The Separatist NDP Quebec Caucus

Jean-Louis Fortin of QMI concern trolls the NDP's Quebec caucus:

MONTREAL - Quebecers elected a good number of separatists when they voted en masse for NDP candidates in the May 2 federal election - perhaps without even knowing it. 

Alexandre Boulerice, the NDP's new MP for Montreal's Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie riding, proudly confessed to QMI Agency he continues to campaign for Quebec Solidaire, the provincial leftist party that promotes independence.

Apparently the running definition of a 'separatist' in Quebec is someone who has at any time in their lives supported the cause of or voted for a separatist party, regardless of current opinions:

Gilles Rheaume, Quebec independence activist and spokesman for a group that claims to fight "Canadian francophobia," said he isn't surprised by the number of Quebec NDP MPs who are separatists or who had professed support for sovereignty. 

"(The NDP) was infiltrated by sovereigntists since the beginning of the 1990s," Rheaume said.

Rheaume estimated at least a dozen new NDP MPs voted yes in the 1995 referendum, or had supported the sovereigntist movement in some way.

Rheaume believes that the NDP has been 'infiltrated' by separatists; maybe akin to how the party was 'infiltrated' by the democratic socialist wing of the party, "The Waffle", during the 1970s?  How well did that work out for that particular entryist group?

During the 1995 referendum on independence 49.4% of Quebeckers who voted did so in favour of independence.  I suppose that these individuals should be discounted then from federalist politics forever for the future?  Painted and smeared by the broad brush of supporting Quebec's national aspirations at a time when it seemed as if the bruised relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada could never be mended again.  Shouldn't it then be viewed as a significant good sign for Canadian national unity that Quebeckers who once voted to separate from the country are now embracing a federalist party over a sovereigntist one?

As pogge noted the other day, there will be a lot of journalists aiming to undermine the NDP by conjuring up all sorts of 'tid bits' on whatever these new NDP MPs from Quebec might have said or did say sixteen years ago.  However, there's also a tinge of elitist condensation from the two establishment parties (the Conservatives and the Liberals) that the NDP with all of its new 'brat pack' MPs cannot possibly expect to be capable and competent enough of 'managing Quebec' when they themselves failed with almost catastrophic consequences for the country.  They're the new players to Quebec federal politics who have had no electoral success in the past, let alone traction amongst the Quebec public.  Now after a single election the party now holds 59 of Quebec's 75 seats in the House of Commons.

Many have and will say that the inclusion of former separatists into the NDP's Quebec big tent is going to cause chaos within the party.  I believe though that it's possible that the Quebec caucus as well as the grassroots that the NDP is going to be working hard to development, could become a source of policy development in the future on the political left in this country; in addition to acting as a sort of forge for the construction of a consensus for the task of bringing Quebec into the Constitution.

Your New Right-Wing Media

Pogge ruminated today on the subject of how he believes political pundits are likely to treat the NDP moving into the future:

I would expect that more articles like the column by Jeffrey Simpson in today's Globe and Mail are in our future. I'm sure that speculating about the possibility of internal dissent in the NDP will be a new national pastime for political pundits. At least, for that portion of the nation's pundits who want to undermine the NDP.

The Canadian media almost exclusively is a business elite media.  I can't think of any significant and influential working class papers other then the Sun franchise, which itself is just a mouthpiece of capital.  Canada doesn't have any papers that have acted as organs for socialist thought on a wider scale such as The Guardian has done for the United Kingdom.  This puts the New Democrats at a disadvantage as they're going to be confronting an almost united hostile editorial stance to its ideological disposition.  It's true that the Toronto Star endorsed the NDP this election around, but they were one paper amongst many and a Toronto-based news print can't be expected to move minds that far outside of Ontario.

