A new life for the left?
Brodie Ramin

For the past decade, everyone to the left of the Liberals has been looking for a way to reinvent the NDP and save Canada's social democracy from obliteration. The New Politics Initiative (NPI) is the latest hope to have sprung from the loins of leftist intellectuals. At the heart of the Initiative is the creation of a hybrid political party-social movement, taking the best elements from both and forging a product of that synergy. In practice this would see social activists from the streets involving themselves in institutionalised electoral politics and getting elected representatives from Parliament onto the streets. It would mean metamorphosis.

This endeavour, many political thinkers agree, is fairly worthy and not ignoble. However, after listening to the various interests involved, one comes to realise that the NPI is like a political Hamlet: people either love it or they think it's misguided and perhaps even a little crazy.

To some, the NPI represents the dynamism that will save the currently ailing NDP. To others it's a turn into hopeless radicalism which will render the NDP yet more irrelevant. To the rest it's just another existential crisis which the party episodically engages in.

Svend Robinson, the NDP Member of Parliament for Burnaby-Douglas, who is at the forefront of this new initiative, believes it can work. He calls me from Ottawa at midnight, to tell me why, "What we're saying is that we're trying to bridge electoral politics (where people like myself as an MP act), with (especially young) people who are involved in the environmental movements, the labour movements, human rights movements among others, and who are for one reason or another turned off by electoral politics." This hope of bringing disillusioned voters back into politics is what makes the NPI so uniquely ambitious as well as what renders its chance of success so precarious.

Robinson says that too often in the past the NDP has focused on fundraising and party business. This, he feels, has come at the expense of the more direct concerns of communities and individuals across the country. That needs to change. The flip side to his argument is equally powerful. He argues that social activists need to realise that if they want substantial and tangible results, it is the government above all else which they need to influence. "If progressive people abandon electoral politics then it's a triumph for the right."

"This initiative is trying to build a bold new political party which is involved in activism so progressive people will say 'you've been there with us side by side'."

This sort of direct action and civil disobedience is the most controversial aspect of the initiative's platform. The NPI further states it seeks to work alongside citizen-led efforts, meaning more participatory democracy on all levels, and to become "open to taking personal and political risks necessary to be an effective, consistent, and strong voice for policies that favour the public good over private wealth." Robinson himself was wounded by a rubber bullet at the Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Quebec City last April, where he marched alongside all 13 NDP MPs.

In terms of the future, the NPI currently has vague and tentative plans to hold a founding convention for the new party, adopt a constitution, a new name, elect a founding leader, and generally consolidate itself. In terms of its relationship with the NDP, the architects of the NPI see the NDP participating in this conference and eventually integrating itself into the new party. The initiative's working paper reads: "If the NDP cannot help to build the mass-based, movement-connected, campaigning political party that concerned Canadians' need, then both the party and social change movements will suffer. The NDP will suffer organisationally from a continuing drain of energy and enthusiasm and electorally as alternative formulations - like the Greens - advance alternative programmes. The social movements, meanwhile, will have their political potential undermined by a lack of focused electoral activity."

At the NPI Web site (www.newpolitics.ca), one can read of three key steps the initiative will undertake: promoting participatory and autonomous government, giving a parliamentary and electoral voice to progressive social movements, and instituting a more progressive agenda than the existing NDP. Their arguably new policies include ending environmental catastrophe, for as Robinson says, "nowhere is capitalism's failure more obvious," as well as reforming NAFTA and the WTO, making equality a priority again, reinvesting in public services, and inviting citizens to take control of the economy.

The fact that the NPI plans to turn left when everywhere in the world left-wing parties are turning right is intriguing. It's also especially pertinent. For like a rainbow with only three colours, a loss of pluralism is to be mourned. All across Western Europe, political space is being abandoned as social democratic parties have shifted further and further to the dense centre. Especially disconcerting for the NPI is that in most of Western Europe, centrism has worked at the ballot box. Formerly social democratic parties are rewarded for abandoning their leftist roots through election across Europe whereas they previously were governments in only a handful of countries.

What this centrism has also meant is the decline and fall of social democracy as we've known it. But in terms of strategy, it also shows that there is a vast amount of political space to the left of, for example, the Liberal Party of Canada. Which is to say, the current NDP has plenty of room in which to manoeuvre.

