Eearlier this year, I have renewed my membership in the New Democratic Party of Canada in anticipation of the party's upcoming leadership race and convention in Winnipeg early next year. I've voted for two projects so far (2012 and 2017), and this one seems especially important to me. After being reduced to seven seats and just 6.29 per cent of the popular vote in last April's federal election – the worst showing for both the NDP and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, since its founding in 1932 – the next few years potentially represent a defining moment for Canada's parliamentary left.
Electorally, the party itself must recover. But beyond this, he needs to discuss and take into account more existential questions of policy and purpose. This requires a genuine process of renewal, not just rebranding, and NDP members deserve a leadership race characterized by vibrant and energetic debate about the party and its future. In this case, debate in Montreal last Thursday— the first of two formal debates currently scheduled — was a resounding failure, and as I watched it I felt a mixture of anger, disappointment and embarrassment.
My goal in what follows is not so much to criticize any of the candidates—who, among other things, were themselves disserviced by the debate format—but rather to make some broader thoughts about the debate and race itself. And one dumb question remains: Does the NDP even want to be a national party?
llet's start with elephant in the room. November 17 releaseParty officials announced that the debate “will be held with a majority vote in French, underscoring the party's commitment to engaging Quebec and the French-speaking communities.” But if that was the goal, then it's safe to say that the evening was clearly counterproductive.
From the outset, this was very clearly billed as a debate in French, a fact further supported by the opening remarks made by Alexandre Boulerice (Quebec's only NDP MP) and chosen moderator Carl Bélanger (former party general secretary, Quebec candidate in the 1990s, and a member of its senior team during the 2011 Orange Wave).
At first glance, this was a somewhat confusing choice, given the apparent lack of French among the management. Among the five candidates, only Avi Lewis actually looks familiar, with Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson coming in second. Three others – Rob Ashton, Tony McQuail and Taniel Johnson – do not speak French at all. On the eve of the debate, it was announced that some candidates would be allowed to use in-ear interpreters and that only 60 percent of proceedings would actually be held in French.
In the end, things fell short of even this more conservative goal. According to the journalist's estimates Isaac Peltz– which convincingly suggests that the party may well have violated its own established rules for the race – only about 19 percent was actually conducted in French.
However, even this may be an understatement, since much of the spoken French was so bad that it might as well not have existed. If you didn't take care of yourself, this clipfound in a few seconds on the Quebec media panel will give you a good general idea.
In some countries the situation has only gotten worse. post-debate fights when three of the five candidates, deprived of their notes and translation devices, could not understand the questions asked of them by French-speaking journalists at all.
Since these restrictions were well known, that the party chose to stigmatize the debate in this way is nothing short of baffling, and the resulting reaction has been predictably critical. Two biggest winners, according to activist Nora Loreto observes her article probably included the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals. reaction in the French-language media, when this was even brought to attention, it was not positive, to put it mildly. Reaction to the title “NDP leadership candidates have poor command of French. Will this affect the future of the party?” The country's most famous French-speaking political journalist, Chantal Hébert, was characteristically straightforward: “The short answer is yes…”.
Even Bélanger, the debate moderator, didn't soften his words. “If you can't speak French and debate in French, you won't get through. It's simple… If there's an election anytime soon, it will be difficult to connect with Quebec voters.”
Bout of question Given the debate's misleading title, it's worth emphasizing what the failure of three of the five candidates to address Quebecers in even passable French ultimately means for the national party. Twenty-two percent of Canada's population, almost one in four, speak French as a first language. In Quebec itself – to state the obvious – it is overwhelmingly the mother tongue, and beyond that, it is absolutely fundamental to both civic and cultural identity.
All this means that the inability to understand or speak French is more than just a technical obstacle for future national leaders, and it is simply impossible to downplay it or suggest otherwise. The phrase “English language rights” is a phrase you won't hear much of in the rest of Canada. However, in Quebec, French language rights have had significant political significance for more than half a century and have been an absolutely central issue.
Until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when Quebec was still a quasi-colony of English Canada (and a handful of United States corporations), the language divide often mapped directly onto the class divide. For example, in one influential study of industrial transformation in the 1940s, sociologist Everett Hughes noted that the typical Quebec enterprise was composed of monolingual French-speaking workers in menial positions and monolingual English-speaking employees in senior positions, with a bilingual foreman typically acting as “an intermediary between the two worlds of labor and management.” Until the 1960s, urban francophones also tended to earn lower wages than their predominantly English-speaking bosses and often lived as tenants in properties owned by English-speaking landlords.
Of course, that was a long time ago, and much has been done since then to change the situation. But the fact remains: a party that claims to be a truly national can't be unless its leader can speak to the people of Quebec in their own language and cannot fully understand the significance of that language in Quebec itself.
Ashton seems like a nice guy, and I understand what he was getting at when he said, “The language of the working class rises above any language in the world.” But for the vast majority of Quebec workers, the language of the working class is French, plain and simple, and there is simply no way around this fact.
Apart from issues of language and branding, the format of the debate itself left much to be desired. At first, there were technical difficulties during the live broadcast. Many questions, such as: “What have you learned from successful provincial NDP governments?” or “Why do you want to be prime minister?” — were themselves needlessly vague and open-ended (this is not a criticism of Bélanger, who I think did his best to answer the questions I believe were asked of him). Nothing was said about foreign policy, and many other important national and international issues remained completely unmentioned.
Speaking for myself, I'm bad want seeing these people disagree and believing that the NDP's current predicament demands nothing less. We can take it for granted that each candidate has core progressive commitments, supports unions, is concerned about the cost of living crisis, and wants the NDP to win more seats in the next election than in the previous one. With this in mind, the debate should address issues that can – to the benefit of both NDP members and the public at large – generate some constructive disagreement. Issues of party organization and structure were barely raised Thursday, but they deserve to be at the center of the leadership battle.
In this regard, I believe that the party as a whole has too often lacked a healthy culture of constructive debate, both internally and publicly. To some extent this is due to concerns about message discipline and so on. But—and I speak here in part as a former staffer (federal and provincial) and Ontario NDP candidate—I have often found that there is an institutional default toward a kind of tough positivity that can be very unhelpful. I'm not saying I want members and candidates to be at each other's throats. But if serious issues and problems cannot be meaningfully discussed in the leadership contest after the party's worst results in some ninety-three years, when Maybe They?
And while we're on the topic, overall there are too few debates planned. More informal events such as the one that took place recently British Columbia Riding Association, as well as another owned by Douglas-Caldwell-Layton Foundation a month or so ago were more substantive, and the party would benefit from scheduling more events with leaders in a variety of formats.
The alternative is a sleepy, low-profile race in which much-needed debate on important issues is lazily postponed to an unspecified point in the future. If the party really hopes for renewal, it simply won't happen.
Initially it looked like “Is this really what the NDP update looks like?Luke Savage (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
