Naive, idealistic young man delivers late, angry rant about Jack Layton and the NDP

Their hands were red from clapping

In an episode of The West Wing, President Barlet’s chief of staff tells us in reverent tones that his boss ‘loves the podium, he sees it as a genuine opportunity to change minds.’ These days it’s pretty clear that Jack Layton has other plans for the podium.

On September 10, during a one-hour speech, Jack closed the NDP’s largest policy convention since 1987 by failing to refer a single time to the decisions of the party’s grassroots. He boasted about policies that he would be unrolling in the coming months, while saying nothing about the policies unrolled that weekend by delegates in the very hall where he now addressed them.

Not that this bothered anyone. Delegates showered him with over a dozen standing ovations during his speech after handing him a 92 per cent approval vote.

It shouldn’t be crazy to imagine that the leader of parliament’s smallest party, who now says he wants to win the next election, take the need for persuasion seriously. And yet the hour-long speech was a brazen attack on the art of politics. Jack’s sentences were short and vacuous, like a row of empty shot glasses.

Seeing him talk like this wasn’t just offensive, it was saddening: he reminded me of King Kong chained to the stage on Broadway. In fairness, when after scolding the Tories he turned his attention to the Liberal leadership race, he seemed a man transformed. The suffocating sanctimony—surely a symptom of boredom—vanished instantly and a mischievous, then beaming smile crept on to his face. He shredded Ignatieff and Rae before complimenting Dion’s integrity and intelligence, ‘and therefore [he’s] almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal Party.’ Moments later, the weight of his chains dragged him down again. If the delegates hadn’t been so busy standing, sitting, and standing again, all the while clapping furiously, they might have noticed and called the Humane Society.

Instead, we got a Harper-esque 5-point plan. Afghanistan, the green economy, looking after seniors, making life cheaper for working Canadians and all things children. This will be achieved, Jack tells us, ‘Carefully. Prudently. And one practical step at a time.’ Never mind the plan itself—meek and unfocussed—how a party at 16% in the polls will actually get this done is hard to imagine. Especially when you look at what’s missing.

Let’s play the Ven Diagram game. What’s the democratic reform that would automatically produce a dramatic jump in the NDP’s national presence, simply by virtue of fairer math? What has been, on and off, one of the NDP’s principal policy planks over the past several years? What has Jack called a top priority of NDP negotiations with other parties in a minority parliament? And what did Jack not mention a single time in his speech, never mind making it one of the NDP’s five priorities for the next election?

Proportional representation. It was a strange omission on the very weekend that a citizens’ assembly in Ontario was being inaugurated, an assembly whose sole purpose is to figure out whether we need to fix the province’s electoral system, and if so, how.

It was a strange omission at a convention where the message was broadcast loud and clear that the NDP has decided once and for all that it wants to be more than an opposition party and is ready to play for all the marbles. I can imagine three possibilities. First, the party leadership thinks it can win Canada like Bob Rae won Ontario, by sneaking up the middle in an unprecedented number of three-way races. This would only take a little over 30 per cent of the vote and a dump-truck-load of luck. Slightly stranger things have happened. Second, they don’t think they can win, and are only pretending to be serious about taking power. Third, what are these guys thinking?

This is the same brain trust that’s decided not to talk about economic policy, despite recent studies (TD Bank, StatsCan) showing that salaries for Canadian workers have barely budged in twenty-five years. That’s a long time and it’s a big problem. You might even say it’s by far the top issue for a party that boasts about ‘Putting Working People First’. (Ironically, Bob Rae also had zero economic ideas when he fluked into power in 1990.)

On a host of issues, the NDP is taking bizarre positions. The party will likely vote with the Conservatives on raising the age of consent from 14 to 16 (changing a 25-year-old law). They campaigned in favour of minimum sentences against the expert opinion of criminologists and the views of the party’s own base. And despite the Conservative win in the last election, they still seem intellectually and emotionally fixated on fighting the Liberals.

