Tom Mulcair lost his bid to remain federal NDP leader, and his party has embraced the so-called “Leap Manifesto.” Neither of these should have happened.
The NDP couldn’t hope to retain the huge trove of seats they gained in Quebec during the 2011 election. That was a one-off event caused by disgust with the Bloc Québécois and little more.
Blaming Mulcair for this misfortune was pure revenge-seeking by party activists who never forgave him for promising, during last year’s campaign, to balance the budget. This was taken as a betrayal of the progressive cause, and worse still, as Harperism.
That’s not to say Mulcair didn’t have his faults. But look at his immediate predecessors. Jack Layton aside, who, sadly, didn’t live long enough to prove his hold over Quebec after winning 103 seats in 2011, you have Alexa McDonough (best seat total: 21), Audrey McLaughlin (best seat total: nine), Ed Broadbent — perhaps the party’s most beloved leader since Tommy Douglas — (best seat total: 43) and David Lewis (best seat total: 31). Mulcair, in contrast, won 44 ridings last October.
But elections, as they say, have consequences. Now the NDP must find that magical figure who can unite a notoriously fractious party and present a calming face to the public while retaining the support of bomb-throwers on the back bench. Good luck with that.
However, it’s the Leap Manifesto that should have rank-and-file NDP supporters worried. In 1983, after four years of Margaret Thatcher, the British Labour party produced a manifesto that was ridiculed as the longest suicide note in history. The Leap Manifesto outdoes it.
Among its planks are an end to all trade deals, no new pipelines, slashing military budgets (we are already outspent by such notorious warmongers as Australia) and taxing corporations until they get up and leave.
But the scheme that really caught my eye was a promise to wean Canada off fossil fuels by 2050.
Surely, this is the point at which green ideology parts company with economic sanity.
Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. These total 172 billion barrels, which, at $50 a barrel, amounts to $8.6 trillion.
In comparison, the entire Canadian economy is valued at about $1.8 trillion. How do you walk away from assets worth four times your nation’s GDP and still pay the bills?
“By developing clean energy” is the usual response. But this is magical thinking. What reason is there to suppose we can reproduce, in these new generating techniques, the price advantage we enjoy in carbon fuels?
Lots of countries are into solar, wind and nuclear. Canada would more likely be a net importer of energy, rather than exporter, if we abandon fossil fuels.
Still, it’s the political side of this equation I struggle with most. How can a party that began as a workers’ movement abandon working families in this manner?
Ask Alberta’s new NDP premier that question, and Rachel Notley gives a simple answer. You can’t.
Notley is on record as firmly rejecting the ideas underlying the Leap Manifesto (strange how power imposes common sense). Same story in Saskatchewan, where the Saskatchewan Party trounced the NDP last week. Also, I suspect, in Manitoba, where the Conservatives are more than 20 points up on the NDP leading into next Tuesday’s election. And, of course, here in B.C., as NDP leader Adrian Dix discovered in 2013.
I understand the anger many feel with everything from obscene corporate bonuses to scandalous bank behaviour. There is much in modern society that needs changing.
But proponents of this manifesto haven’t thought things through. Their single-minded focus leaves too many vital questions unanswered.
This isn’t just a leap in the dark. It’s a leap off a bridge.
