The cost of divorcing Party from Movement

Will the NDP learn what it lost and get it right this time?
Part Two of a three-part series: Reflections on the Left

By: Mel Watkins

  While moving to the centre makes little sense for the federal NDP, there is a different strategy that it can pursue that has some history on its side.
 

When conservative American international unions were solidly entrenched in Canada, labour leaders were a drag on any progressive propensity of the NDP

  Ideologies - like neo-liberalism on the right and socialism on the left - manifest themselves at both the level of the party and the level of civil society. In plain English, the CCF, as the precursor of today's NDP, was born as both a party and a movement and that was the strength that enabled it to make the breakthrough in Saskatchewan in the 1940s and then to govern for so long and so effectively.
  It is significant that the scholarly history of the party has been substantially written in terms of the tension between the party and the movement. In the late 1950s, with the federal party almost decimated by the Diefenbaker sweep, David Lewis led the way in restructuring the CCF into the NDP and, as today's discourse goes, greatly privileging the party over the movement.
  True, the trade unions were brought in but at the top, not at the rank-and-file level; the party was actually made less democratic in practice. And in those dinosaur days when the conservative American labour movement was solidly entrenched in Canada through the so-called international unions, the union leaders were a drag on any progressive propensity of the party.
  While this re-birth failed to lead the party to the breakthrough at the federal level that Lewis and others hoped for, it did enable it to survive and occasionally, as in the Trudeau minority government in the early 1970s, to have real influence. In the barren political terrain of North America, this counts as an achievement.
 

The party-labour establishment gave the toe of its boot - I know of what I speak - to the youth movement and the New Left of the 1960s

  The strategy's great drawback, however, and the great lost opportunity was that the party-labour establishment gave the back of its hand, the toe of its boot - I know of what I speak - I was there and felt it - to the youth movement and the New Left of the 1960s. As the Waffle, we were actually in the party by choice, prepared as left-wing social democrats - which is what most of us were - to function there. Our reward was to be turfed out in the early 70s.
  Dare I say it: the party lost, often for good, many of the best and brightest of a generation of activists. Those who returned, like myself, were suitably subdued. This cannot have been helpful to the party.
  All aspects of a movement were expunged from the party. Leaders ran campaigns in purely electoral, even narrowly strategic, terms. Hence, in 1988, with a broad movement formed against free trade where the NDP was certainly thought to be on-side, when the writ dropped for the federal election, leader Ed Broadbent initially tried to run as if that was not the issue in the election, fearing that the Liberals would be the benefactors.
  At a defining moment in Canadian history, the federal NDP made the biggest error it had made since the turfing out of the Waffle and, again, permanently alientated many movement activists.
  The party was, to be blunt about it, mostly oblivious of popular forces. Thus it supported every elite attempt at constitutional change; nothing so discredited the Ontario party after it was elected by a fluke in 1990.
  The result of all this is that the party was less able to withstand the onslaught of the New Right that has everywhere redefined the political landscape and marginalized the left.
  The question now is whether, with the movement back in business, the NDP can grasp the nettle.

Mel Watkins is a political economist and a political activist who speaks and writes extensively on contemporary issues.

Part One of this series looked at whether the Left is still alive. Part Three will look at the party's new commitment to anti-globalization.

Other articles from The common good

Posted: February 12, 2001

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