The Real Victory Is The NDP's

I know lots of people are depressed this morning thinking about four years of majority rule under the heel of the Nasty Party. It's true that they are a ghoulish and evil lot and they will try to shaft workers, the poor, women, Quebecoises, Aboriginal peoples, the disabled, peace-lovers, the environment and all things good and right in the world that I may have missed. They are, in short, scum.
Just so that you know where I stand.
But while the wingnuts who make up the Tory base may be gloating a bit this morning, my guess is that Harper - a sharper sort of scumbag - is rather more circumspect. Sure, he got his majority but only by poaching a section of right wing Liberals who were peeing their pants at the thought of an NDP federal government and only by promising them stable, moderate rule. Now, of course, Harper is an inveterate liar and charlatan and not prone to keeping his word or respecting democracy or its institutions. But he also doesn't want the Tories to be the next Liberal wipe-out in waiting. If he pushes too hard he has to know that he may win some short term gains but the result will be that the already fragile Liberal Party will complete its collapse as the remaining bulk of its members head to the NDP and a smaller number head to the Tories. If he unites the left under the umbrella of the NDP he will have polarized the country, shifted close to a majority of the electorate to the left and made it much less likely that the Tories will be able to ever win a majority again. All it would take is a breakthrough in the Prairies to put the nail in the coffin of future Tory majorities. So, he will have to govern carefully - I don't expect to see any great lurch to the right in the coming months, just more of his attempt to slowly transform Canada into a right wing dystopia of Seuss-like proportions.
Now, a lot depends on the ability of the NDP to really capitalize on their massive electoral breakthrough. And, in an ironic way, a Harper majority will potentially make that easier and allow the NDP time to consolidate its gains in Quebec, build a party machine to deepen its Quebec roots and pave the way for further gains. If that building process is accompanied by strong opposition in parliament and - even more importantly in my mind - with campaigning on the ground to involve the hundreds of thousands of people who have turned to the NDP, it could really transform Canadian politics. I'd be interested to know, for instance, what sort of relationship exists between the activists and leadership of Quebec Solidaire and the federal NDP. QS is a left-sovereigntist party in Quebec with one seat in Quebec's National Assembly and a presence to some degree across the province, plus several years' experience in holding together riding associations, etc. They are certainly to the left of the NDP and have an official position of being a party of both the ballot box and of the streets. One hopes that sensibility is widely held in the Quebec wing of the NDP because if two-thirds of the NDP caucus seek to build the party through a strategy of mobilizing and that infects the party in English Canada, things could get very exciting. In fact, in the short term my guess is that the NDP is about to become the country's fastest growing political party and it will be infused with idealistic youth and formerly cynical trade unionists. If the flux and the growth combine in the right recipe - something nobody can know at this point but about which we ought to be optimistic - we could be looking at a mass, renewed left wing movement and party.
There are dangers, of course - the union leadership are slow-moving, conservative bureaucrats with little interest in mass mobilizing or anything that disturbs "business as usual." The NDP leadership - many of them union bureaucrats themselves - is likewise conservative in this sense. Layton is a wildcard. He's no radical but he supports extra-parliamentary movements - he has spoken at innumerable anti-war events and Olivia Chow has gone the distance with the War Resisters Support Campaign both inside and outside of parliament. He might encourage this process, which would help it immensely, or he might try to follow a more Harper-esque model of containing the party's rookies by tightly controlling the flow of information and the model of party building. Hopefully the political situation in Quebec is dynamic and massive enough that it will push things forward regardless of what the party leadership thinks.
Harper will have nowhere near that dynamism from his victory and he no longer has the cover of a minority government to blame for his failings. The continuing experience of austerity and recession for the majority of Canadians will undermine Harper's credibility. Having a big, left wing alternative will facilitate that decline. That's why I'm not depressed.

