BC Interior seats and wide swathes of Northern Ontario, or do you want to win 10 seats in Ottawa, Toronto, and the University cities up and down the 401 and 403 (Kingston, London, Niagara)? Cause you can’t do both, and trying to be everything to everybody has had the Singh NDP get less seats in English Canada than Tom Mulcair two straight times.

The NDP needs to stand for something, be it workers rights above all and a dogged fight for employment and economic concessions first and only, or they can be a socially liberal party of woke leftwingers I would rather kill myself than talk to at a party, but they can’t be both, for one simple reason. If you’re a party of workers and unions, then you’re representing a lot of people with “bad” (read: horrifying to people like me) views on abortion, gay marriage, climate change, and COVID, and the NDP has made clear that’s not acceptable to them.

Be a party solely about social liberalism, and you lose the votes of the (overwhelmingly white men) who work in industrial jobs, and you can’t win Oshawa again, but if you committed to this path you’d probably pick off some Liberal seats. Go with the workers route, and Colin Carrie will pack his bags in Oshawa, and Charlie Angus would pop champagne corks in Timmins, but say goodbye to making any progress in Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, or Vancouver anymore.

Honestly, picking one of the two routes would be better electorally than their current malaise, but the real problem for the NDP is they’re a political party living with a shit status quo and nothing to lose who won’t just break themselves to let them rebuild properly. This party doesn’t have a purpose anymore as currently constituted, but it is allergic to the kind of introspection that can fix them, because they fucking suck.

Think about Andrea Horwath’s 2021 comments about vaccine mandates for teachers and nurses, and you see the tension abound in the whole party. At first her line was that these restrictions on the employment of unvaxxed people were an unconscionable abandonment of the Charter, because she was talking as a union person whose job is to do what unions do, and defend the worker, no matter the price. The next day, she had to flip, and come out for the policy, because the social liberals inside the NDP had a shitfit about Horwath defending the rights of the unvaxxed instead of protecting the majority. It’s almost as if they’re two parties at heart.

The NDP need to be broken to be repaired, they need to be willing to have a hard conversation if they want a future. That they won’t have it ensures they’re on a one-way ticket to irrelevance.