Canadian Socialists Show Unprecedented Gains 6MAI11

AN interesting look at the recent Canadian election and the rise of the NDP to become the opposition party in Parliament. From Tikkun Daily.....

by: Ralph Seliger

I’m not a Canadian, but I’ve lived in Canada and was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Democratic Party, the perennial third (sometimes fourth) party in that country until a few days ago. I don’t wish to steal Peter Marmorek’s thunder as an actual Canadian and I look forward to his post-election analysis, but I would like to share some reflections of my own.
When I was a student at McGill in the early ’70s, I campaigned for an NDP candidate in Montreal. Naturally, he finished a distant third (if not fourth). But I understand that dramatic NDP gains in Quebec (where it nearly wiped out the separatist Bloc Québécois, down from 47 seats to four) have catapulted it into a respectable and unprecedented second place finish nationally–up from 37 to 102 seats, with the Liberals crashing from 77 to 34.
The ruling Conservative Party won a majority of the seats but only 40% of the vote. The key to the election strategically seems to be that a close split between Liberal and NDP voters in Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, allowed the Conservatives to win a decisive number of seats there.
I was drawn to the NDP out of a sense of international solidarity as a young American socialist who was a member of the Socialist Party-USA and later its successor organizations, the Social Democrats-USA and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. DSOC, a left-wing split-off from the somewhat rigid and surprisingly hawkish SD-USA, was led by the brilliant democratic socialist thinkers and writers, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe. In 1982, I was present when DSOC merged with the New America Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America.
I also vaguely recall seeing Michael Lerner on that occasion, who was one of NAM’s key leaders. Unfortunately, although the DSA enrolled an impressive number of stellar thinkers and activists–including Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornell West, Jerrold Nadler and many others–it was clearly not successful in moving the United States in a social democratic or democratic socialist direction (I like to think of these two terms as basically synonymous). The DSA still exists, yet it cannot be said to be truly influential.
American socialists had reason to envy Canadians for its NDP, even though it was not one of the two major parties contending for national power. It generally elected 20-40 Members of Parliament and would occasionally win power in a province or two (it has actually governed five of Canada’s ten provinces, including Ontario, plus the Yukon Territory). With these new elections, however, this pattern has changed, as the NDP is now the official opposition in Canada’s parliament, having decisively displaced the Liberals, historically that country’s most successful political party.
Whether the NDP remains a major force and even forms the government one day, largely depends upon how well it navigates what might be called the challenge of utopianism, or “making the perfect the enemy of the merely good.” I refer back to Michael Harrington to explain my meaning: I recall him saying that a utopian vision is of value because it defines the direction in which you want to move society; but he warned that if you ever thought that you’ve actually arrived at this ideal state, then you (actually, we) are in trouble, because you’ve probably established a totalitarian order. Still, a movement devoid of idealism, rots from within and is corrupted by the allure of power.
Hopefully, the NDP can do a lot of good despite these potential pitfalls. Mind you, even when only a third party, it left an indelible mark on our neighbor to the north by modeling on a provincial level Canada’s one-payer health care system.