The NDP’s exit from the supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals gives them an opening to bring the party back to its social-democratic roots; whether they will or not is the question that could give the Conservatives the federal ticket in 2025.
On Aug. 27, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced in a video that he’s “ripped up” the NDP-Liberal supply-and-confidence agreement that would have kept the Liberals in a minority government until the deal was set to expire in June 2025. Singh cited the Liberals’ partiality to corporations as the impetus for exiting the deal.
The supply-and-confidence agreement (SACA), for all of its slow implementation on certain programs, did create real gains in terms of expanding dental care, implementing federally backed paid sick leave and banning scab labour — all policies that are thoroughly the result of the NDP side of the equation, no doubt.
However, Singh is right that the Liberals have continued to show their mixed loyalty to corporate powers. And the longer the NDP stayed in the deal given Liberal shilling to corporations, the more the NDP left itself open to attacks from the Conservatives on hypocrisy claims.
The recent federal action to force binding arbitration on striking rail workers of the two largest rail companies in the country, effectively forcing them to get off the picket lines and back to work, should have been enough on its own to push the NDP out of the SACA. To be fair, the forced arbitration on the strikers may well have been the final straw for the NDP leadership’s alliance with the Liberals as after Singh visited picket lines of striking rail workers in late August, he asserted the Liberal government’s decision crossed a line.
The forced rail strike arbitration is just one among many other examples of Liberal class warfare that makes the NDP leaving the deal with the Liberals a shrewd decision.
With all that said, leaving the SACA isn’t going to be a panacea for the NDP’s future vitality.
While leaving SACA is a solid first step to repairing the NDP’s image, gaining more power in legislatures will require the party to provide a renovated vision of a Canada that is militantly protective of the working class through robust policy changes to the status quo of the last four decades.
Ironically, Poilievre has become a kind of ugly rhetorical reflection of Singh in that they’re both overly reactive to the Liberals without providing concrete policy-driven visions — albeit the NDP is better on balance here — for how to create better lives for everyday Canadians.
Returning to the labour strike, for example, neither Singh nor any NDP official channel suggested something that even a columnist in the centre-right Globe and Mail argued should be done to the oligopoly of Canadian rail companies in the wake of the strike to diminish rail employers’ power; namely, nationalize them.
The lack of an overarching vision of the power in a social democratic approach to key political areas — the budget, railways, housing, etc. — has been a continual problem for the NDP since leadership shifted toward the centre after Jack Layton died in 2011.
The NDP’s subsequent leader to Layton, Tom Mulcair, for example, was famously blasted by Trudeau in 2015 for needless austerity over wanting to balance the budget instead of continuing deficit spending. In his rebuttal to Mulcair, Trudeau correctly pointed out that deficit spending is what’s needed to stimulate the economy. To add insult to injury, Paul Martin, chief usherer of austerity-based fiscal policy in Canada, made the empirically borne-out observation that running a balanced budget or worse, a surplus budget, would be taking money and therefore jobs out of the economy in response to Mulcair’s statement.
Singh, on the other hand, hasn’t made a misstep as big as Mulcair’s budget mishap. Still, when Singh signed off on the Liberals’ federal budget this year, he pointed out his approval of policies that help working-class people and marginalized groups, things like free access to birth control, school lunch programs and other specific welfare-adjacent policies — but that was it. While this reluctance to be more overarchingly standoffish on the Liberal’s fiscal policy may have been a product of the SACA agreement, the fact that Singh didn’t appeal to anything larger about the budget itself is concerning for a party with a lineage in the social-democratic tradition.
Voters need to have a distinct sense of what an NDP-led government would do with the budget, such as the programs they would fund and new confiscatory taxation plans that could capture accumulated wealth at the highest end of the earner spectrum. Another key to this approach of concretized vision-building for the future of the country should be harkening back to how past social-democratic oriented budgets led to so many material benefits in the 20th century, with steeper progressive taxation brackets and government intervention essentially building the middle class.
David Moscrop’s recent piece in The Walrus revealed that even insiders of the party today are aware of the lack of a positive vision from the party’s leadership, and recognize it as being a weakness that is still not being addressed.
Equally poignant in Moscrop’s op-ed is his pointing out that the NDP hastily voted to remove references to socialism in its constitution in 2013. On the heels of the massively popular, grassroots Bernie Sanders campaigns wherein Sanders explicitly called himself a democratic socialist, it’s clear that the once taboo term is having a revival it hasn’t seen in decades. Therefore, New Democrats should embrace popular aspects of democratic socialism as many of the once heretical reactions against nationalization, free education or expanding worker autonomy and control of production through legislation are becoming attitudes of a bygone era.
This doesn’t mean the NDP should simply appear more radical or socialist as a cynical ploy to get in slightly more social-democratic policies compared to the Liberals. If there’s anything more politically disastrous than the NDP’s lean into the “conscience of the Liberals” rhetoric in the last 10 or so years, it’s radicalism as a vague gesture with no substance.
Trump may have shown that that kind of populist rhetoric with little substance works on the right, but the left and centre is a different constituency. Instead, like Sanders, NDP leadership needs to put down radical policy and have rhetoric that meets the inherent radically progressive nature of said policy.
Sanders is once again instructive here. In Sanders’ proposal to make college free and pre-empting the tired “But how will you pay for it?” question, he outlined on his campaign website how a small tax levy on Wall Street exchanges could pay for the whole thing.
Thus, when Singh calls out the Weston family or other major corporate beneficiaries of the recent greedflation, he should take a page out of the Sanders campaign and connect it to how increasing the top income tax bracket and increasing profit taxes on a Galon Weston would be how he could pay for dental care for all Canadians.
Whether the party continues its reactive and middle-brow vision of fighting for the working class is largely going to be a function of whether party leadership wakes up and realizes that the symbolic significance of breaking with the Liberals provides a ripe opportunity to address how their rhetoric and programming is quickly becoming uninspiring and stale.
Canadians are ready now for a new social-democratic — and even, mainly for younger Canadians — democratic-socialist vision of the country. And the NDP are more poised to deliver now than they have been in a long time.