Papers such as The Globe and Mail and the Winnipeg Free Press generally take liberal positions on civil rights and social issues such as same-sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc. but they also rigidly support capital on issues such as free trade and corporation taxation.  While the Liberal Party fit this liberal-conservative position most of the time and some of these papers were in fact founded as Liberal Party organs many decades ago, the NDP's social democratic positions on the economy are viewed as a potential assault on the integrity of the market as far as they're concerned.

Liberal Party Death Watch

Liberals, despite being demolished at the polling booth are still fighting amongst each other for the few scraps of influence that remain within the party. By the way, this?

Liberals are already talking hopefully of a quick implosion by the huge, untested NDP Quebec caucus, leaving the province wide open again four years down the road.

Don't sit around hoping that the NDP stumbles, because do you guys really think that if Quebec sours on Layton that they're really going to back the Liberals over returning to the Bloc?  If the Liberal Party expects to do well in 2015, they're going to have to do better than just expecting things will go their way.

Progressives Better Prepare for Disappointment in 2015

Seems that since the New Democrats have eclipsed the Liberals to become the Official Opposition that nobody is interested in the Layton camp to attempt to work with the third party to attempt any sort of united progressive opposition to the Conservatives.  I figured that this would occur, given how eager the New Democrats and their earlier incarnation the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation were in replacing the Liberals on the left-wing side of the spectrum.

I think this is still a mistake if progressives intend on attempting to remove Stephen Harper and the Tories from government at the ballot box in 2015.  I believe that the New Democrats will in fact solidify their hold over the progressive vote in the country and further relegate the Liberals to a more marginal third party status, but that process will not be quick enough to produce a change of government in four-years time.  New Democrats may think that the re-alignment on the left will eventually be beneficial to the country, and that's possible, some will argue probable, but you may regret not making the tactical decision to work with the Liberals in the short-term if the Tories are able to institutionalize the full wrath of neoliberalism and all of its social woes into the Canadian federal government.  If you're victorious in a theoretical 2019 federal election, you may find it extremely difficult to reverse the decisions made by the Conservatives and especially the effects of those decisions.

Thoughts on the Federal Liberal Leadership

On Wednesday apparently the Liberals will be naming an interim leader for their federal caucus.  If the rumours are correct and the party expects to wait for a year or so before holding a leadership convention to elect a permanent leader, than it stands that the best candidate for the interim job would be somewhat not expected to hold ambitions towards the permanent role, or has outstanding factors at play.  In this case, I feel that the best candidate for the job would probably be someone like John McCallum who is likely too old to challenge for the leadership.  I don't think that the interim leadership is as critical as some seem to think and hence the choice isn't as important, so long as it isn't someone who has obvious intentions on the permanent position.

As for the permanent position, I think that the Liberals are in an unenviable position; considering the rump nature of their caucus and the diminishing amount of attention that they're going to be receiving from the media.  Choosing a 'blue liberal' is a mistake and given that the election on Monday was primarily one of realignment on the left in Canada; choosing a centrist is a mistake that the NDP will punish them for through consolidation of the progressive vote.  Aside from ideological questions, there has to be significant attention paid to rectifying the most obvious and glaring problem with the Liberals, which is the increasingly non-national nature of the party.  It's clear that the Liberals can't expect to put together a challenge for prominence again by merely sweeping through Anglophone Montreal and Toronto, they'd be stuck at where they were during the 1990s.  There has to be work done in the west to rebuild what is now a completely discredited vision of Liberalism on the prairies.  The western Liberals are a mess, and have been reduced to two marginal seats in downtown Vancouver, then Wascana and another marginal seat in Winnipeg North.  The only member from the west which I figure has the stature to be a leader is Ralph Goodale, yet his incapability to speak French is a problem that makes this impossible.

