NDP’s left turn pays off

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/11/2003 (7982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LORNE CALVERT’S New Democrats clung to a majority government in Saskatchewan by their fingernails for two reasons.

First, many of the NDP abstainers of 1999 came home in response to Calvert’s plea at the outset of the campaign. Roy Romanow’s two terms from 1991 to 1999 were characterized by a right turn, and many in the party believed he sold the party’s soul to the fiscal conservatives, the bankers and the uranium industry. Party membership and morale declined, and voter turnout fell from 81 per cent to 65 per cent.

The fallaway of NDP supporters, activists and sympathizers reached its peak in the 1999 election. Many were lulled to sleep by polls giving Romanow a 20-point lead over Hermanson and the Saskatchewan Party. The consensus was that Romanow had the election in the bag, thanks to the split on the right between the Saskatchewan Party and the Liberals. Many were shocked when Elwin Hermanson almost stumbled into office by accident. Romanow was forced into coalition with the Liberals in order to stay in power — a decision that helped set the stage for the decimation of the Liberals in this month’s election.

Romanow made the wise decision to quickly exit the scene, and Lorne Calvert worked to rebuild the party and re-establish public trust and confidence. Over the last three years, Calvert struggled to put the Romanow legacy behind him and recover the ideological and philosophical soul of the party. In this hotly contested, ideologically polarized election, the NDP won largely by making public ownership of the province’s Crown corporations the central issue. Further, polls revealed that Hermanson trailed Calvert badly on the issues of leadership and trust. These too became central themes in the NDP’s campaign.

The basic reality is the NDP won by making a modest left-turn after Romanow’s departure in order to sharpen the contrast with the Saskatchewan Party.

The second reason for the NDP’s victory resulted from this polarization — the utter shattering of the Liberal Party caused by the defection of many Liberal supporters to the NDP in order to stop the Saskatchewan Party.

There is a danger that this reliance on frightened Liberal supporters will become a permanent feature of the NDP’s approach, and such a temptation must be resisted. Frightened Liberals are hardly a secure bedrock to ensure future political success — next time they might go home to the Liberal Party, or they may be attracted by a more moderate and less threatening Saskatchewan Party leader. In the meantime, efforts to pander to that base will dilute the actions of the Calvert government.

Will Calvert learn from the success of his modest left-turn? Will he continue to re-discover the NDP’s moderately left-wing, social-democratic soul? Rather than apologizing for the party’s traditions and ideology, as Romanow often did in meetings with the business lobby, will Calvert advocate an increase in public ownership and a return to the construction of a universal system of social and economic security for all? Will he stop temporizing and move quickly to write the continent’s most progressive labour laws, as the CCF did in 1944? Will he begin the reconstruction of all those things lost and destroyed during the bleak Devine and Romanow years, such as the child dental plan, the prescription drug plan, and public ownership of natural resources?

Calvert’s victory was close. Many among the party’s traditional base — labour, progressive farm activists, social-justice activists, environmentalists — came home only reluctantly to keep the Saskatchewan Party out of power. To re-build the NDP, Calvert will have to re-kindle long-term faith and support by moving forward on the NDP’s traditional progressive agenda. It was clear in the election that such a promise was key to galvanizing sufficient public support for victory.

This election involved two tests. First, Calvert tested the NDP’s traditional base of support by appealing to them to come home to help him stop Elwin Hermanson. Now Calvert faces a test: Will he deliver on his implied promise of progressive and meaningful change?

As always since the CCF first emerged in Saskatchewan, all Canada will be watching. The most intense ideological and philosophical debates in Canada will be heard in the polarized Saskatchewan legislature over the next four years. There, the future choices facing all Canadians will be presented and probed vigorously.

The message from the electorate was clear. It’s time for the NDP to re-discover its defining principles and to express them with clear conviction and pride: the value of public ownership; the importance of the welfare state in creating a secure, humane and just civil society; and the use of the government as a popular tool for progressive social and economic change.

Having polarized the province over principle in order to win re-election, the NDP will squander the opportunity to move forward if it backs away from and fudges the meaning of that polarization. The NDP took 52 per cent of the urban vote and 36 per cent of the rural vote. The Saskatchewan Party took 50 per cent of the rural vote and 29 per cent of the urban vote. Province wide, the NDP outpolled the Saskatchewan Party 45 per cent to 39 per cent.

The results suggest that the NDP’s campaign had significant resonance even in the rural areas, and it has the Saskatchewan Party on the run. Residents of villages, small towns and working farmers — the majority of farm men and women who work at off-farm wage jobs to sustain the family and the farm — remain a natural constituency for the NDP.

All that is required is an NDP government with the political courage to continue the polarization, keep the Saskatchewan Party on the defensive and press forward with the basic programs necessary to realize the principles endorsed by the electorate.

John Conway is a University of Regina political sociologist and the author of The West: The History of a Region in Confederation.