It’s a good thing that at least Jack Layton’s NDP is bringing the sweet smell of success to a distraught Vancouver. But the excited delegates at the weekend’s convention may want to remember that not all such party gatherings have been joyous celebrations. Nor have they all been harmonious models of solidarity forever, as this one will surely will be.
As it happens, I was a delegate at the founding convention of the party in 1961, which wasn’t really the founding convention at all. The NDP was simply the old socialist CCF under a new name. (Big prize to anyone who knows what CCF stands for.) Simply re-branding the CCF wasn’t the intention, by any means. The CCF was deep-sixed because it was doing so badly. Begun nearly 80 years ago at the height of the Depression, expectations that hard times would drive the new party/movement to success soon proved naive; Canadians were too insecure to try an unproved and vaguely dangerous new left-wing ideology. Even under its revered leader, Rev. J.S. Woodsworth, the CCF failed to get as much as 9 per cent of the vote and eight seats.
Wholly unpredicted, it was the prosperity and growing confidence brought on by imminent victory in the Second World War that gave the CCF its first success. In 1944, Tommy Douglas made North American history by winning government in Saskatchewan, producing “an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism.” But after a titillating blip in the polls, the federal party continued under M.J. Coldwell on the long road to perennial third party status. Mr. Coldwell, a dignified principled man whose very existence seems to have been obliterated by the tricks of history, led the party in five elections, never getting more than 15 per cent of the vote, sinking in his final two campaigns (and my first two) to 10 per cent and 9 per cent. Nor did the party form a single other provincial government in those lean years, although it was the perennial bridesmaid in British Columbia.
That’s when the party brains reckoned they needed a better formula, and the New Party, as it was originally called, was launched. Democratic socialism would largely be replaced by a softer social democracy, for the few who grasped the difference. The hope was to add to the CCF’s narrow base both more “progressively-minded” Canadians who weren’t socialists and far more trade unionists, the idealized working class beloved of left-wing theorists. In those ancient days, there were enough trade-union members in Canada to matter. In the end, alas, the liberals largely remained with the Liberals while most rank-and-file unionists refused to follow their leaders beyond the factory floor.
I represented the University of Toronto CCF Club at the founding convention in 1961 when Tommy Douglas was elected leader. (There’s a photo of me joining a standing ovation for something or other, maybe the resolution calling for Canada to quit NATO, with a cigarette jutting out of the corner of my mouth and smoke encircling my entire head; I pay the price for that youthful folly even now.) Once again dreams and fantasies flourished beyond reason. Tommy may have been Saskatchewan, but he wasn’t Canada. There’s only one truly iron law in Canadian politics: No provincial premier has ever been elected prime minister. Whatever makes these men – yes, all men, of course, so far – popular at home makes them imperfect fits for other parts of the country. Under Mr. Douglas, the party did no better than 18 per cent of the vote, far from expectations, good enough only to remain the third or even fourth party.
Still, in the decades to come until May 2, 2011, the 18 per cent neighborhood was a pretty welcome federal result for the NDP; on a number of occasions it got far less. Happily, provincial governments were eventually formed in B.C., Manitoba repeatedly, Saskatchewan again, Nova Scotia, the Yukon, and, yes, once even in Ontario (or was that one just a dream?). But the federal party realized its true role was not as a government-in-waiting but as the conscience of the country and its influence on governments.