It stands to reason as well that the Liberals will prefer someone younger without the taint of the endless internal wars of the 1990s and 2000s.  There will be a lot of people tempted to throw Justin Trudeau into the leadership.  I think he's too intelligent to be convinced by the party elite that this could in any way work.  Not to say that he himself is a bad candidate, but the family baggage he carries just isn't going to fly in the country, especially if the party wants to be relevant outside of Ontario and Atlantic Canada.  Dominic Leblanc's candidacy I feel is stronger than Trudeau's.  He was House Leader under Martin and has expressed leadership ambitions before.  He's also francophone, although not from Quebec.  David McGuinty's candidacy will be a problem if the Ontario Liberals lose the next election.

Bob Rae is probably the most prominent Liberal left in their benches.  His candidacy is strong because he has experience governing the province of Ontario before, although this is also a weakness, since Ontarians remember how well that fared.  The most problematic part of his candidacy is that he's low hanging fruit as far as the Conservatives and NDP are concerned.  Both parties can dump a lot on him and by proxy the Liberals in general.  Rae's position as a former NDPer though, along with some comments before on merger talks puts him in a position to facilitate discussions with the New Democrats towards closer co-operation between the two parties.  Something I feel will be important for left wing politics moving forward at the federal level.

Probably my most preferable candidate other than Rae is Denis Coderre.  A francophone Quebecker who sits in a tough riding and has since turned it into a Liberal fortress over the years.  The Liberals absolutely have to work at rebuilding the party in francophone Quebec, and a leader from Quebec is likely needed to attempt this at the very least.  Coderre was Ignatieff's Quebec lieutenant before a spat over the nomination of candidates and gained a reputation for being a fighter in Parliament, something that will be appreciated given now that the Conservatives hold a majority.

Overall the Liberals have good bench strength, but many of its candidates carry at times a significant amount of baggage.  My more preferable candidates at this point are Rae or Coderre.

Why Thomas? Why?

Thomas Mulcair decided to get the NDP rolling off to a great start in the Official Opposition today by opening his big trap and suggesting that there's a conspiracy afoot; that the 'Bin Laden photos' in the possession of the Americans in fact do not exist.  To make things -even better- he suggested, quoting the Globe article, that 'legal issues might surround the decision to kill the Al-Qaeda leader', as if charges could be theoretically brought up on the Americans in this case.  Why begin the campaign with such a complete and abrupt collapse in media discipline?  From a purely political standpoint I don't see the benefit to this, nor does it endear anybody to the NDP foreign policy positions.  I even agree with Tory MP Chris Alexander's reply to Mulcair in this case that the comments are just moronic.

As I've stated before, the only significant danger the NDP faces to holding onto its significant electoral gains is self-inflicted wounds; it speaks badly to the party's prospects that it's Quebec lieutenant and effective deputy leader is making these kind of dumb comments two days after the election.

Picking up the Pieces

Well first off, I don't think we'll ever experience a more bizarre and interesting evening electorally for a long time.  This electoral campaign began originally as a boring and dull replay of 2008 and to a lesser degree 2006, even politicians and pundits lamented upon the seemingly irrelevancy of going to the polls.  The trends were there for Canadian politics to structurally settle into the circumstances of increasingly durable minority status.  All parties stuck in a perpetual circumstance in which nobody could break out of the regionalized vote splits across the country.  This wasn't the case in 2011 for two reasons.  The Liberal Party of Canada and the Bloc Quebecois both collapsed.

The most important take away is that the Liberal Party is finished as a party of government.  Its supporters will likely continue to fight to restore the party to its former glory, however that's likely to merely produce another vote split along the left in the next election, whenever that may be.  The party has faced electoral calamity before in 1917 when Laurier's Liberals were devastated by the Conservatives' Unionist government during the First World War, again in 1958 under Pearson and then in 1984 under Turner.  In all cases the Liberals rode a weak opposition on the left, their brand as a natural governing party as well as the maintenance of regional electoral 'bases' to sustain them until their Conservative opponents imploded.  Montreal and Toronto provided these bases in the past, but in 2011 the Conservatives and NDP smashed into the Greater Toronto Area, while the NDP broke through taking most of Montreal.  These bases are no longer reliably Liberal, and Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton don't provide adequate springboards to electoral success in Central Canada.  Atlantic Canada has in the past been willing to hold onto the traditional parties of government.  They did so with the Progressive Conservatives during the 1990s and appear to have done so with the Liberals this election.  Old habits die hard, but they do die, and the NDP is creeping ahead of the Liberals in urban areas.

