Since the last federal election in Canada there has been a lot of discussion in the media about the NDP’s poor performance in that election and how Tom Mulcair may or may not be responsible for this.
But did the NDP perform poorly this time or are they simply returning to their normal status following an unusual blip in popularity? Federally, they have, until the 2005 timeframe (or thereabouts), been a third party behind the Conservatives and the Liberals.
IMO the NDP’s climb to second party status only occurred because of a combination of two factors: the Liberal fall from grace as a result of the sponsorship scandal; and the likeability of Jack Layton. Without those events I don’t think that the NDP would be having concerns about leadership and direction as they are now since they would never otherwise have come so close to victory.
So, did their status really collapse or did they simply return to their normal state?
The sponsorship scandal was an election before that. The 2011 fiasco was because they had a terrible leader and no coherent platform.
A little of both.
Yes, some of it is the Johnson Effect (a return to normal levels of performance) but some is that they had no clearly differentiating platform. What did they stand for?
The election become a “Harper or not Harper” vote, an election they could not win, since Justin Trudeau is less like Harper than Tom Mulcair is. The NDP failed to make an issue their defining thing.
You’re proof that I found it tricky to clearly make my point re Sponshorship (no snark intended). My point is that had the scandal never occurred, would the NDP have just continued as always, sans Orange Wave in QC. Yes the scandal was 9 yrs before the most recent election but wasn’t that crucial for the NDP’s surge?
The sponsorship scandal was pretty much ancient history by the time of last fall’s election. The Liberals’ real problem was that they had no credible leadership after Chretien. I predicted that both Dion and Ignatieff would be complete disasters and so they were.
I think you’re mostly right about the NDP. Their big success in the previous election was due to a convergence of factors – Layton’s huge popularity, the unelectability of the Liberals and hence lack of any other alternative to Harper’s increasingly reviled Conservatives, and strong NDP support in Quebec which is traditionally more left-leaning than most of the country.
It led, I think, to unrealistic expectations this time, especially in light of the NDP win in Alberta, and Mulcair is being somewhat unfairly blamed for failing to achieve it. OTOH, Mulcair is no Jack Layton and has a tendency to be abrasive, and their pandering to Quebec with the “50% plus 1” strategy on separation was not very smart. And young Trudeau turned out to be a more appealing choice than even the polls had predicted.
I composed my previous post before the intervening ones appeared but got interrupted before I hit “send”, so it’s a bit out of sequence but nevertheless I believe is correct and says more or less the same thing as RickJay. I don’t understand why you would think the sponsorship scandal had much to do with the NDP’s rise and the Liberals’ fall when the Liberals so clearly had no credible leadership during that period. Ignatieff was barely even Canadian – he was an ex-pat with more time in Europe and the US than Canada, brought back from the US and parachuted into a riding to give him a Parliamentary seat so he could become their anointed hero, and turned out to be a gaffe-prone annoying jerk.
You’re right about the leadership issue for the liberals - I had forgotten about that mess with Ignatieff and Dion - so there’s another factor.
IAN a follower of any specific party but I think that Mulcair is taking the rap for a situation that would have occurred regardless, unless the liberals had never recovered.
Regarding his leadership, he struck me at the time as much more reasonable and pragmatic than Alexa McDonough and Audrey McLaughlin.
That’s pretty much how I see it. When the Conservatives alienated Quebec, the Liberals were wandering in the wilderness. The only options for Quebec voters were the Bloc and the NDP. I don’t know enough about the Bloc to say why they couldn’t pick up the slack, but Jack Layton had positive nice-guy appeal and Quebec roots. Without him, there was no more reason to support the NDP. Mulcair, even with his roots in Montreal, lacks any inspirational qualities.
I have zero confidence in Mulcair as a national leader. Besides booting the campaign with ill-considered decisions, he recently criticized the prime minister for not calling out Donald Trump as a fascist. If Mulcair thinks it’s a PM’s job to interfere in the election process of our biggest and best ally, I don’t want him anywhere near 24 Sussex. The NDP would do itself a favour by finding a new leader.
If you’re agreeing with the “sponsorship scandal” theory, then I disagree – you seem to be forgetting that the Liberals were going through party leaders like disposable dishcloths, and Dion and Ignatieff were just about as likeable and unelectable as dishcloths, too.
But you’re right that Muclair has made some ill-advised policy decisions. As I said before, the “50% plus 1” policy on Quebec was nuts, and so was the inappropriate meddling in US politics. Trudeau, in contrast, has been careful to stay the hell out of it. In fact, when he was in Washington for the state visit, reporters at one point tried to get him to comment on Trump, and I’m sure he would have been diplomatic, but never even got the chance because Obama immediately stepped in and quite properly deflected the question out of courtesy to his guest. Mulcair meanwhile wades right in like a hapless buffoon. And I say this as someone who generally thinks highly of the NDP.
