I’m still thinking this through, but it seems to me that the old left/right 2×2 (social vs economic axes) model is now outdated, and needs to be replaced by something more like this (some early thoughts below*)
Like many western “democracies” and their imitators, Canada suffers from the use of the “first past the post” electoral system, in which parties supported by only 30% of voters can win landslide majorities, while parties supported by 20% of voters can end up with no elected representatives at all.
It’s a hopelessly flawed, antiquated system, inherited from the British, for whom elections were always about whether the Upper Class Tories or Working Class Labour would govern the country. Other parties were considered nuisances, best ignored.
A recent Canadian PM, Trudeau Jr, promised if elected to do away with that system and replace it with a proportional representation system, which is far from perfect, but at least, well, proportionately better. He was re-elected on that promise. And of course he immediately reneged on it.
Whenever and wherever Canada has had referenda on proportional representation, the two big-party lobbyists and their corporate funders and media have spent gobs of money fear-mongering and lying about it, so even when a majority has voted to support reform despite all that lobbying, it was still defeated because there wasn’t a super-majority in favour.
As a result, just as in other two-party first-past-the-post countries like the US and UK, we Canadians live in a duopoly of two right-of-centre parties, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties, with indistinguishable laissez faire policies and programs. One of the parties, by agreement, may claim to espouse a few progressive positions, but that’s just performative, and it’s never enacted into actual law. It’s all about making sure citizens are conned into believing it actually matters which of the duopoly parties is elected.
The requirement for the duopoly, which has seemingly prevailed in all anglophone countries and many other ‘western’ nations for decades, is that:
- both parties agree to support untrammelled capitalism, constant deregulation, privatization, and endlessly-reduced taxes, especially for their rich corporate benefactors, and hence endlessly-reduced public services and endlessly-increasing wealth inequality;
- both parties agree that policies that encourage and subsidize development and a steadily-increasing GDP will always prevail over any environmental laws and regulations, no matter how disastrous the consequences for the planet and for future generations; and
- both parties agree that war is good business and essential to “national security”, and wars which are launched, regardless of their rationale, by any “allied” country are to be supported as enthusiastically as the electorate will tolerate.
As a result of this tacit agreement, since the end of WW2, US, Canadian, UK and many other “western” governments have, almost without exception, been anti-socialist, anti-environmentalist, and anti-pacifist governments.
Those who believe in social and economic equality, a clean and safe environment, and an end to wars are hence marginalized in fringe parties the system has specifically been designed to exclude from the possibility of ever governing. They are, of course, allowed to protest, as long as they behave while they’re doing it and go home promptly afterwards.
In the west, this is called “democracy”.
There have been instances where one of the two Tweedle parties has inadvertently selected a leader who has socialist, environmentalist, or pacifist tendencies, and who opinion polls suggest might actually be elected. Such leaders are generally taken aside and spoken to, and told that while they are permitted to espouse such beliefs, there will be severe consequences if they even threaten to actually enact those beliefs.
If they fail to heed these warnings, the Epstein Class/Patriciate and their corporatist and media henchmen will immediately launch a no-holds-barred campaign to discredit, smear, and oust them. We saw this with front-runner Bernie Sanders being ousted by the Democrats and replaced by the senile Joe Biden. We saw this with front-runner Jeremy Corbyn being ousted by the UK Labour Party and replaced by the moronic Keir Starmer.
Similar events have happened in Canada, notably in 1987 and again in 2011, when the leaders of Canada’s third party, the NDP (under leaders Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton respectively) briefly outpolled both of the Tweedledee Liberal and Tweedledum Conservative parties. In the subsequent election in 1988, the NDP polled third due to virulent opposition to Canada’s worst-ever PM, the arch-conservative Mulroney, who almost destroyed the country over his anti-federalist Meech Lake accord. Many Canadians were hence fear-mongered into voting for the moribund centre-right Liberals instead of the proudly socialist NDP, and the vote split ironically allowed Mulroney to win a second majority with just 40% of the popular vote.
An almost identical repeat of this pattern occurred in 2011 when the corrupt and inept Harper Conservatives were mired in a scandal that galvanized opposition to Harper. But again, fear-mongering against the “socialist” NDP, combined with the systemic flaws in the first-past-the-post system, together resulted in a vote split between the moribund centre-right Liberals and the NDP, which again allowed the hugely unpopular and blatantly corrupt Harper to win a second majority, with just 39% of the popular vote.
The NDP led the polls again in 2015, until then-leader Mulcair betrayed the party by moving it sharply right, and squandered that lead, losing badly to neophyte Trudeau Jr in that year’s election.
The New Democratic Party (NDP) was established as the CCF in 1932, under the leadership of the passionately socialist and pacifist JS Woodsworth. Buffeted and occasionally wafted by events ever since, the NDP remains a perpetual threat to the Tweedle parties, the Liberals and Conservatives. It has often seemed to be close to oblivion, especially when their leaders foolishly attempted to move to the right, or when fear of the increasingly intolerant right-wing Conservatives being elected forced many Canadians to hold their nose and vote for the misnamed Liberals.
But it has been as supporting members of coalition governments where the CCF-NDP has really made its mark. It was the CCF that introduced universal public health care, initially in Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas (who in repeated CBC polls over the years has been voted “The Greatest Canadian”). When he moved from provincial to federal politics, Tommy Douglas then made it a condition of supporting a minority Liberal government, that the Saskatchewan model be adopted federally. That’s the only reason we have it.
