A Bit More Detail

The Globe and Mail‘s John Ibbitson seems pretty convinced that new NDP leader Thomas Mulcair–elected over the weekend–will be able to make the New Democratic Party the new party of government. Is Mulcair the left’s equivalent to Stephen Harper?

Thomas Mulcair has taken control of the New Democrats in the same way that Stephen Harper took control of the Conservatives: by appealing to the party membership in the face of opposition from the old guard.

Now, like Mr. Harper, Mr. Mulcair must transform that party from a protest movement into a government.

Make no mistake about the importance of what happened in Toronto last weekend: Tens of thousands of New Democrats rebelled against the party establishment – a cabal of union leaders, academics, journalists and party apparatchiks – to elect an outsider.

They did it, in the words of one NDP supporter who was at the convention, because they no longer wanted to be led by “a comfy sweater.” Mr. Mulcair and Brian Topp, who finished second, were both seen as bare-knuckle politicians who could take on the Conservatives and win.

Mr. Mulcair, a Quebec MP and former provincial Liberal cabinet minister, defeated Mr. Topp, the party’s canniest strategist, because Mr. Topp was favoured by the party elders, and among those elders there are too many comfy sweaters.

In appealing to the base through the one-member, one-vote system to displace the NDP elites, Mr. Mulcair was following precedent: Stephen Harper did the same to smother the Progressive Conservative influence within the new Conservative Party in 2004; he in turn was imitating Mike Harris’s coup against the old guard of the Ontario Conservatives in 1990.

This particular passage from Ibbitson’s article is diagnostic of many things.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton defined it best in the last NDP candidates debate, earlier this month.

“You’ve attacked our opposition to unfair trade deals, our links with the labour movement, our championing of ordinary people,” she accused Mr. Mulcair.

To which Mr. Mulcair replied: “Between the Ontario border and the B.C. border we now hold a grand total of three seats.” Principle, meet the will to power.

Will Mulcair be able to pull off this feat? And if he does, what will happen to the Liberals? Perpetual third place, worse?

At the National Post‘s Full Comment blog, Michael Den Tandt makes the plausible point that the Conservative Party might well want Québec NDP MP Thomas Mulcair, front-runner in the NDP’s leadership race, to win. Why? Mulcair might be a good enough leader to help eviscerate the remains of the Liberal Party, and his leadership would strengthen the NDP position in Québec, but Mulcair might also be unable to pull the NDP close enough to the economic centre to let it challenge the Conservative Party.

(Of course, the mention of Tony Blair and New Labour is something that should make people worry. Right, Britons?)

The Harper Conservatives are already training their cannons on the New Democrat front-runner, some say, because he is the one they most fear. Mulcair’s combativeness, experience and brains make him a formidable foe. Moreover, he’s the New Democrat best placed to pull a “Tony Blair,” and shift the party further to the centre, where conceivably, it might contend for power.

But there’s another line of thinking, which suggests a Mulcair victory would suit Prime Minister Stephen Harper just fine. It gets back to Harper’s lifelong dream of destroying the Liberal party. Mulcair, it is believed by those who’ve seen him work in Quebec, has the capacity to wipe out or to absorb the Liberals. A Liberal-Democratic Party would necessarily position itself left of where the Liberals stood in their small-c-conservative period in the late 1990s. And that would at last leave the economic centre unobstructed, which is precisely what Harper wants.

[. . .]

Mulcair has taken great pains to avoid open comparisons with former British prime minister Tony Blair, who held power in the U.K. from 1997 to 2007, after jettisoning the most impossible of the British Labour Party’s socialist policies. But the parallels are clear. A couple of weeks ago, I asked Mulcair about the NDP’s reputation as a party that doesn’t understand kitchen-table economics. “To concede the point,” he said, “we’ve always been very conscious of the fact that a majority of Canadians share most of our goals and values. It’s been difficult in the past to convince them that we can provide good, competent, confident public administration.”

His solution, he said, would be to demonstrate while in Opposition that “we’re capable of running a G7 country.” Reading between the lines, in my judgment, that means he intends to pull a Blair.

