Canadian Voters Reject the Right
by Barry Weisleder

On June 28, voters across Canada’s six time zones rejected the newly formed Conservative Party, punished the Liberals for eleven years of cutbacks and corruption, and strengthened the labour-based New Democratic Party (NDP). The electoral shift to the left also benefited capitalist parties superficially identified with progressive change, specifically the nationalist Bloc Quebecois (BQ) and the environmentalist Green Party.

The result is the first minority government in twenty-five years – one which will face a more evenly divided House of Commons. At this writing, with some local races close enough to require a recount, the Liberal Party has 135 seats, the Conservatives 99, the Bloc 54, the NDP 19, plus one independent MP (a disaffected British Columbia Conservative).

The NDP achieved the biggest vote increase of any single party, but remains one seat short of holding the balance of power in the 308 seat Commons. The party of labour and the left in English Canada captured 15.7% of the ballots cast, and added over one million more votes to its column than it received in the November 2000 federal election. (If Canada had a proportional representation (PR) system, the NDP would now have 46 MP s, and the Liberals only 114.)

The pro-sovereignty, left leaning BQ, which runs candidates only in the province of Quebec, captured nearly fifty per cent of the vote there, adding over 290,000 more votes to its previous score. The Green Party registered 4.3% and attracted over 580,000 votes in total, a six-fold increase over its last outing. Though the Greens were shut out of Parliament (under PR they would have 14 seats), they now qualify for annual federal funding, an amount equivalent to $1.76 per vote, which goes to all parties obtaining over 2% of the votes. While business and union contributions to political parties are now banned, it will not stop corporate executives and the rich from donating generously to the pro-business parties.

The ruling Liberal Party felt the wrath of voters furious over severe expenditure cuts and the infamous $250 million federal sponsorship scandal. Liberals saw their vote shrink from 41% to 36.7%. In the process, they lost over 310,000 votes on June 28.

The voter turnout was the worst ever, at 61%, below the previous record low of 64% in 2000. So the voter abstention pattern continues, but where did those Liberal votes go?

Not to the Conservative Party, that’s for sure. The combined vote of the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party, the two parties which merged to form the new Conservative Party in 2003, was 37.7% in 2000. But in 2004 the ‘united’ Conservatives collected only 29.6%. This represents a loss of over 840,000 votes on the right.

It seems evident that some Conservatives voted Liberal this time, especially in the Atlantic provinces, and that many X marks migrated from the Liberal and Tory columns to the BQ in Quebec, and to the NDP and the Greens across English Canada. Broadly speaking, about 1.75 million votes moved leftwards.

In fact, only a week before the election, opinion polls showed the Liberals and Conservatives in a virtual tie at about 32%, which would have entailed much bigger losses for the Liberals, and a possible Conservative minority government.

Fear and Loathing

Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin skillfully played on widespread fear of the more reactionary policies of the new Conservatives and their leader Stephen Harper, a former spokesperson for the radical right wing policy group the National Citizen’s Coalition. In a desperate bid to stop the surge in support for the NDP, Martin and the Liberals fomented an eleventh hour ‘stop Harper’ movement on the campaign trail and in media ads.

Martin, the former federal Liberal Finance Minister responsible for the biggest cuts in Canadian history to transfer payments to the provinces – cuts which effectively crippled health care, education, transportation, and other social amenities -- postured as the prime defender of the public sector he had so ravaged. He portrayed Harper as a masked man with a hidden agenda. Martin railed, “If you vote NDP you help to make Harper the P.M.”

Many people were so gripped by fear of Tory plans to privatize health care, by revulsion towards reactionary Tory views on gay marriage, gun ownership, language policy, immigration and marijuana, and Conservative preference for deep integration into the United States’ war machine, that they were prepared to overlook Paul Martin’s record, and vote for the party they loath, rather than the one they more feared.

In addition, Martin promised billions of dollars to “fix medicare for a generation”, create a national child care service, generously fund neglected big city infrastructure, and keep Canada out of the US ballistic missile defence system. The Liberal leader campaigned like a New Democrat. He even had the sheer chutzpah to claim that Liberal and NDP values “spring from the same well”. This late and cynical gambit apparently worked. It probably cost the NDP 5% of the vote, and catapulted the crisis-wracked Liberals back into government -- albeit a minority one.

