What now for Canada’s New Democrats?

Opinion

What now for Canada’s New Democrats?

It is definitely time for some analysis and deep reflection by the New Democratic Party. The loss of many of its federal seats can be blamed on the vote split and how unfair it was for Liberals, after breaking their promise on proportional representation, to push “strategic voting” to stop the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives.

Many media outlets echoed the call for strategic voting and mentioned often, “this is a two-party election.” The reality is, the farther right the Conservatives go, the more we become a two-party corporate state.

To grow, the NDP needs to offer a clear alternative.

The NDP had an opportunity to demonstrate that the Liberals and Conservatives are both corporate parties that will only offer more shades of neoliberalism to solve the problems caused by neoliberalism. The big problem was that Poilievre and the Conservatives controlled the narrative on inflation for years, blaming it on Trudeau as an affordability crisis, rather than what it is, a record-profit problem and an inequality crisis due to concentration of wealth.

Canadians need to understand the farther right the Conservatives go, the more they drag us into a two-corporate-party, right-wing reality. Liberals love this, it helps them. They can get away with being progressive on social issues and conservative on economic policy.

The problem is unless we tax wealth we can never pay for the public health and education nor the social safety net and infrastructure we need. The Liberals under Mark Carney won’t tax wealth, so will continue to oversee deficient budgets and public debt.

Especially as the crisis in climate, pandemics, wars and other threats continue, fiscal restraint will be more difficult.

The door is open for the NDP to develop an economic policy focused on just transition, with a clear path, sector by sector, to move our economy away from fossil fuels.

Being the party with structural ties to the labour movement, the NDP are the natural party to demonstrate clear plans, industry by industry, to move away from unsustainable carbon jobs to green jobs. There are tools to do this, I created one called the Change Matrix.

The NDP can make a promise to kids they will never have to work in a job that kills the planet. And rather than a failed economy and ineffective economic policy that denies climate change and ignores poverty and inequity, the NDP can embrace policies that will truly meet the challenges we face, rather than push them farther into the future for our kids to address, or worse, for the point of too late to come.

Just transition begins with making peace central to politics, as it starts with disarmament and divestment from weapons manufacturing and war. Elected officials and unelected officials with agencies like NATO must be real with Canadians about the inability of Canada’s small population and a large land mass being able to defend ourselves militarily against a superpower like the United States, Russia or China.

Therefore, we must commit to and get really good at diplomacy and peace building.

We must learn to disarm dictators with negotiation and dialogue that sees how their tyranny comes from trauma, nationalism and protectionism. Including how trauma from neoliberal wars and colonization affects us all for generations, then apply that understanding in public policy and politics.

Based on studying the impact of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants, of Indigenous communities affected by colonization, refugees from war zones, as well as communities affected by slavery, apartheid, and forced displacement, we know war trauma has four generations of impacts. Survivors of direct exposure often respond with denial, their children with vicarious trauma, grandchildren with epigenetic changes and great-grandchildren with diffuse impacts.

Healing trauma must be our priority.

A trauma-informed NDP with a trauma-informed politics and economic policy would champion a new social safety net that is not a charity model, but a community development model that builds people’s capacity for engagement in neighbourhoods, while providing a basic income, social housing, training and supports that heal trauma.

The NDP can go all in on reconciliation and the contribution of Indigenous culture to bridge the rural-urban divisions in Canada.

The NDP could reject the simplistic, nationalism, and flag-waving, and instead emphasize global citizenship, and form alliances with international agencies working for international co-operation, sustainable development and peace. And join the movement to reject growth economics and champion the circular economy worldwide.

An NDP with peace at the centre of our politics could put democracy on the agenda, not just for electoral reform, but for democracy between elections with participatory budgets and more collaborative processes for impact assessment, even on things like AI, which is mining or data to sell to multinational corporations and the U.S. dictatorship. Rather than simply identifying vote and asking for donations, the NDP could organize deep canvassing to engage directly with people, forging solidarity, and support for voting in our own interests. I hope the NDP realizes Canada does not need another liberal party.

Canada needs a clear, powerful, vision with a path for a just, healthy and peaceful world, that deregulated markets and neoliberal governments will never create.

Marianne Cerilli is an educator and former MLA focused on community development.