Small wonder then, that there’s more than a whiff of fear, in Liberal ranks, at the prospect of a Mulcair victory. Should he transform the NDP into a mass-market party, as Blair did to New Labour, what remains of Liberal support could easily bleed away, permanently. In that event, a merger — say in 2014, after the smoke of the Liberals’ own leadership race has cleared — would be more akin to a takeover.

How would this benefit the Conservatives? Gerry Nicholls, a conservative consultant who worked alongside Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, holds that this PM would love nothing better than to do politics in a two-party system. That’s because, in a standup fight between a socially moderate party of the centre-right and a party of the centre-left, this PM believes Conservatives will win every time — because most Canadians, while socially moderate, are economic conservatives. The Liberal party, because of its chameleon-like ability to mould its ideology as needed, will always be a threat to the Conservatives. But a Liberal-Democratic Party, with the history of the NDP embedded in its DNA? Perhaps, not so much.

Will the New Democratic Party follow up on its success in the 2011 federal election and manage to position itself as the alternative party of government, replacing the Liberals? Much depends on whether the New Democratic Party can come up with a leader who can live up to the late Jack Layton’s promise; still more depends on whether the party’s membership will grow sufficiently, especially in regions of the country where it has traditionally been sparse. Joan Bryden’s Canadian Press report puts an optimistic spin on trends.

A record number of card-carrying New Democrats are eligible to choose the federal party’s next leader, with British Columbia and Ontario holding the key to victory.

Final membership numbers released Tuesday by the party show membership has swelled to 128,351, an increase of just over 50 per cent since the start of the leadership contest last October.

All members are entitled to cast ballots, starting March 1 and culminating in a Toronto leadership convention on March 24.

British Columbia, with 38,735 members, and Ontario, with 36,760, will have the most influence over which of the seven contenders emerges victorious. The two provinces account for 30 per cent and 28.6 per cent of the membership respectively.

Ontario outstripped all other provinces in terms of membership growth, adding more than 14,000 members since October.

In Quebec, membership numbers have shot up to 12,266 from 1,695 last fall — a 600 per cent increase.

Still, Quebec accounts for only 9.5 per cent of the total membership, leaving the province with limited influence in choosing the party’s next leader even though it delivered more than half the 103 seats won by the NDP in the May 2 election.

[. . .]

Quebec’s clout is virtually identical to Manitoba’s 12,056 members (9.3 per cent), and only slightly better than Saskatchewan’s 11,264 (8.7 per cent), and Alberta’s 10,249 (7.9 per cent).

Nova Scotia is the most influential of the Atlantic provinces, with 3,844 members (2.9 per cent). The other three Atlantic provinces and the northern territories each account for less than 1 per cent of the national total.

By way of comparison, Québec’s population of eight million is ten times the size of Nova Scotia’s, eight times the populations of Saskatchewan’s and Manitoba’s, and a bit more than twice the size of Alberta’s. Québec is also the province that elected 59 NDP Members of Parliament out of a total of 75, providing a majority of the NDP’s caucus in Parliament.

Dan Arnold at the National Post‘s Full Comment blog is more skeptical of what this means.

First off, 45,000 new members isn’t “skyrocketing” when you consider both the Liberals and Conservatives exceeded that level in their most recent leadership contests. Heck, the B.C. Liberals and Alberta PCs posted similar or higher membership totals in their leadership races last year.

As for that “staggering” increase in Quebec – a little perspective people! Yes, that’s a big percentage increase, but it also means Quebec will have just a third the votes of B.C. Adding 12,000 Quebec members is well below Mulcair’s original target of 20,000, and it’s below the 14,000 who voted in the BQ leadership race. Keep in mind, those are actual BQ votes, not memberships, from a party most describe as “dead”. It’s also a total nearly every media outlet in Quebec ridiculed at the time.

In fairness, the NDP seems likely to surpass the 58,000 who voted in their 2003 leadership contest – though even that isn’t assured when you consider many of their current members are only members because of provincial leadership races last year. Still, we probably shouldn’t sneeze at 45,000 new members, especially when that includes the NDP’s first real Quebec membership base ever. There might very well be more votes in the NDP leadership race than the Liberal leadership race – especially if no one runs for Liberal leader.

Much depends on whether the NDP can deepen its base in Québec–increase its membership, especially–in time to keep its newly-acquired base and secure its position as a national party.