Decline of NDP into Self-Parody
Post 28 | Is this Once Important Ballast in Canadian Politics Needed Anymore?
Jump the shark was a termed coined about Happy Days – a popular TV show that ran from 1974-84. The episode prompting that line featured Fonzi wearing jean shorts and leather jacket, jumping over a shark on water skis. Some thought it would spell the show’s death knell - that this bizarre and discordant plot line signalled the exhaustion of good story ideas.
In fact, the show continued for years afterward but left us this pop culture reference - to describe a group or body of work that has run amok of its core philosophy and faded into a period of exhaustion or self-parody. This readily describes the federal Liberal party. But it also defines the federal NDP in their confusing pursuit of ideas and policies that some time ago jumped the shark.
My father was an NDP supporter born of working in a steelworker’s union where it was considered a natural state of things to vote NDP - a party promoted to be looking out for the working man. Despite that influence plus taking a political science degree in a leftward leaning university, I drifted toward a centrist mindset in late teens while grudgingly turning in Marxist inspired essays.
After landing a career driven by free market principles and drawn in by Brian Mulroney’s policies, my worldview really diverged from the NDP. But I still understood the party’s raison d’etre, respected Ed Broadbent during his years as leader, and strongly supported our multi-party system where a group like the NDP had a voice. During Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair’s subsequent leadership, there remained some connection to the roots of social democratic principles and a continuing thread of fighting for the average Canadian – whatever that overused term means.
The NDP under Jagmeet Singh have become lost as they struggle with principle and policy coherency. And they have made a mockery of themselves, shamelessly propping up the government with their in-all-but-name coalition. Recent polls showing them neck and neck with the Liberals should be read as a move away from the Trudeau death spiral and not an enlightened rush toward the brightness of the NDP.
With one eye squinted shut, a generous supporter could argue they are still pursuing a social democratic mandate with a push for socialized childcare, dentalcare, and pharmacare, along with free tuition, basic income supplements and continued railing against corporations and the wealthy.
But these socialist dreams lack any accompanying economic maturity to be taken seriously, and offer no acknowledgement of unintended consequences or of government’s demonstrated inability to effectively run things. The unfolding disaster of universal childcare should be an object lesson.
Undoubtedly the NDP will be full of puffery over yesterday’s announcement of their success in ransoming universal pharmacare from the hapless Liberal government, willing to further mortgage us to stay in power. But as previously covered in Exploring the Case for Universal Pharmacare if rolled out as originally anticipated, it will cost a whopping $11-$13B per year. Expect overruns and bungling as likely outcomes - for a program that isn’t needed and Canadians don’t want once they understand the realities.
The NDP have swallowed the blue pill and are living in a make-believe, socio-economic equity world with positions increasingly disconnected from reality. Their policies are comprehensible only to the extent they are in competition with the Liberals for most money to be spent, as they follow a philosophy that the average Canadian shouldn’t have to pay for much of anything. This is paired with no plan for generating all the revenue to pay for this social welfare bonanza, while promoting policies that would crush our free market, further dampen our productivity and destroy the core industries providing our tax foundation.
The question is whether they are knowingly living in the matrix, or unaware of their ignorance. Neither is good.
Singh adds to the tangled party policy platform with his well-worn platitudes and faux outrage of media missives. His eleven month support of Trudeau’s government while tweeting conflicting barbs from online safety, his backdown on ultimatums (ie pharmacare - the end of 2023 was to be a redline for their blanket support of Trudeau) and revisionist history (ie apparently they now only reluctantly supported the Emergency Measures Act invocation) offer little confidence in substance of character.
His February 2022 statement regarding the Emergency Measures Act was just one of many unserious and bizarre comments where he declared that the protesters, “wanted to overthrow a democratically elected government with a committee of their own choosing”, and, “Their goal was not an innocuous goal. Their goal was to overthrow and to replace it in a fascist way without having any elections”.
