After Ed Broadbent resigned as leader of the national New Democratic Party in 1989, he said no to invitations to speak at party conventions. The leaders who replaced him, he said, did not need him hanging around.
He set aside that rule yesterday. He accepted NDP Leader Jack Layton's invitation to address the party's federal convention in Halifax. He agreed to speak, he said in a conversation this week, because he had something important to say.
The imagery he possibly won't like, but he arrived in Halifax like a gruff, Holy Land prophet, an Isaiah in goatskin robe and sandals, to declare how the NDP should behave as a social democratic party – he used that name, which many of his fellow New Democrats are tiptoeing away from – in the next election campaign.
In his speech, he proclaimed the arrival of “a social democratic moment” in Canadian politics.
He reached back into history and talked about the reasons why Canadians once embraced the mythology of themselves as a sharing, caring society, a society that extolled equality and the dignity of its members, and how those labels became the glue of social cohesion.
He baldly used the T-word: taxation. That sharing, caring society of government pensions, universal health care, comprehensive employment insurance, the expectation that every boy and girl with ability could go to university all was paid for “by adequate levels of progressive taxation.”
He brought with him scriptural text: the findings of British social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson that life expectancy, physical and mental illness, obesity, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, youth suicide, impaired social participation and a host of other social ills are outcomes not primarily of poverty but of inequality – the gap between the rich and everyone else.
(He could have used Canadian data. James Dunn of the University of Calgary published research in 2003 showing that afflictions such as cancer and heart disease have more to do with job status and income disparity than lifestyle and genetics.)
And he said that because of social-policy slashing and irresponsible and unfair tax cuts in Canada, a recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – the international body of 30 major free-market economies – shows that inequality in Canada is now growing faster than in the majority of OECD countries.
Richard Wilkinson's inequality research has been around for 30 years, although there are academic critics who still think that the central issue is poverty, not income disparity. The NDP, for its part, has individual policies aimed at social equality – child tax benefits, national preschool child care and so forth.
“But to have an all-out attack on inequality?” Mr. Broadbent asked in the interview. “No, it hasn't had that.”
That is his social democratic moment.
NDP leader Ed Broadbent smokes his pipe during an open caucus meeting in Port Coquitlam on Oct 18, 1980.
“The time is ripe for the party to really look at it,” he said. “Both the Democrats in the States and even New Labour – Gordon Brown, whom I have a very low regard for as practical politician – have advocated a tax increase on the rich, which New Labour has always backed away from and so have the Democrats.”
Ekos Research president Frank Graves, one of Canada's most astute pollsters, said Mr. Broadbent's language may well have traction with voters. “These concerns have been historically strong with Canadians, but have weakened over the past decade. Current circumstances [the deep recession] may be increasing receptivity.”
Historically strong – as in the past mythologies Canadians applied to themselves that Mr. Broadbent talked about in his speech.
“Achieving more equality in our everyday lives,” he said, “we became a nation of greater social cohesion, made up of citizens who for the first time began to describe themselves as ‘sharing and caring.'