Note To The Left From The Right

THE BLOSSOMING POPULARITY OF THE WILDROSE ALLIANCE PARTY IN ALBERTA proves my personal adage that you’re never so bonkers that there isn’t somebody more bonkers than you. In this case, it’s the Alberta Tories who are being out-bonkered.
On Sunday, at their convention, the WAP elected as their leader media commentator and fiscal conservative, Danielle Smith. She had been running against a former Reform Party organizer and noted social conservative, Mark Dyrholm, who dropped out when it was clear that she was going to whoop his ass.
The WAP is gaining fast on the Tories who have maintained a nearly 40-year dynasty in that province – following on from the Social Credit, which ran the province from the Depression. The reason: the Tories are too left-wing.
Sorry, let me say that again: The Alberta Tories are too left wing.

“[Smith] criticizes the royalty rate the province is charging oil companies, and finally abandoned the Tories in April after the government tabled a budget that projected a historic $4.7-billion deficit while still green-lighting double-digit spending”

The Tories, knowing that the Alberta oil boom would come to a halt sooner or later, in the way that all resource-based booms do, imposed a higher royalty rate on the oil companies during the high times, in order to save for the low times. Like now. Even with that surplus cash the Tories are still forced to run a deficit – that’s how hard things have crashed.
But the Wildrose yahoos can’t stand that the Tories didn’t just pull a Herbert Hoover, let the economy tank and then send out the police to beat the hell out of all the people starving in the streets. That makes WAP beyond-the-bonkers-pale.
One of two things is going to happen to WAP. The first and most likely one is that they will whack the Tories in the next provincial election – they’re now running second at 21 percent, behind the Tories at 38.4. They’ve only been in existence since January, 2008. Either WAP’ll win or they’ll force a Tory minority government.
If they win they’ll screw things up right quick. Remember when the Alliance was formed and Stockwell Day was the leader? Think jet ski. Enough said. WAP’ll inherit a deficit and perhaps even a stagnant economy. Their front benches will be filled with a bunch of yahoos and soon they’ll be tripping over their own feet, destroying the economy, saying dumb shit. The usual.
The other possibility is that they’ll do that before the next election.

IN ANY CASE, BY NOW YOU’RE WONDERING THE MEANING OF THE TITLE ABOVE. Well, it’s two things. The first is that the right wing consensus in Alberta has been shattered by the economic crisis. The Tory dynasty is coming apart. The WAP is not a “new” party – it is a split from the Tory party. That means that there is a space in Alberta for the left to take advantage of the growing disarray on the right.
The second note is an important point that Ms. Smith made during her campaign to become WAP leader.

“Ms. Smith herself argues that the party will remain at the province's political fringes if it focuses too much on issues such as abortion. ‘The ‘single issues' aren't top-of-mind for most Albertans,’ she says. ‘If we go into an election talking about things that are going to cause division, we aren't going to be successful in building that big tent.’”

The point here is that key arguments have been won on social questions, such that any right wing party that wants to succeed must not attack those things outright without risking fracturing and losing. And neither the abortion nor gay rights were won as a result of enlightened politicians like Smith (god help us) – they have been won in the streets, workplaces and in the homes of the country.
I’m old enough to remember the end game of the pro-choice struggle to decriminalize abortion. It involved campaigning in the union movement, protests and pickets, the courage of doctors like Henry Morgentaler to provide illegal abortions, etc. The parliamentary success was the result of the latter.
Gay rights is a similar story, starting with the explosion onto the streets that happened around the Stonewall riots 40 years ago. This led into the creation of the Gay Liberation Movement, then, with the AIDS crisis, there were big mobilizations organized by ACT UP. This was followed by the militant in-your-face actions of Queer Nation and big demonstrations and campaigns around same sex spousal benefits in Ontario (which the NDP sold out). All this pressure in and out of the public eye, led to a growing acceptance and creeping legal gains that, most recently, led to full legal equality in marriage.
The lesson from both of these is that it is through ostentatious struggle that the terrain can be shifted. That applies as much to economic questions as it does to social ones. So, to the left in Alberta – and elsewhere – have hope. Victories have already been won and more can be. Especially when the right wing has a nice big split. I look forward to watching them tear each other apart.