I've highlighted some key points in the article.
ATHABASCA, AB, Mar. 9, 2012, Troy Media/ – “Ordinary Canadians,” to
use a phrase that New Democratic Party leaders have been repeating for
decades, are clear about whom they want to win the NDP’s interminable
federal leadership race.
A Forum Research poll, conducted March 2 and 3, asked Canadians which
party they would vote for if a federal election were held that day,
providing three different scenarios, namely if Tom Mulcair, Peggy Nash,
or Brian Topp, the top three contenders, became NDP leader.
Topp not on top
With Mulcair as leader, the NDP would have received 30 per cent of
the vote compared to 32 per cent for the Conservatives, 23 per cent for
the Liberals, 8 per cent for the Greens, and 4 per cent for the Bloc
Quebecois. But if Nash were leader, the Tories rise to 33 per cent,
while the NDP ties with the LIberals at 24 per cent. Put Topp in charge
and the Tories go up to 34 per cent, and the Liberals to 25, with the
NDP down to 23 per cent.
In terms of seats, a separate Forum poll of 1,675 Quebeckers
demonstrates the devastation for the NDP in Quebec if they don’t choose
Mulcair.
Mulcair, according to Forum, would garner 40 per cent of the votes in
the province for the NDP and, according to the calculations of 308.com,
Canada’s main website for mathematically-minded political geeks, that
would retain all of the NDP’s current Quebec seats for the party. By
contrast, with Topp as leader, the NDP would win only half that
percentage of votes and a measly three seats. Worse, Nash as leader
would mean a drop to 18 per cent of the Quebec vote and only one seat
(presumably Mulcair’s, but if he chose not to run after losing the
leadership contest, the evisceration of the NDP in Quebec seems the
logical result).
That should clinch it for Mulcair, one would think, and polls
published both by the Mulcair electoral team and by the team of
leadership candidate Paul Dewar do show the former Quebec Environment
Minister and the first NDPer ever to win a federal seat in Quebec in a
federal general election in the lead.
But there is much griping within the NDP about Mulcair. The leading
candidates generally conceded that he is the only one who is charismatic
but many party members fret that, because of that charisma, he will
become a one-man show rather than a team player.
Everyone also concedes
his bond with Quebec, but in English Canada, where NDPers have only
recently had to come to terms with Quebec demands and Quebec interests,
many members seem bound and determined to once again put Quebec in its
place even if it costs them all those seats won by Jack Layton and
Mulcair in 2011.
Mulcair wants the party to refresh its language, and has gone after
such phrases as “ordinary Canadians” and the strategy of targeting
unionized workers rather than workers more generally. That has drawn
criticism from fellow candidates regarding his commitment to party
traditions, even though a key reason for Jack Layton’s breakthrough in
2011 was that he attempted to make the NDP look less scary to people who
had not supported the party in the past but who shared at least some of
its values.
The fear on the part of many longstanding members is that perhaps Mulcair is not really “one of us.” But what is “one of us?”
Apart from using comfortable clichés that Mulcair, along with
B.C.-based candidate Nathan Cullen, have eschewed, the policy
differences between the “traditionalists” and Mulcair are minuscule. But
a variety of sources are trying to suggest that Mulcair is hiding
something from the members. A website called “Know Thomas Mulcair,”
which claims to be the voice of unidentified “progressive” party
members, but is more likely a front for one of the other candidates’
campaigns, suggests that he is a Zionist tool, and that he was
responsible for cutting many jobs when he was a member of Jean Charest’s
Cabinet.
The National Post meanwhile suggested that Mulcair had been
toying with the idea of joining the federal Conservatives after
resigning from Charest’s government. And then there were the revelations
that Mulcair gave money to his own constituency association rather than
to the national party, something that the federal party expects its
elected members to do.
How accurate are these accusations? A comment by Mulcair in 2008 that
seemed to suggest that he, like Stephen Harper, was on Israel’s side no
matter what has been much quoted. But throughout the campaign, he has,
like the other leading candidates, reiterated the party’s official
stance that calls for a two-state solution with Canada attempting to
play a mediating role rather than the lapdog role for Israel that Harper
plays or a parallel role for the Palestinians that some elements of the
NDP advocate.
The criticisms of Mulcair’s presence in a Quebec LIberal government
that did indeed cut some public service jobs is interesting, considering
that no one faults Topp for his behind-the-scenes role in the big cuts
that were made by the Romanow NDP government in Saskatchewan. No doubt
that is because an NDP government that leans to the right gets a pass
that a Liberal government that tacks to the right does not.
Mulcair no “flaming radical”
But, as Mulcair has pointed out, Quebec provincial politics since the
1970s has divided less on right versus left lines than on federalism
versus separatism. Within each camp there are rightists, leftists, and
centrists, and the overall platforms of both the Parti Quebecois and the
Liberals therefore are a set of compromises. In any case, Mulcair quit
the Quebec Liberals when Jean Charest insisted upon allowing resource
companies to go ahead with projects in provincial parks, which, in
Mulcair’s view, had to be preserved for environmental protection and for
popular enjoyment.
Tom Mulcair is no flaming radical, but he does support the NDP’s
social, environmental, and economic policies. He has a long history of
public service while his opponents have rather thin resumes in terms of
work within government or in the private sector.
It will be interesting to see if the party’s almost 130,000 members
choose to elect him as their leader and to give Canadians a chance to
elect a prime minister who will make a break with the harsh policies of
Stephen Harper. Or will their suspicions that this man is too suave, too
self-confident, and too willing to go beyond the party’s sleepy phrases
cause them to reject him in favour of one of the unfortunately
forgettable group of candidates whom the NDP leadership race has
attracted along with Mulcair?
Alvin Finkel is professor of
History at Athabasca University and author of Social Policy and Practice
in Canada: A History (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006)
