Orange Crash

The NDP’s slide to the middle – and downwards.

Tom Mulcair is a perfectly suitable party leader. By virtue of this, he’s a disappointment. It seems that in the final weeks of the campaign, his role has shifted from future standard bearer of the Canadian left to yet another third-party leader, liable to sit on his hands for four years while the big boys duke it out. It’s a huge blow considering the NDP’s investment in a calculated move towards the centre. History may show that he’s only another example of an inevitable loss of principles in the hopes of gaining election.

That’s not to say the spirit of the party has gone entirely by the wayside. Something like the NDP’s $15/day childcare plan is awfully ambitious and has the logic behind it to be a victory for lower-income families and the socially conscious. How does he plan to do this? By “raising tax on the rich,” of course. By how much?

Oh, one to two percent. Not terribly ambitious for Canada’s socialist party, is it?

The game of musical chairs in the centre of the spectrum seemed too enticing for Papa Tom not to make a beeline for the empty seat. It’s politics as usual, and that’s the problem. The NDP’s logic after the Layton lift was that they were within smelling distance of some real power; they took all the standard measures to follow through on this after his passing. They elected Mulcair after looking up the “next step” in the political election manual. In doing this, they missed something fundamental about the Orange Wave. Jack Layton saw himself in the tradition of Canadian idealists, so far removed from the concerns of politics as sport and closer to politics as the manifestation of something ephemeral, the organized expression of our values. Not entirely practical, but that’s fuelled the NDP platform from the start.

It wasn’t more than four years ago that people were predicting the end of the Liberal Party as we knew it. They’d been squeezed out, painted as an unprincipled boys’ club floating around asking for votes because, hey, haven’t we done well before? Remember Pearson and Pierre? After the CPCs finished wiping their chins with all the Ignatieff poster overstock, the Liberals looked like a recent divorcée: nowhere to go except wherever their midlife crisis led them. So, naturally, they looked for a pretty young thing to save them.

Problem was, Justin Trudeau’s first few months in office didn’t help this perception that the Liberals had no idea what they were doing. They’d played their trump card too early, pulling the goalie with too much time left. He was left open to attacks on his inexperience (as the successor to the too-experienced Ignatieff, naturally) and his hair (a struggle that yours truly understands all too well). Some policy trickled out as Justin was brushing the seat cushions, such as legalizing pot, but it all seemed like your uncle getting his ear pierced: a little too try-hard, a little too out-of-left-field for it to be anything other than a faux-“new direction.”

Meanwhile, Mulcair and the NDP were riding high, following the instructions of the aforementioned Political Machine Assembly Guide. Mulcair proved himself a trustworthy bearer of the title of Opposition Leader. Behind the scenes, the NDP’s plan was spurred forward by the politics of negation, inherent in their role being primarily to oppose, oppose, oppose. For a hot second, it seemed as if Mulcair could carry the entire weight of stopping Harper on his own shoulders.

The problem with being the Official Opposition in Canada, especially to a party so unable to define themselves by anything other than the ideology that they ostensibly represent, is that you have a hard time avoiding falling into one side of an American-style party dichotomy, especially when you’re entering from hard stage left like the NDP. For all we talk of our political landscape being different from our brethren to the south, it’s really only been differentiated by the flourish of a couple of parties farther left than the standard-bearer occasionally winning double-digits of the popular vote. The war is still between cutting taxes and social programs, the difference being that the left can’t figure out who should lead the charge.

So what’s happened is that the NDP usurped the Liberals in terms of being the de facto left party. This is a cozy, enviable role; or at least, it was before 2011. That election showed nothing more than the fact that, just as Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Bernie Sanders are proving in the US, people are increasingly growing suspicious of anybody incubated in the womb of establishment politics. Layton had been leading the NDP for almost ten years before he suddenly became the mustachioed messiah, and his ascendance had less to do with any stark change in personality (heavy courting of La Belle Province aside) than it did with many Canadians’ gut rejection of a guy like Michael Ignatieff, whose credentials are that he is academic and established and has a grasp on the underpinnings of global politics. Layton, in contrast, earned enough grizzle while cutting his teeth on Toronto City Council to shake hands with the everyman. Layton was educated, too: he studied for his Ph.D. under C. B. Macpherson and his undergrad under Charles Taylor, two of Canada’s preeminent political philosophers and champions of the Canadian Idealism movement. But he wisely made himself a man of the people instead of the politics, and thus managed to stand firmly on the outside of the system, where a huge number of Canadians bumped into him.

(It should be noted, here, that Stephen Harper, the man, is being ignored in this analysis. This is because yours truly believes that at this point, a scarecrow that chirped out “economy!” as you walked by would be suitably adequate for the role Harper has created for himself, perhaps without as dead a look behind his eyes).

The problem with succeeding Layton is that, without that level of star-power charisma, you revert back to the tried-and-true way of playing politics. Mulcair has backed himself into the same corner that the Liberals have been crawling out of since 2011. In crawling, they’ve stayed under the radar, taking only occasional flak while the big boys yell across the room at each other.

The election began and Harper’s CPC began to take shots at the Trudeau, seeming to preemptively consider the writ dropped with the Liberals 10 points behind a gridlocked NDP and CPC. They had yet to shake the image of the kid still trying to pick out what they wanted for dinner.

But then, something changed. It began to solidify around the Munk foreign policy debate, with Trudeau’s evoking of his father standing out against the milquetoast exchange surrounding it (characterized by the realization that there isn’t a whole lot of depth to plumb, in terms of foreign policy disagreements, that hadn’t been already covered). While Harper and Mulcair’s unchanged style rarely came above pointed bickering, Trudeau was sidestepping the potshots and making declarations using the sort of change rhetoric that’s dicey to pull off without the special charisma of an underdog.

The question of whether or not it was a good performance takes a back seat to whether it was effective, as some parts of Canadian politics seem to beg for nothing more than “good enough.” It’s a testament to the delicacy of the position the Liberals occupied that the discourse surrounding the Liberal platform only needed a reversal in opinion on its leader to go from being haphazard and thrown together to principled and bipartisan.

In the meantime, the CPC’s attack ads pushed the NDP into playing a game of hardball that they weren’t used to, and the focus on this turned both parties into wax simulacra of the supposed ideologies they represent. The Liberals took the fire from down below and didn’t join the game until they were done hoarding policy positions. When they’d finally joined in and Justin got the debate bump, their well-stocked cupboard was on display and even their thoughtfulness was deliberately thought-out: running a deficit to build infrastructure and the common good, based on sound economic logic, beats the CPC and the NDP at their own game while the two parties are off playing pavement populism.

What’s happened, then, is the party that once seemed like empty calories is now coming across as hearty and substantial. While the two parties that have been duking it out in the House of Commons for the last four years continue fighting the same battle, Trudeau has left the ring and people are meeting him outside. He’s benefitting from the same outsider positioning that propelled Layton to where he ended up at the end of the 2011 election.

The similarities between the two end there, to be certain. But when a party’s not stuck fitting itself into the political spectrum, the potential presents itself to move upwards and outwards. Or, at least, to seem to.