Another important factor for the Liberals is that they are no longer a national party.  Despite the terrible results in Ontario, finishing third behind the NDP, the Liberals finished fourth in Quebec in number of votes and barely held onto seats in Vancouver.  The Liberals were increasingly a party dependent since 1993 upon good results in Ontario and in particular upon vote splits between Reform/Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives.  The Chretien majority in 1993 won every seat in Ontario except for one and then did it again in 1997.  Once the Alliance and PCs merged in 2003 this wasn't possible anymore and predictably the artificial nature of Liberal dominance in Ontario was revealed.

If the Liberals return to prominence, it will not be a result of their own actions, but rather a result of mistakes made by the New Democrats.  The New Democrats face the challenge of attempting to manage a gigantic new caucus now dominated by 57 new MPs from Quebec alone, many of whom were 'posts' placed there to fill the party slate.  It still seems inconceivable what took place last night, but the precedents are there in Canadian history for rapid and jarring switches in party allegiance amongst Quebecers.  Diefenbaker's Quebec caucus in 1958 and then under Mulroney in 1984 saw Quebec flips from strong red to blue almost instantly.  In 1993 the Bloc Quebecois won francophone Quebec and reduced the Liberals to mostly Anglophone Montreal.  The NDP's near sweep of the province is within that tradition.  It's important to note however that as sudden as these movements occurred, they often switched back.  The NDP will be hard pressed to maintain its strength in Quebec, however if the primary attribute of Francophone support for the NDP is ideological then it is conceivable that the new relationship will be more durable then people think.

The NDP also faces the challenge of attempting to build its party constituency in Ontario, likely over the dying husk of the Liberal Party.  It is in Southern Ontario however, where there is room for local agreements between the Liberals and the NDP to take place.  There's already consideration floating around for mergers between the two parties (they could be called the "Progressives".  You read it here first!), however I figure that a better solution in the short term might be to have the two parties agree not to run candidates against each other in some ridings where vote splitting was particularly jarring.  This was also a problem in Manitoba where Anita Neville lost her seat to the Tories probably because of a strong showing from the New Democrats in Winnipeg South Centre.

I think eventually there will be some kind of temporary or permanent relationship between the New Democrats and the Liberals in the future, there are simply far too many similarities ideologically between the two parties, especially as Jack Layton has moved the NDP towards the centre during his leadership.  This is probably likely to accelerate as he settles into Stornoway.  The idea floating around the interwebs that the NDP is somehow a 'socialist' party is a joke, either perpetuated by attempts to label the New Democrats as either too 'radical' for Canada or simply by historical and political ignorance.  Chantal Hebert's analysis that Canadian politics is likely to polarize within a left-wing and right-wing two party system is astute and likely on the money as to how events will play out in the future.  It also means though that the 'Liberals in a hurry' will be replacing the Liberals as the only really relevant left-wing party, isolating the Liberals in the centre where they will likely 'go with the flow' and have little direction ideologically.

This election sets up an interesting future in Canadian politics, where we'll likely see the development of a two-party system based around polarized ideological platforms.  The creation of a Conservative majority without the involvement of Quebec as a fundamental part of it might have been more threatening to national unity if the NDP had not of almost swept the province.  Providing in the process a counter-balance to Quebec's dislocation within Canadian power politics by offering it a place within the opposition under the expectation that the NDP will challenge someday for the reins of government.  For political scientists and historians of Canadian history, this election will likely become one of the most written about in Canadian academia.  The randomness of it all, including the enormous ramifications for the ideological disposition of Canadian public life and the end of the 'Big Red Machine' as a party of government.