Ontario: Stiles Coronation The NDP’s Original Sin

On The Deeply Damaged Dippers

David Coletto teased a new Ontario poll this weekend with a warning that the NDP are in “deep trouble”, a sentiment echoed by Mainstreet’s daily tracking which has them at 15%. My latest average has the NDP at 18%, which would be a 5% decline from the last election’s already third place finish in the popular vote standings. It’s a staggering position for the party to be in, and a lot of the criticism of the NDP’s failures are accurate, but also off the mark.

The decision to lead the campaign with a 407 policy that mostly in places where the NDP didn’t need help and doesn’t do fuck all to help their crises in southwest Ontario or the North was a mistake. The party’s refusal to act seriously or coherently on market housing is an absolute disgrace at a time when voters consistently name housing as a key issue. But none of these are the fundamental crisis at the heart of the party.

In so many ways, the NDP’s current crisis is a function of its original sin of this era of the party, the decision to clear the field for Marit Stiles in the post-Horwath leadership race. That decision was made to try and avoid a tough leadership race, and the kinds of divisions that can come, but in doing so the NDP merely ignored and delayed the internal civil war the party so desperately needs. And that refusal to make Stiles face a challenge is why the party is going to flirt with not being an official party in Queen’s Park.

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I know that I’m being repetitive here and that it sounds like I’m just doing Scrimshaw Karaoke right now, but the reason I keep doing the “the NDP are two parties stuck together by First Past The Post” bit is because it’s undeniably fucking true. It’s one of the most important dynamics in politics right now, and the refusal of so many to understand that the NDP are not just an amorphous blob of “leftwing” but actually two very different political traditions is infuriating. The NDP have always been a union and working class party built in the west and out of the traditions of the Progressive Party and the CCF that viewed Central Canadian elites with contempt.

At some point along the line, it became a party that cared about workers but also came to advance other causes, like marriage equality, a woman’s right to choose, and a more progressive approach to foreign policy. Those stances were born out of the NDP being a party that appealed to the disillusioned, which oftentimes has meant those opposed to the Liberals for being insufficiently leftwing. And so the party has changed.

Those changes aren’t, in and of themselves, a bad thing, but over the last 15 years politics has changed. In the past, economics used to be the dividing line - rich, socially liberal areas would vote for Republicans and Conservatives while poorer, socially conservative voters found themselves voting for the left. What changed is that social values have reoriented politics on a more cultural axis, and meant that voters are significantly more likely to do something they’ve never done before. This is true in Canada, America, Australia, and Britain, whether it’s safe Labour strongholds now voting Reform or Teal seats in Australia or the divergent trends in places like Forsyth and Youngstown in the US. The coalition of young social progressives in Toronto and on university campuses and the old working class cities and towns isn’t a coherent mix anymore.

The problem for the NDP is that they correctly identified that their party is split, probably in ways that cannot be fixed even if there was the goodwill to do so. The party is split between an urban progressive membership and caucus that believes that drag performers need special protection under the law, that Palestinian liberation is a thing provincial politicians need to be opining on, and that symbolic measures like land acknowledgments are useful, and a working class wing of the party that could not care less. That the NDP engineered a coronation tells us clearly they knew the party was split and couldn’t survive a fight. The problem is, they got one anyway.

I’ve litigated my views on Sarah Jama enough times in the pages of this site, but the fight about her statement and her status was about more than just Jama. It was a test of Stiles’ authority, an authority that she lacked precisely because she never received anything resembling a democratic mandate from inside the party. If you were a New Democrat outraged about Jama’s removal, you felt no loyalty to your leader or no sense of restraint because you never got to vote for her. You never faced a choice. As someone who has been a vocal critic of Bonnie Crombie, it’s always been tinged by the fact that she won a contested race. She has some form of mandate within the party for her brand of centrist liberalism, and it is unreasonable to be mad at her for not being Nate Erskine-Smith when she won and Nate lost. Stiles’ internal critics never felt that restraint or obligation to be constructive, because she doesn’t have a mandate.

The fight about Jama isn’t the only instance where the NDP needed a leader with internal authority, however. The lack of mandate has infected the party’s whole operation, because the leadership race didn’t force Stiles to take any concrete stances or show her hand on policy. Again, to go back to Crombie, the Liberals have a policy agenda and a set of ideas because there were serious campaigns by serious people that rejuvenated the party’s ideas. The NDP never did that, they never had to come up with ideas and plans to solve problems or to win votes, and it shows. The party has floundered for years now wasting time on nonsense about Drag Bar Safety Zones and making it easier for admin staff to do paperwork in healthcare instead of proposing genuinely strong ideas because everybody with vaguely progressive ideals and an intellectual capacity was advising Nate or Bonnie or Yasir instead of Marit or anybody else during the 2022 race.

Had the NDP had a real race, with a candidate from Northern Ontario or from the non-Kitchener Southwest there would have been a real debate and the party would have faced a real fight about how to win back working class voters. Not every NDP to PCPO switcher is some ardent homophobe or sexist but there is a contingent of people who are uncomfortable with the progressivism of the modern left, especially on issues of gender identity and diversity writ large. The NDP is a coalition of people for whom inclusion and equity is essential and for people who would love it if the left would shut the fuck up about those issues and focused on the real issues, like their rural hospital being understaffed or their schools falling apart. And they’ve done nothing to fix that crisis because there’s nothing they can do.

The moment the NDP decided to anoint Stiles as leader they destroyed themselves. She is a leader without a mandate, without legitimacy, and without the power to make tough decisions for the party. She is the leader for punting decisions into the long grass because any decision she makes will be second guessed and undermined. Every failure since flows from the NDP’s original sin of coronating her, and they are about to face disaster because of it.