The NDP, led by Singh, has recently made a crusade of grocery prices – gratuitously calling the heads of our major grocery chains to a public scolding for high food prices. Watching last March’s coverage of the grandstanding-as-questioning by Singh was cringeworthy with his thin questions and apparent lack of basic market understanding capped off by, “How much profit is too much?” – to the CEO of a publicly traded, for-profit corporation.
Excellent analysis published the past two years which speaks to the real inflationary impacts on food prices – namely taxation, cascading supply chain impacts, Canada’s protectionist food marketing boards, and dampening effects of various green policies - haven’t arrested the NDP’s ongoing harangue against Galen Weston, et al.
Meanwhile the NDP continue pushing their delusion that Canada’s ultra-rich can be taxed enough to pay for the additional tens of billions they wish to staple onto our bulging debt. Economics 101 be damned.
The latest departure from reality is a doozy, coming in the form of private member’s Bill C-372 presented by Charlie Angus (MP Timmins-James Bay) - to make fossil fuels advertising illegal in Canada. Charlie really outdid himself with a bill that would make great fodder for a movie script set in the jackbooted world of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games or 1984.
The preamble alone features towering statements about the evils of fossil fuels and their contribution to the existential threat of climate change and responsibility for millions of deaths driven by the fossil fuel industry, whose apparent misleading advertising is akin to the evil tobacco companies of yesteryear. It is filled with causality leaps and statements of opinion-as-fact that would enter the public record as truths if this authoritarian piece of legislation made it to law.
The bill then sets out how advertising of fossil fuels in Canada by producers, retailers or other persons will be met with penalties including up to two years in jail and millions of dollars in fines.
Yup, you read that right. You would go to jail for advertising gas or oil in Canada.
I won’t take the space here to refute this idealogue-driven piece of zealotry masquerading as serious legislation presented to our national Parliament, but will do so in a subsequent article if this farce proceeds further.
At minimum, it stands as another excellent/horrible example of the NDP’s lack of seriousness.
It is difficult to recognize any remaining value in the philosophical or intellectual ground this once-vital party now occupies in Canadian politics. Back to a time when our three major parties represented a traditional left-centre-right political spectrum, the NDP played an important role as a counterbalance to more conservative fiscal and social ideas. But with a collapse of the middle and the Liberal’s leftward lurch, Canada has long ago departed that reality.
The NDP’s woes may have started with Jack Layton’s lend us your vote campaign in 2006, as they worked to repackage themselves in a modernizing Canada and became briefly fashionable. Thomas Mulcair inherited the party after the bloom came off that rose and subsequently ran a reasonable though subdued party for five years.
Under Jagmeet Singh since 2017, the party has veered into the land of indecipherable principle and rudderless policy as they flail about for political traction and relevance, notwithstanding a brief period of TikTok popularity with a young voting bloc, and king-making power the past year. Meanwhile the Liberals have oozed their philosophy and policies so far left that the two parties are now virtually indistinguishable.
If the NDP measure success as being chief enablers of the current government and for blackmailing the Liberals into passing more economically crippling social programs – then they have been over achievers.
But if this party believes they have promoted policies for the good of Canada and represent a ballast of intelligent social democratic principles - they are sadly mistaken. I have no prediction on whether they can move beyond this long period of jumping the shark. But on current trajectory they should just merge with the Liberals and be done with it, as these two parties look the same - out of touch and detrimental to our country’s wellbeing. They make excellent bedfellows.
Stay tuned and stay pragmatic.
Interesting article, and accurate in its basic premise. Under Jughead, the NDP have lost the script. This country could tolerate social reforms based on ideology as long as there was a reasonable chance that these reforms could be paid for. That is long gone under Singh's leadership.
Say hello to your newest subscriber! I’m a now marginal New Democrat, who agrees with many of your criticisms. I like your list of ‘not-weirds.’ I agree with much (not all) of what you say and look forward to dialogue with you. I promise not to call names.