NDP Revival and Reversals

NDP Leader Jack Layton ran an ‘energetic’, almost frenetic campaign that was clearly a cut above the efforts of preceding federal NDP Leaders Alexa McDonough and Audrey McLaughlin. His bright, articulate persona speeded the NDP revival. But he was also the author of some of his party’s misfortunes.

After a strong start, in which Layton zeroed in on the brutality of Liberal social cuts and its tax favours to the rich, and in which he held Paul Martin personally accountable for the dire fate of homeless people, Layton softened his attack.

Worse, after telling an appreciative Quebec audience that he favours scrapping the undemocratic Clarity Act, Layton caved in to unprincipled public criticism from NDP MPs, and to business media pressure, saying he is a “flexible federalist” and that Clarity is a non-issue. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of the two televised federal leaders’ debates occurred when he was confronted by BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe. Layton was left visibly floundering. (The Clarity Act asserts the right of the federal government to dictate, after a Quebec sovereignty referendum, whether the question is sufficiently clear and the majority is sufficiently large to be valid. Most NDP MPs voted for the Liberal legislation, violating an NDP Federal Council resolution, adopted by an over 75% majority in February 2000, directing NDP MPs to oppose it.)

Certainly a major problem was the reluctance of the NDP leadership to campaign for the stated goal of forming an NDP government. Instead, in a misguided attempt to appear ‘realistic’, Layton mused about conditions for supporting a Liberal minority government. (A referendum on proportional representation and various public funding initiatives were touted by him.) But this stance fueled thinking that the NDP cannot win, and that a vote for the NDP is a wasted vote. It dovetailed with notions of ‘strategic voting’ to stop the ostensibly more right wing Conservatives. This resulted in the loss of NDP votes to the Liberals. On election day, ‘strategic voting’ likely cost the NDP ten or more seats.

It is also a losing proposition for the NDP in terms of encouraging the Leader to jettison planks from his platform that he thinks might be obstacles to a potential alliance with the Liberals. A glaring example of this kind of policy strip-tease occurred late in the campaign when Layton abandoned the party’s call for an inheritance tax on inherited wealth over $1 million. There was no explanation of how the NDP would make up for this potential lost revenue, and what impact it would have on proposed government funding for social priorities. Dropping the inheritance tax, backing away from the demand to repeal the Clarity Act, and failing to fight for an NDP government did little to address the ‘democratic deficit’ inside the NDP, or beyond.

Jack Layton’s stated commitment to a ‘balanced budget’ was also in tune with the position of the capitalist parties, and is a mark of NDP leaders’ unwillingness to challenge fundamentally the neo-liberal legacy, and the ongoing agenda of cutbacks, de-regulation and privatization.

Just the same, the NDP electoral gains achieved on June 28, the popular rejection of the Conservatives, and the reduction of the Liberals to a minority in Parliament serve to destabilize corporate rule. These factors foster better conditions for the entire workers’ movement to extract progressive concessions from the ruling class and to challenge the neo-liberal agenda.

NDP should act like a Prod, Not a Prop for the Liberals

Liberal P.M. Paul Martin claims he “got the message” from voters and that his government will “do better”. But to survive in Parliament, the Liberals will have to appeal to the NDP for support, whether the latter holds the balance of power or not.

How the NDP responds to this dicey situation will be a crucial test, and will determine its future as a workers’ party. If the NDP gets too close to a Liberal minority government, as it did to the Trudeau minority in 1972-74, it will again pay a hefty political price.

To advance the interests of working people and allied sectors of the population, and for the NDP to survive as a party, it must strictly maintain its independence from the Liberals, while vigorously pressing for the demands of working people, inside and outside Parliament.

Unlike the BQ and the Greens, the NDP is based on working class organizations and represents a conscious class break with the parties of big business. Despite its pro-capitalist programme, it is a vehicle for independent working class political action – the only mass labour party in North America. The NDP is a crucial arena for the development of the political forces needed to replace capitalist rule with social ownership and workers’ democracy.

The challenges of a minority-led Parliament, in which the NDP could play a decisive role, will spawn big debates in the party on strategy and tactics. To that end, the NDP Socialist Caucus will work to strengthen the party’s independence from the capitalist parties, and try to link the NDP to the living struggles and mobilizations of workers and the poor.

NDP members can compel the party leadership to step up the fight to reverse the social cuts and the privatization moves of the past twenty-five years, to abrogate the corporate ‘free trade’ deals, to defend Quebec self-determination, to end imperialist intervention in the Middle East, and to stop Star Wars 2.

Such gains would constitute great progress towards a better world. Our job is to help make it happen.