The particular manoeuvre they seem to have chosen is to redefine the nature of the political party in an activist mould. At current NDP gatherings, the old, the poor, and the outcast usually come together and hear one of the few NDP MLAs make jokes about how "50 per cent of the B.C. NDP party is present" - meaning only one of the two. People in the audience introduce themselves to each other by saying: "I joined the party in 1974, how about you?" Which of course is exactly what the NPI is struggling against. The very notion of 'the party' tends to fill the mind with images from depressing Eastern European movies. This is why the NPI wants to change its nature and function - making it less of an institutionalised bureaucracy and more of a dynamic social force.

"People have been talking about the need to go beyond electoral politics for decades. In the 1980s, people were saying that the reason the federal NDP party did so poorly was because it didn't have a movement behind it. They've known this for a long time."

In essence, the potential of the NPI to reinvigourate the left depends on two issues which currently hang over its reputedly noble intentions. First: will social activists be tempted from their movements and into electoral politics? This is uncertain. There are those who argue that social movements are sustained by a sense of moral purpose, the intensity of which a political party cannot sustain. Alternatively, one could argue that activists involved in these movements also have to cope with their own internal bureaucracies and mundane work. Members of political parties are also, in their own way, united by a sense of moral purpose. So the answer to this first issue seems pervaded by uncertainty.

The second question is: if social activists are enticed to enter the fold of electoral politics, will they be a large enough constituency from which to forge a successful political party? The answer to this, it seems, is clear. Most political thinkers believe that a party with civil disobedience and street protest as a pillar of its platform will be unlikely to attract a large middle-class or swing vote. MPs battling it out on the streets may endear the party to the youth and the more radical left-wing, but could very well lose its traditional support such as unions and working-class households. Conversely, attempting to appeal to traditional groups may very well end up hurting both the Initiative and the left, while strengthening support for the only non-right alternative, the Liberal Party.

Nevertheless, say others, when a political party tries to reach out to the people, its enemies should be wary. The TV reporters who stand like dolls in front of protesting crowds enjoy asking the incorporeal air, "Who are these people?" Meaning, "Where do these faceless crowds behind me come from and why don't they just vote their concerns away?" This is exactly what the NPI hopes to give them the means to do. The architects of the NPI believe protest is just another language in the world of political change, and it is a language they seek to learn. The soft-left who have traditionally had less taste for storming the barricades will be more difficult to win over. But if they did accept the change in tactics, they would be an invaluable part of the Initiative.

Then there's the purely pluralistic argument. This upholds the idea that just for the intrinsic value of political pluralism, bringing estranged voters into the fold of electoral politics is morally and pragmatically virtuous. It could help remedy Canada's apathetic liberal democracy and create the sort of system where people give up time and safety to bring political issues across the occlusive barricades of power circles. At the same time, it would change the very topography of Canada's political space for the better.

Professor Cohn says, "The intention is very sensible. For their own good and for the good of the party system, let's hope they come up with something. Getting these people involved would reinforce the legitimacy of electoral politics; even the Liberals and the Alliance would be forced to admit that this wouldn't be good for them as parties, but it would be good for Canada's democracy." His hope, however, cannot conquer his cynicism. "It's just that I haven't seen them come up with any intellectual breakthroughs."

The definition of a great novel is one that articulates the spirit of its age - the sentiments and fears that every person has but cannot put into prose. The hope of the left is that the NPI will be the political equivalent of the Great Canadian Novel, that it will articulate the activist spirit of the time. In doing so, even Professor Cohn is prepared to admit, it could repatriate a multitude of currently alienated citizens and in the process restore legitimacy to Canada's democracy. What's more, this would come at a time when political thinkers continually remind us of the dangers of political apathy

To take advantage of the opportunity, progressive people ask: who can guide this lost and blind party, like Oedipus after banishment from Athens? Those behind the NPI believe that, as with Oedipus, the best hope lies in Antigone, his youngest daughter. They believe that only with the support of the incorrigible young and devoted - those capable of enduring long enough to ride out the neoliberal storm - will the NDP regain political relevancy.

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