NDP's Directional Dilemma

On How The NDP Should Go Forward

One of the things that’s bugged me for a long time about the current state of the federal NDP is their refusal, plainly, to decide whether they’re a party of Opposition or one of Government. The Confidence and Supply framework is, in my view, the least preferable way to handle a hung Parliament for this reason, but they cannot decide whether to trumpet their successes or bash the Liberals as Tory-lite failures.

Their refusal to piss or get off the pot has led to the party’s existent crisis, one oft-chronicled in these pages. I maintain their leadership is also a cause of their current discontent, but in the spirit of trying to take the world as it is and not how we want it to be, Jagmeet will be the leader at the next election, and those who have the party’s best interests at heart should accept this.

So, given the party’s dismal standings in the polls, inability to capitalize on anger at the Liberals, and a massive threat on their working class, regional flank, how should they respond? By leaning into the Liberals, and this government, not by leaning out. If they continue to pretend they’re opposed to a government entirely dependent on its votes, they will be wiped out. But if they lean in, they have a chance to save the party, and potentially the government too.

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The structural problem of junior parties in collaborative governments, be it proper coalitions or looser arrangements, is that they end up boxing themselves in. They get the blame for the actions of the government without much of the credit for the good. When the UK Lib Dems or the German Free Democrats went into government, they were instantly destroyed at the ballot box. The Senior Coalition party, in both cases, not only won the next election, but their vote went up. If you liked the government, you voted for Cameron or Merkel, and if you didn’t, you voted for the oppositions.

The NDP face a similar dilemma now, which is that their posturing has meant they have vulnerabilities everywhere. Their relentless Liberal bashing has alienated a lot of those on the progressive side of the Liberal Party, including many who voted for Jack Layton in 2011. But because they’re propping up the Liberals, they also have big problems amongst voters who deeply dislike Justin Trudeau. If the only thing you care about is maximizing NDP seats (which, you shouldn’t, but for the sake of this argument), you need to be attempting to maximize either St. Paul’s or Skeena. The NDP’s refusal to pick a lane is alienating them both.

The NDP could abandon the confidence arrangement, return to proper opposition, and try to cosplay a brand of populist anger in an attempt to save Timmins and Skeena and Kootenay, but the problem is that won’t work. Attempts to decouple arrangements to try and save the minor party don’t usually work. The Tasmanian Greens didn’t benefit when they were tossed out of the Labor-Greens government in early 2014, nor did the Lib Dems’ attempts to “consciously uncouple” from the Tories help them in 2015. The damage is done, from the point of view of anti-Liberal voters who now view the NDP as an extension of all the things they hate about the incumbent government.

The answer, then, is obvious – they have to bearhug the decision to prop up the Liberals. That doesn’t mean bearhugging the Liberals, but the record in government has to be the only thing you talk about. Instead of attacking the Liberals for not doing enough, every accomplishment of the last two Liberal minority governments has to be framed as having been accomplished on NDP votes, even if it wasn’t actually because of the NDP.

The NDP has to sell a coherent vision for its own utility, a rationale for its own continued existence, and the cul-de-sac of useless populism and holier than thou rhetoric has clearly failed to coalesce into anything with any long-term value. Their path forward cannot be dependent on voters mad at the very existence of the NDP as a party with its current operating priority – providing the votes in Parliament to the Liberals in exchange for some policy priorities. If your voters hate you for doing that, you can’t win.

The way you can win, or at least maximize your chances of limiting the damage in regional, working class seats, is tangible progress. When you don’t have ideology on your side anymore, there’s one thing you can do to win seats you shouldn’t win anymore, and that’s selling tangible benefits for your constituents. The undersold story of the (limited) polling we got in December is that the Liberals seem to be back up in Atlantic Canada after their horrible, terrible decision to do a little retail politicking. It works.

The NDP fought for a dental care plan that is, in effect, a mass transfer of wealth from Laurentian Elites to the regional working class. They should be highlighting not just that they’ve passed some abstract dental care package but that they did it for voters in Timmins and Comox. They should make the targeted nature of the package an advantage, and talk about it as an effort to rebalance government priorities away from elites in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa to working class Canadians just trying to get by.

Their path is to lean into the power of government and influence, tone down the ideology stuff, and focus on the value of having MPs with power. In the same way the Liberals’ Atlantic Caucus had no trouble shouting loudly from the rooftops that they delivered the carbon tax exemption, the NDP should pitch themselves as pragmatists delivering for their home seats. If I were advising a NDP MP right now, all I’d be focused on is whether they can get some federal infrastructure dollars back home to fix aging schools or hospitals or whatever’s needed.

I’ve harped on this before, but the NDP are two parties stuck together; a worker’s party where social values are secondary, if not irrelevant in comparison to, economic solidarity, and a socially progressive party where ideological purity matters most. It’s a party of union workers who won’t always have the most progressive things to say about minority communities and a party of those for whom equal protection and minority rights is their priority.

What gets press is the latter, the urban activist wing of the party, those who care about trans rights and Palestinian solidarity as their animating issues. What goes less covered is that there’s a segment of their voters who would love nothing more than for the NDP to shut the fuck about those issues in exchange for caring about places and people like them. As the axis of our politics has gone from economic class to social values, there’s a reason the right is coming for these seats.

Instead of trying to match the Tories on an insincere offer of populism they can’t pull off, they have to be something else, in this case, a party of delivery. Will it save Charlie Angus or whoever? In specific, I have no idea. The problem is, however, is that the status quo ends with the NDP getting wiped out of their regional strongholds. The damage has been done by the last two years. Getting out of that mess is not necessarily going to be easy, and it’s entirely possible the damage has been so sufficient that no strategy can get certain MPs their seats back. But this is a better shot at getting it done.

Since Jack’s death, the NDP has been a haphazard mess, an incoherent party unable to decide who it is or what it should be. The paths available to it all require decisions, which this party is allergic to. If they want 2024 to be different, and if they want to try and save their MPs, they have to focus on what can actually stave off their fate.

The NDP have to stop pretending they’re in Opposition. They have to lean into their status as a partner of the government, and start selling their record of delivering for their voters. If they don’t? They might not have this much influence again for decades.