I’d disagree that Dion is unlikable. He’s likable and capable. He’s just got zero charisma and mediocre communication skills. He makes a perfectly good cabinet minister, but a lousy party leader.
I concur with the general consensus that the NDP surge in the previous election was the anomaly, and their performance under Mulcair was an inevitable regression to the mean resulting from the Liberals regaining their footing. If the NDP are content to remain in a third-party role, Mulcair is a serviceable leader. A bit abrasive isn’t really a deficiency in the leader of a third party that’s mostly trying to shift the Overton window rather than wield real power. If on the other hand they want to displace the Liberals as the voice of majority of non-conservatives, he’s also a serviceable leader since he’s sufficiently pragmatic to not drive centrists away by means of strident leftism. In that case the abrasiveness does become an issue, abut I’m not sure who would be in the wings who could do a better job.
The NDP surge in 2011 was a real anomaly, agreed. And Jack Layton was as great as Ignatieff was awful. But the NDP didn’t do much to build on it either. Here is a case in point.
In the previous election, the NDP recruited a college student and put her name in a French riding in Quebec. She barely spoke French and considered that she had so little chance of winning that she was on vacation (Vegas, IIRC) on election day. She won! She moved to her riding, took intensive French lessons and started going out and meeting her constituents. She really represented her constituents, got to know them and got known by them. She survived the Liberal wave and is still in parliament. In other words she took her job seriously and was rewarded. Had the while NDP done that, the results might have been different.
No, by wandering in the wilderness, I meant they were aimless, like a rudderless boat. Or like going through leaders like disposable dishcloths.
I saw that, and my reaction was that Obama didn’t trust Trudeau to say the right thing, which irked me some. Or maybe it was courtesy, I don’t know. Since then, Trudeau has handled it diplomatically whenever he’s been asked, as befits a prime minister.
Throughout the campaign and since, Mulcair’s decisions have looked like directionless flailing, as if he doesn’t have a philosophical conviction to guide him like Trudeau has or Harper did, and is just winging it depending on which way the wind is blowing on any particular day. Which I guess is a longer way of saying he wades in like a hapless buffoon. I also say that as someone who thinks highly of the NDP, although more at the provincial level than federal.
Regardless of whether the NDP was punching way above strength in 2011, the reality is that as recently as a few months before the election, the NDP was in striking range in the polls of forming government in last fall’s election. And Mulcair, for whatever reason, couldn’t deliver, leading them back to third place.
I think courtesy was perhaps indeed part of it, in that no foreign leader should be subjected to questions about internal American politics, especially of the circus sideshow variety. But the other thing is that Obama has not hesitated to make a few snide comments of his own. He obviously finds Trump thoroughly ridiculous and the prospect of any Republican president from the current field to be appalling, and hasn’t been reticent to take the occasional jab. Like when he was asked after the SOTU address if he could imagine Trump doing the same, and he said “maybe on Saturday Night Live”. So I think he saw any possible Trudeau response as being no-win – either a respectful response about Trump, or a criticism that would be construed as an embarrassing foreign intrusion. So better to step in and cut it off. A very wise choice, the more I think about it.
I just hope the NDP doesn’t get into the previous Liberal pattern of having disposable leaders until they find one that works. There is much to be said for the devil that you know. I hope they know what they’re doing, because I don’t see any obvious high-profile successor unless they can bring Jack Layton back to life.
I’d be curious to see if there’s any appetite for folding the Green Party into the NDP. The Greens have a national infrastructure and, since May replaced Harris, have a left of center platform that would appeal to general NDP voters. I’d hazard a guess that consolidating the Green vote into the NDP would peel off Liberal voters and some Bloc supporters.
Yes, I think now it was probably out of courtesy. It was certainly bad manners for the reporter to ask that question of a foreign leader on American soil, and Obama might have been saying as much by stepping in like he did. (“Thanks Obama!”;)) Given the state of journalism these days, it was probably more important for the reporter to ignite a controversy than get a substantial answer on policy.
Back in Canada, the farthest I’ve heard Trudeau go on Trump is that he’s confident that Americans will make the right choice. If Mulcair was PM and openly called Trump a fascist, he and the country would be in the middle of a shitstorm now.
As extremely inappropriate as that would be, I doubt the storm would be that bad, really. Americans care little about Canadian opinions of them (to their credit) and Canadians across the political spectrum think Trump is a jackass (also to THEIR credit.) So, really, it would have been bad, but not that bad.
Mulcair didn’t get the boot because he was mean to Donald Trump, anyway. He got the boot because, in the wake of an election disappointment, the NDP is apparently being hijacked by the cappuccino socialists who take the Leap Manifesto seriously.
I also say that as someone who thinks highly of the NDP, although more at the provincial level than federal.