Avi Lewis as NDP Leader

 

The Canadian NDP has just selected Avi Lewis as their new leader. All the pundits, predictably, are calling this a big mistake. He was the furthest left of the available candidates. They say he cannot possibly expand their voting base.

This is their idee fixe, that everyone should run to the middle. This does not work in a time when people are genuinely upset with government. This does not work in a revolutionary period. Consider Ronald Reagan—he was the farthest right candidate for the Republicans in 1980. And he swept the electoral college. 

Right now, voters everywhere are demanding change. Consider the relative success recently of parties of the far left and far right. The Greens, Reform, and Restore in the UK. Trump, Sanders and Mamdani in the US. Meloni, Takaichi, Milei and the like. Granted, the surge is stronger on the far right than the far left, but both are surging. It might even be true that without appealing to the moderate middle the NDP can never win a majority, or enough support to form a government. But that was never a realistic goal for the NDP. Their reason d’etre is to be a protest party.

If the NDP moves to the middle, they simply overlap the Liberals. Why would a moderate then vote NDP, who have no history of ever winning government, over the Liberals, Canada’s “natural governing party”? If the policy proposals are more or less the same, it makes no sense.

Moreover, that is the very strategy recently pursued by Jagmeet Singh; we see the results. The NDP becomes irrelevant.

NDP DEI DOA

The current federal NDP leadership race is attracting little attention. The NDP has faded into irrelevance. And there is no one in the current crop of contenders who seems likely to change that. No one is particularly prominent, there are no obvious flashes of charisma.

If the NDP is in this position, this has a lot to do with poor leadership choices in the past. It ought to have more vitality than this—the populist let in the US, under figures like AOC and Bernie Sanders, has been more energetic. As has the populist left in the UK, under Corbyn or Galloway. But a couple of times, just as it seemed to have broken through into relevance, the NDP seems to have gone for DEI hires at the helm. It has not turned out well.

Most obviously, there was the defenestration of Tom Mulcair, who won them 44 seats, and who had been a provincial cabinet minister in Quebec, in favour of Jagmeet Singh, who had been a provincial MLA. Singh defeated Charlie Angus, who had a seat in parliament and was an established author, publisher, and founder of charitable institutions. Not to mention, Angus had charisma. Singh has all the charisma of a high school student council president. One must assume Singh was elected due to his ethnicity. 

He led the NDP to seven seats and the loss of party status.

Don’t say this was due to racism among voters. I never saw or heard a single attack on him due to his ethnicity. It was due to sheer political incompetence, jettisoning any trace of principle and managing to fully identify the NDP with the larger, and widely unpopular, Liberal Party.

Their earlier error was to vote in Audrey McLaughlin as leader in 1989. She had been an MP for only two years; and won then only because she was given a special exemption from defending the federal party platform. The party chose her over Dave Barret, who has been the premier of B.C. It seems clear they elected her on her sex; so they could boast being the first major party to elect a woman as leader. 

And she led the NDP from 44 seats down to 9. Because McLaughlin had nothing to sell, just more of the same old, at the very moment that populist ferment was breaking out in the West. Instead, the upstart Reform Party took all those anti-establishment votes.

This is a useful public demonstration that DEI hires do not turn out well. McLaughlin and Singh were out of their depth. Merit is the only principle that matters.

How would you feel if your heart surgeon were a DEI hire?

Singhing in the Rain

Jagmeet Singh

Jagmeet Singh's leadership of the NDP is in trouble. The Dippers cannot seem to budge the polls, and now internal dissent had broken out over Singh's high-handed approach to matters in caucus and in Saskatchewan.

I said at the time that the NDP was making a big mistake in dumping Tom Mulcair. I'd say now this proves me right.

The NDP thought that, with Singh, they could out-fresh face, out-hope-and-change, out-Obama, and out-progressive Trudeau's Liberals.

Bad concept. Trudeau's Liberals were already crowding that side of the political spectrum, governing left. There was not much viable ground to their left. Why vote, then, for a party with less chance of gaining power, when your agenda is being accomplished by the party in power?

Worse, if Trudeau screws up, or the public gets tired of him, Singh does not work as an alternative. He shares the same characteristics likely to alienate from Trudeau: being young, inexperienced, a pretty face, from a privileged economic background, from Central Canada, very urban.

Now imagine how much better Mulcair would play than does Singh on this score and at this point, if you are annoyed with Trudeau. If Trudeau looks amateurish, out of touch,, callow, and, as the Conservatives said, not ready for prime time, so does Singh. Mulcair has an avuncular look, solid political experience, performs well in the House. He looks like the adult alternative. Rather than crowd the left end of the spectrum, he was moving the NDP toward the centre, where they could look like a safer alternative to the Tories as well as the Grits.

Tom Mulcair.

Both Trudeau and Singh came in on the coattails of Barack Obama in the US. Whenever some new US politician makes a splash, the instinct among Canadians and Canadian pols is to find the closest parallel they can to run. But Singh is too late at the feast. Trudeau got there first. Now Obama is gone from the nightly news and the front pages, and that approach is old hat. The drive now, on the right, is to get someone who looks like Trump. Enter Doug Ford. On the left, the obvious model now is Bernie Sanders.

That's the avuncular thing.

Policies aside, Mulcair looks more like Sanders than does Singh.

Can Singh come back? Doubt it. Can the NDP get Mulcair to come back? Doubt it.

But I bet that if Mulcair were still leader, the NDP would be looking right now as though they had a serious shot at being the next government.