Vote NDP — without illusions

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The political sea change represented by the orange wave in 2011 seems about to wash ashore the first labour-linked federal government in Canadian history.

The union-based New Democratic Party led opinion polls in early September, and is poised to form a majority in Parliament after the Oct. 19 vote. While pundits de­ bate whether this political tsunami is due to mass disaffection with the authoritarian Conservative regime under Stephen Harp­ er more than popular infatuation with the NDP’s milquetoast election platform, unde­ niable is the fact that the two-party system that dominated Canada for a century and a half is a thing of the past.

To say that this makes the Canadian es­ tablishment nervous is an understatement. The ruling rich would much rather limit the “practical” choice of voters to the Bay Street-backed Liberals and Tories. In fact, Capital is so rattled by the polls that a sec­ tion of big business has pushed the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau to campaign os­ tensibly to the left of the NDP.

To create jobs and stimulate the reces­ sion-bogged economy, Trudeau pledges to spend billions to repair infrastructure and to reduce taxes on the “middle class.” He forecasts three years of federal budget defi­ cits. NDP Leader Tom Mulcair stubbornly insists that he will not even contemplate a deficit budget, prompting Trudeau to predict that Mulcair would be forced to renege on bold multi-billion-dollar spending plans, ranging from child care to health care.

Clearly, the Liberals are guilty of supreme chutzpah. It was former Liberal Finance Minister and Prime Minister Paul Martin (now campaigning alongside Trudeau) who imposed the biggest cuts in federal spending in Canadian history. Still, Tom Mulcair has a serious problem. Without substantially increasing taxes on giant corporations and the affluent, which runs counter to his mantra of holding the line on per­ sonal income tax, providing tax credits for businesses that invest in innovation, and his proposal to reduce the small business tax rate from 11 to 9 per cent, Mul­ cair is cutting himself off at the knees.

Even if the Canadian economy does not descend deeper into recession, an NDP administration, under tremendous pressure from Bay Street, would likely trim or postpone indefinitely its promised reforms, thus alienating its popular base. Likely is a re-play of the Bob Rae Ontario NDP regime of the early 1990s, which not only abandoned its promise of public auto insurance, but slashed spending, contracted-out ser­ vices, and imposed unpaid “holidays” on public em­ ployees.

Mulcair’s effort to shake the spendthrift image of the NDP, unjustly fostered by the corporate media, by ap­ ing the fiscal conservatism of the Tories, follows in the shaky footsteps of Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Hor­ wath. She apologized to the party faithful for a disas­ trous June 2014 provincial election campaign.

Mulcair, in the short run, may get away with it be­ cause the Harper Conservatives are forced to wear the current economic downturn. They look like dictators and warmongers, and are up to their eyeballs in deceit over the Mike Duffy, et al, Senate spending scandal.

Nonetheless, over time, Mulcair will have to square his social promises with his tax policies. He will have to deal with his contradictions on pipeline construc­ tion, international “free trade” deals, support for po­ lice and the military, and his persistent excuses for the atrocities committed daily by the Israeli apartheid state and its merciless siege of Gaza.

Party controllers have lately demonstrated a rising intolerance of legitimate political differences in the ranks. Nova Scotia NDP candidate Morgan Wheeldon was forced to resign for calling Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza—which killed more than 2200 people, among them over 500 children—a war crime. NDP member Syed Hyder Ali, who sought the nomination in Edmon­ ton Wetaskiwin, was blocked for quoting a 2014 state­