Yesterday’s election in Nova Scotia produced the first NDP government east of Ontario , and a majority at that.
How did Darrell Dexter manage such a feat, and what lessons does it hold for other jurisdictions in Confederation?
Basically, it comes down to one thing: Dexter followed the correct path.
The NDP is split between two broad traditions.
On the one hand is the patient and incremental path of Tommy Douglas, drawn from prairie social gospel and sifted through a filter of Roy Romanow pragmatism and Tony Blair centrism. It remains the dominant stream in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
This stream isn’t the abandonment of past principle its opponents allege. In fact, it is utterly consistent with Douglas’s philosophy of demonstrating competency in order to be trusted to bring about change. Douglas and finance minister Clarence Fines prudently managed the finances and carefully planned for debt reduction and balanced books. The massive change they brought about in Saskatchewan took place over decades, with medicare only introduced in 1962, 18 years after Douglas first came to power.
This stream of the NDP is the one Dexter firmly aligned himself with: pragmatic, centrist, “conservative progressive.”
The other stream of the NDP comes out of a more radical tradition of demanding immediate change. Dave Barrett’s government in British Columbia in the early 1970s is perhaps the best example. It blew through the province like a comet, left a nationalized insurance system in its wake, and burned out three years later to spend another generation in the wilderness.
But most of the followers of this tradition never achieve government. It is more about the journey than the destination, attempting to win over Canadians to an undiluted socialism rather than to moderate to the realities of the political system and the values of the public.
For instance, Michael Laxer and his neo-Waffle “Ginger Group ” recently wrote Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath to demand the party issue a comprehensive manifesto as soon as possible and stop focusing its resources primarily in winnable ridings.
"Many party members had reservations relating to the “push to win ” strategy that prioritized certain ridings for party resources at the expense of others. We feel that this strategy should be abandoned, as it has failed to produce any tangible results during an election. The NDP should instead adopt a policy that ensures each riding association has the ability to reach every household in their riding at least once during an election campaign. We should force the other parties to have to engage us seriously in every riding in the province."
To argue that the NDP should devote as much money, time and effort in Leeds-Grenville, where they finished in fourth, as Thunder Bay-Atikokan, where they finished just 36 votes behind the winner, is taking the extremely long view.
And rather than a detailed manifesto, the Nova Scotia victory was propelled by a platform that could charitably be called short.
But this is the challenge that bedevils the NDP: in a party long nurtured by claiming moral victories and mythologizing the past, how much can ideology be compromised for power?
Dexter’s victory appears to be the result of three things.
First, the leader himself is personally appealing, warm and trust-worthy. Darrell Dexter carefully managed his image as a pragmatist and non-ideological politician, avoiding the firebrand rhetoric common to NDP opposition parties elsewhere. The NDP campaign was based around their leader, rather than party or policy, as their rightly assessed that their leader was the strongest asset of the three with the general electorate.