On his blog, jameslaxer.com, York University political scientist James Laxer identified the NDP’s ‘strategic dilemna’: How do you go after the Tories when this means voters, choosing the lesser evil, will flee to the Liberals? Hence their current strategy of going easy on Harper, weakly accusing him of being ‘wrong on the issues’, and focusing their attack on what they believe to be their real enemy, the Liberals. Since Laxer thinks—and he’s surely correct—that Harper is the most reactionary Prime Minister in Canadian history, it follows that the NDP’s current obligation is to show Canadians how reactionary and out of touch with their values Harper is, even if this wins them fewer seats than nibbling away at the Liberals. (If Gerard Kennedy, Rae or Dion wins the Liberal leadership, this will be an even greater dilemma.)

Laxer argues that ‘the NDP must earn the trust of Canadians over time that they will never shy away from speaking out on behalf of working people and the nation. That is the road to electing the first people’s government in Canadian history.’

Is Laxer right? It’s impossible to say. What I do know with certainty is that Jack, at least two years ago, agreed with him.

When he came to McGill University one cold winter day to speak to an auditorium overflowing with students, he delivered a long speech without notes. Its focus was poverty. I was in the audience and sceptical. But did he ever win me, and the rest of us, over. Smart, funny, genuine: exactly what you want from a politician but are afraid you’re never going to get. The equivalent of a giant ape destroying three T-Rexes to save a girl. He said that when Tommy Douglas stood up against the War Measures Act in 1970, he thought, ‘this is a guy who doesn’t want to win the next election’. But he was so impressed with Douglas’s eloquence and principled stance that he joined the NDP.

In Quebec City, though, it was the hollow man, the one those of us who usually see him on TV have gotten used to. Closing a policy convention by pretending it wasn’t a policy convention. Timid and rigid. Speaking in a lifeless, imitative language designed neither to offend nor interrupt the applause. Critics on the right accuse Jack of wanting to move Canada in the wrong direction—too far left, too anti-American, too downtown Toronto. On the left, it’s a distorted mirror: on too many issues, he’s too moderate. But both imply that Jack wants to move the party somewhere.

I’m pretty sure now that such attacks miss the point. The NDP leadership doesn’t have a clue what it wants. Jack’s admirable opposition to the Afghanistan mission—driven in fact by the party’s grassroots—only obscures this bigger problem. The NDP can’t be bold, specific or intellectually challenging if it’s got nothing to say. Taking Jack out of his message box would help, but it can’t be the solution because the message box is the symptom, not the sickness.

Superficially, the history of the American and Canadian neo-cons over the past quarter-century is the history of brilliant campaigning. (The classic example is the transformation of the obviously progressive ‘estate tax’ into the cringe-inducing ‘death tax’.) But at a deeper level it’s a story of intellectual daring, the formation of a semi-coherent, semi-revolutionary idea of what society should be, and developing a strategy to bring about radical changes to how we live our lives.

The federal NDP, meanwhile, has found itself playing a progressively duller, more defensive game that reminds you of 14-year-olds glumly trying to master the neutral zone trap. Their political ambition has been reduced to keeping the last crumbs of social democracy from being swept off the table. The federal NDP is Canada’s most conservative political party—their rhetoric the most tepid, their ideas the most inoffensive, their proposed policies the most backward-looking.

The party’s base, judging by its massive resolutions binder, is bursting with ideas, good and bad. At the very least, the role of the leadership is to chisel and compliment these, then give them shape, cohesion, and a magic gloss. The kind of architectural vision that takes just isn’t there.

The New Democratic Party is 45 years old and completely adrift. The name used to be a useful one because it could mean anything: it reflected just the kind of forward-looking openness that the NDP then represented. Today, it’s useful to the party’s leadership for the opposite reason. It works because it conceals—if only barely—that in 2006, the label New Democrat means nothing at all.

I met a bunch of brilliant, inspiring young people at the convention. Keith Sweeney, a 25-year-old running for Toronto city council in Ward 12, is one of them, a reason to believe in the future of this party. But most of the smart, young, dedicated Canadian activists I know didn’t come to Quebec City. It’s too bad. They missed the chance to network with people as extraordinary as them; two great speeches, by Jane Doe and Stephen Lewis; and one hell of a bender.

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I should point out, on a slightly different note, that I thought the convention itself was extremely well organized (by Ira Dubinsky).