Until last week, the most recent NDP leader was the remarkable Jagmeet Singh, who never shied away from his Sikh heritage. Although progressive Canadians will vehemently deny it, I am absolutely convinced that quiet Canadian racism was largely behind his lack of success in last year’s election. Although clearly the fear of the even-more-right-wing extremist Conservative leader Poilievre has played a part in enabling the Liberals to hold on to power since the loathsome Harper was finally deposed in 2015.
Whatever the reasons for his lack of electoral success last year, Jagmeet resigned as leader shortly afterwards. Last week, Avi Lewis was selected as the party’s new national leader. He’s the son and grandson of past provincial and federal leaders of the party, and is married to renowned author Naomi Klein.
Avi is a leader in the old CCF-NDP mold — an unapologetic socialist, environmentalist, and pacifist. He has forcefully opposed the US-Israeli-NATO genocide in Palestine and neighbouring nations, and has decried the folly of the US-Israeli war against Iran, and NATO’s complicity with it. He is completely opposed to any more fossil fuel development in Canada. And he has announced a series of proposals that will, if they become law, reverse the steady erosion of Canada’s public services and reduce income and wealth inequality.
Avi was one of 100 authors of the much-maligned 2015 Leap Manifesto, kind of a Canadian Green New Deal, which was excoriated by the Tweedle parties and by even by provincial leaders of the NDP in the energy-intensive and mega-polluting provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Here are the 15 main points in the Manifesto:
- Fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
- A shift to a “100% clean energy economy” by 2050
- A moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- Support for community-owned clean energy projects
- A universal program for energy efficiency and retrofitting, prioritizing low income communities
- High-speed rail and affordable, nation-wide public transit
- Re-training and resources for workers in carbon-intensive industries
- A national infrastructure-renewal program
- An overhaul of the agricultural industry, prioritizing local production
- A moratorium on international trade deals that infringe upon democratic rights
- Immigration status and full legal protection for all workers, including immigrants and refugees
- Investment in expanding “low-carbon” sectors of the economy, including through the development of a national childcare program
- A “vigorous debate” on the implementation of a universal basic income
- An end to austerity and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, paid for with cuts to military spending and robust progressive, wealth, and corporate taxation
- An end to corporate funding of political campaigns and examination of voting reform
Horror of horrors, eh? Who would ever want to live in a country that did this?
Avi has a long uphill battle. The latest polls have Carney’s Liberals still riding high on his Davos performance at 46%, Poilievre’s Conservatives at their usual 32%, and the NDP third at just 10%. There is still a very real fear of Poilievre and his extreme, racist positions that run counter what most Canadians continue to stand for. And the Epstein Class/Patriciate and their corporatist and media henchmen will be working hard to portray Avi and his party as “extremists” who will hurt jobs and the economy. They will actually use the above Manifesto against him, as if any right-minded Canadian would have to be appalled by such progressive ideas.
Sadly, much of the conditioned Canadian electorate are likely to fall for that, again.
And given the horrendous and undemocratic first-past-the-post system we have to work with, that fear-mongering may doom the NDP to an even more dismal result in the next election than the last one.
If so, I think that will be the death knell to progressive politics — the socialist-environmentalist-pacifist politics that I’ve followed all my life — in Canada. That will be a horrific betrayal of future generations of Canadians who will have to live with the consequences of the desolated, poisoned, war-ravaged, immiserated country and world we are continuing to bequeath them.
I hope Canadians will take this last chance to elect a government that will actually respond to the needs of most Canadians, and the challenges that future generations, who aren’t yet able to vote, are going to face.
But I’m not optimistic. The deck is stacked against us.
* I think the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘libertarian’ have become so misused that they should probably be retired. The old economic liberal/conservative split has morphed, I would say, into two dimensions: that around the role of government in economic matters, and that around how taxes should be structured (if they exist at all). On the former, I think most social conservatives are agnostic, while on the latter they align more closely with neo-cons as being anti-tax. Likewise, I think the old social liberal/conservative split has morphed into two dimensions: that around ‘simple’ matters of morality and that related to tolerance of discrimination. On the latter, I think social conservatives are more agnostic, while both neo-cons and progressives are more strident in their views about discrimination than they are on other matters of ‘morality’.
What this chart tells me is that the Republican and Conservative parties are much closer aligned to their conservative constituencies (though the alleged ‘split’ of the MAGA gang over the war in Iran is telling) than the Democratic and ‘Liberal’ parties are to their supposed progressive constituencies. Perhaps this is why the US Democrats remain even less popular than US Republicans, despite the Republicans’ senile and incompetent leader. The Democrats are completely out of touch, because their funders and ‘their’ voters have almost opposite views on what they want done. So guess what Democrats are doing (besides, as much as possible, nothing)? As for the MAGA gang, it seems clear to me that as eager as they are for war against those they have been conditioned to hate, they are much less enthused about expensive wars against those far away they don’t much care about.
As for Canada’s NDP, or at least Avi’s position as outlined in the Leap Manifesto, I find it refreshingly, perhaps even nostalgically, closely aligned with what I think most progressive citizens, and especially most women and young voters, would like to see happen. Whether Avi can pull it off is another question entirely.
