The NDP's Crisis Of Language

On The Neverending Crisis

It’s been obvious for a while that the NDP are one of my punching bags on this site now, and I do think the criticism I level towards them is fair. They’re a fundamentally unserious party right now, protecting a government that they rail against constantly, but something finally clicked for while their crass politicking pisses me off so much – it’s the language of crisis.

The NDP’s pitch is that we are at a crisis right now – that we have the establishment, in cahoots, designed to hammer the working class and the vulnerable to protect their interests. Whatever you think of that sentence, that is the logical consequence of messaging about Establishment Parties and Sunday night’s messaging about the housing market being rigged and everything else he’s ever said. And the problem with the language of crisis is that it’s deeply offensive to talk a big game and then do nothing.

The NDP is claiming the housing market is rigged against average/normal/real Canadians, and their response is tinkering around the edges on renovictions and banning some amorphous class of people who own too many homes, without specifying who actually meets that criteria. Saturday saw Jagmeet attack Telus for cutting jobs, as if the NDP hasn’t completely failed to propose the one thing that would actually help Canadians in this space, which is a federal TelCo modelled on SaskTel.

The NDP at this point relies on the language of crisis without proposing the solutions to a crisis. As anyone who has ever been through a proper crisis or helped someone through it, if something is truly a crisis, then the solutions to it have to meet that moment. And the NDP is trying to appropriate the language of crisis while proposing modest, frankly useless, solutions to problems, and that’s why they’re so tragically fucked.

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Be it in Salvation In The Storm or the legions of unpublished fiction I’m working on, the concept of crises is strong within my work. What is, after all, Salvation other than a study of a character going through the multiple crises of finding himself, finding love, and finding professional success all in a wild, disparate, and insane world? It’s all about crisis, and so I’ve obviously thought long and hard about what it will take to solve crises.

The NDP is talking about the problems facing this country in almost existential terms, but their solutions are not in any way meeting the scale of crisis they are describing, and that’s honestly more offensive than anything that’s come out of Pierre Poilievre’s mouth in the last decade. If you are going to claim that Canada needs radicalism, and you’re propping up a government you claim is hurting us and are only proposing incrementalism and frankly unimaginative policy at that, then you need to shut the fuck up and go away, because by your own test you’ve failed.

Whether or not a political party or a movement is successful depends not on whether people like me think it’s a success, but whether it’s a success on the terms it defines itself as. Is the PPC a success? I mean, no, in the sense it hasn’t won anything, but if Pierre Poilievre wins the next election and governs as a genuine populist and not a traditional heir to Harperite conservatism then the PPC will have won. The problem for the NDP is that by their own metrics, they are losing, and losing badly.

The problem for the NDP is they’re acting like an outside pressure group immune to political realities sometimes, and at others trying to pitch themselves as the adults in the room of a Parliament full of hyperactive partisans. The average NDP MP is much more sensible than the average NDP member or voter, but their message paints these otherwise reasonable human beings into a corner of their own idiocy.

The NDP are structurally flawed, stuck between a membership and an activist base who would like the NDP to be a party of the American left, inspired by and propelled forward on the momentum of the Sanders movement. It’s why a lot of the most vocal Dippers are Torontonian social liberals, despite the seats they hold being old school culturally conservative bastions that have union ties. The tension in the party is too hard to fix, so the party goes for Liberal bashing as the unity between those with pink hair and those worried about a pink slip in a dying industry.

The problem is the NDP’s traditional Liberal bashing rings hollow when the only reason the Liberals are still in office is on NDP votes, and when the NDP could have prioritizes housing in the Confidence And Supply Agreement and chose not to, instead focusing on Dental and Pharma. Whether that’s worth it or not is a value judgement I can’t make for other people, but the NDP want credit for what this government does while decrying it at every other stop, all the while using the language of crisis.

If the NDP genuinely, truly believes we are in a crisis, it has a moral obligation to take down this government at its earliest availability and to do everything in its powers to defeat it. If it truly believes the Liberals are stacking the deck against the young, then it must immediately revoke its support for Justin Trudeau. If the NDP believes the words that come out of their mouths and their Twitter accounts, then anything other than a fall election is a betrayal of country and citizenry. But of course, it doesn’t believe that, which is the problem.

The reason I think a lot about the language of crises and the responses required comes from my past, and from the society we live in. The coopting of therapy speak to describe minor inconvenience, the watering down of the word trauma, and the elevation of everything to a crisis is killing us. The NDP have to decide whether they believe the warmed over piss they pass off as talking points or whether they’re willing to actually begin to live in reality. To paraphrase Sorkin, if everything’s a crisis, nothing is.

If they’re going to live in the same delusion that I do every time Jordan Spieth tees it up or George Russell gets in an F1 car, that’s fine, but they should confirm that for us so we don’t mistake their words and ideas for actual, you know, policy in reality. If they’d like to join the rest of us, taking everything to 11 has to end, for the good of their party and the good of the country.