Unite the "Left"? I Think Not

In the month since the general election of October 14, there have been an increasing number of calls to “unite the left.” Generally when this is proposed, the writer or speaker means that the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens (and sometimes the Blocists) should unite to form a single party, as the Reform/Alliance and Progressive Conservatives did in the early years of the decade to produce today's governing Conservative Party of Canada. Protagonists of this view believe that this is the only way in which the opposition to the current government can gain power.

Even those on the right who don't want to see this but think it would be a good idea for the opposition parties (I was talking with one of them about this yesterday), suggest that it would be successful, and would allow the NDP to gain a greater ability to push through policy proposals, as opposed to the “freak of mathematics” (as my friend put it), that results in the NDP every so often holding the balance of power for a Liberal minority government.

As you may have gathered from my previous mentions of this proposal, I think the whole idea is a crock, designed to subsume more principled opposition into the Liberal Party, and effectively render it impotent. If the NDP were to go along with this, the Party would simply become the left wing of the Liberal Party of Canada, which is really not acceptable, considering the substantial differences on policy between the parties. Liberal brass loves this idea, because it allows them to no longer have to worry about electoral opposition on their left flank, and thus to concentrate on matching the Conservatives tax cut for tax cut. The only pain the Liberals would suffer from this agreement is having a very vocal, but ultimately powerless, left-wing faction within their party.

The subsuming of the NDP (and to a lesser extent the Greens) into the Liberals would also be profoundly anti-democratic. The people are far better served by a system with more than two political parties. For an example of what happens when there are only two national parties with any real representation, look no further than the United States. There, the red and blue wings of the Property Party trade power back and forth, stultifying in a stagnant swamp of political theories long gone sour. The democratic processes are far better served when there are third and fourth parties able to compete for seats and a share of power. Even the old Westminster-style Parliamentaries democracies have multi-party systems now: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India and the mother of them all, the United Kingdom. The US is one of the few industrialized democracies in the world clinging to a two-party system, where the space between the parties on most issues is so small as to be negligible. A two-party system reduces voter choice to a minimum, and that is anti-democratic. I don't want to see that for Canada, and that is another reason I oppose the idea of uniting the “left.”

But the most important reason that I oppose this idea is that it pre-supposes that the Liberal and Green parties are in fact parties of the left, or even the centre-left. As my Conservative friend pointed out to me, the Liberals have the capacity to occasionally elect a centre-left leader. However, this has not happened since the days of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Some, perhaps many, would disagree with me and point at the hapless Stephane Dion. However, Mr. Dion was not left or even centre-left. His public face is a mix of dated and stale Liberal centre-left proposals that we have heard every election since 1993, such as universal childcare that was never delivered, and a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to his party's friends on Bay Street, promising more and deeper corporate tax cuts for the Conservatives, and a policy to fight greenhouse gas emissions that would have directly placed the burden for changing consumption practices on the poorest members of Canadian society. The Liberal Party is expert at putting on a veneer of the centre-left come election time, but the Liberals have not governed from the centre-left in a long time, indeed governing from the centre-right during the long Chretien/Martin years. No, the Liberals are not a party of the centre-left, and to unite with them is to lose one's soul in pursuit of power.

Similarly, political pundits seem to revel in identifying the Green Party as a party of the left. Sorry, no. Green Party policies focus on market based solutions, and reverse-wealth transfer schemes, such as a carbon tax. They are led by a woman who said that women do not have "the frivolous right to choose" to have an abortion, and who worked for Brian Mulroney, identifying him as the "greenest" Prime Minister in history. The leadership of the Green Party, and increasingly it's electoral base, is drawn from former Progressive Conservatives. Not exactly the left. Caring about the environment is not a left-right issue. How you approach environmental protection is, and that is where the Greens show themselves not to be a party of the left, as the media and many pundits would have us believe.

As for the BQ, merging with a party seeking the dissolution of Canada is incompatible with the mission of a federal political party representing the entire country. They have some good, left, views and policies, such as opposition to the use of replacement workers during strikes, but their policies of radical decentralization are a right-wing position to take.

The reality is, despite the mass of pundits who would like to see a subsuming of the NDP and Greens into the Liberals, there is no collection of left-wing parties to unite. Canada has a party of the far right, two parties of the centre right, a party of the left-centre-left, and a party devoted to Quebec independence. The left is already as united as it can get without pawning its soul to buy power. And if you don't have any principles, then all you have is power, and all you are is a Liberal.

If the NDP were to merge with the Liberals, I would rip up my membership there and then. For this socialist, the NDP has drifted too far right as it is. Drift much further, and there is no more value in the party for me.

I'll have an entry updating the Liberal leadership race within the next couple of days.

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