NDP's Carbon (In)Coherence

On Jagmeet's Trial Balloon

So, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP voted with the Conservatives in a doomed effort to signal some form of space with the government on carbon pricing. Then Jagmeet came out and suggested/implied/hinted that the NDP are not wedded to a consumer-facing carbon price as part of their climate solutions. This is in the same month that Charlie Angus, Rachel Blaney, and Carol Hughes – three NDP MPs from seats where the Carbon Tax would be very unpopular and who are facing threats from insurgent Conservative campaigns – all retired, and in the same year that Angus introduced a bill to ban advertising for the fossil fuel industries, including bans on statements promoting any form of fossil fuels even if they’re factually accurate.

The reason all of that context is clear is that the NDP are taking a decision that is at least in theory defensible, but doing so in the worst way possible. The NDP have a legitimate reason to fear a carbon tax backlash, in that they have somewhere around a dozen seats where the Tories are their main opposition and the voter base isn’t exactly focused on the effects of climate change.

The problem for the NDP is that they’re (apologies if you can say the next bit by memory) two parties stuck together, and the urban, progressive wing of the party is going ballistic over these quotes. The problem for Singh is the same that faced Bonnie Crombie, which is that progressive voters view support for a carbon price as a prerequisite for caring about climate change. And unlike Crombie, he did nothing to mollify the left.

So I have to ask, once fucking again – does Jagmeet Singh know what party he’s leading?

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I have tried my hardest to stop turning these pages into Jagmeet and NDP bashing, because it is clear that the party is going to keep this decrepit leader whether I or anyone else who can think about politics coherently thinks they should. They need to dump him, they won’t, and it’s repetitive in a way that I found less and less useful to harp on about how every dumb Jagmeet decision is evidence that I’m right about him. That I’m right is, to me at least, self-evident. I don’t really care whether people agree.

But what I do find fascinating is the issue of climate change in an era where 61% of people don’t think a carbon price affects climate change. Singh in particular and the left in general need to embrace a form of climate action that is both effective and seen to be effective, and the current carbon tax fails the latter test. In a vacuum, it’s entirely reasonable to want another solution.

But to affect another solution you need, wait for it, another solution, or at the very least a pathway to getting to a better solution that anyone will believe. Bonnie Crombie, when she announced the provincial OLP’s abandonment of consumer facing carbon pricing, appointed an expert commission led by someone who voted for her leadership rival to come up with a plan that doesn’t betray the fight against climate change. Where is Jagmeet’s similarly careful staged announcements? Hell, even in what he said, he was non-committal as always, committed to nothing except waffling and wasting all of our time.

What the NDP need, and what has pissed me off about them since the 2019 election, is their utter lack of seriousness. They’re a party that wants the benefits of being viewed as a “major” party – being put on TV panels, given proper airtime on the news, things like that – without the responsibility of having to make any fucking sense at all. The NDP want to be taken seriously but not literally, in a sense. They want to exist in a universe where the NDP are a serious party but don’t actually have to do the work.

What does the NDP actually want in the housing market? We know they oppose “luxury” condos for stupid reasons about not understanding how supply and demand works, but we don’t actually know where they are on the vast majority of things the Federal Liberals have proposed. Nor have they used Doug Ford’s uselessness on the topic to attack him. I have no idea what the alternative climate policy they think could help them, because they’re announcing their thoughts on climate policy on the back of a napkin. They may be serious people individually, but together this is as unserious as Jordan Spieth’s Masters performance.

This isn’t about them coming closer to my politics, this is just about them coming to any sort of cohesive politics. This isn’t about an insistence that I am right, just that political parties that claim to want to represent us actually care about the issues we face coherently. I would be happy if the NDP focused on their regional seats and focused on being a party of non-urban BC, Northern Ontario, London, Windsor, and Oshawa instead of being a party of social liberals. I’d be less likely to vote for them, but they’d at least be a coherent political party that could argue amongst itself wit everyone being on the same page.

What the NDP are now is less a political party trying to win power and more the dying remnants of a University club that lost a leader everyone liked. There’s intense infighting happening within the party, according to my sources, and there’s an intense inability to actually make any decisions. The Ontario party is a mess, having engineered a coronation instead of a contest after over a decade with the same leader. There is no ambition in this party, and no willingness to engage in any formal process that might create some.

The best thing that ever happened to the Ontario Liberal Party was a long leadership race that forced the candidates to articulate different visions. Even though my candidate lost, the fact that race went from March to December meant that there are a ton of policy proposals from both winners and losers to build the party’s future around, and a large, vocal minority that has organized and made connections that serves to help keep the party’s focus on their values. The NDP’s refusal to allow a fight in Ontario has left them weak. The Federal party’s loyalty to Jagmeet has done the same.

Singh is a bad leader who has won less seats in English Canada than Tom Mulcair in both 2019 and 2021. He is a shit leader, a shit politician, and the architect of their disaster. His inability to lead on policy, win at the polls, raise any money, or serve any viable function for the party is killing them. But the problems aren’t just Jagmeet. They’re much more structural.

I went on Ryan Jespersen’s show this week and talked about my doubts on Naheed Nenshi, but the thing about that leadership contest is that at the very least Albertans will have a party that argued between very different views of the party. Federally? There’s been no such argument since 2017. No airing of how to handle post-COVID, no airing of how to handle rising tensions, no arguments on how to handle the much more salient issues of crime or trans health care or frankly much of anything. The reason they’re so scared? There’s no way to keep St. Paul’s and Skeena on the same page anymore.

Is the NDP’s carbon tax pronouncement consistent with giving a shit about climate change? No, but why should we expect it to be? The NDP gave up on being a coherent movement when they let Jagmeet stay as leader. Now we’re paying the price.