Winnipeg Free Press Wed Jan 10 2007

LIBERAL Leader Stephane Dion’s ultimatum to Liberal MP Wajid Khan that he couldn’t have one foot in government and the other in opposition produced the 125th seat for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives last week. It also delivered the moment of truth to NDP leader Jack Layton. The New Democrats’ 29 MPs now hold the balance of power, meaning they can stop the other opposition parties from defeating Harper’s government.

Beginning with the last election, the NDP and the Conservatives have been, well, indecently cosy. On Monday, though, Layton sounded tough, saying he’ll operate issue by issue and won’t guarantee the Conservatives’ survival unless they make “dramatic changes” in environmental policy, including a commitment to the Kyoto Protocol and a hard cap on greenhouse gases.

But that could be mere public posturing. The party’s fortunes are sinking as NDP voters shift from dismay to disgust at the footsie being played between their federal caucus and the most hard-right government in Canadian history.

This oddest of political odd couples’ first date was the sudden defeat of the Liberal government in November 2005, launching the federal election and wiping out milestone achievements the NDP supposedly cherishes: Canada’s first national child care and early learning program, the Kelowna Accord for aboriginal communities and progress on Kyoto.

Layton’s pre-emptory strike also vitiated a big chunk of Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer’s agenda, from adding $20 million to the province’s child care program to a national power grid and saving Lake Winnipeg, both of which were committed to by Dion during his short term as Liberal environment minister.

The Conservative-federal NDP courtship acquired dramatic intensity when, midway through the campaign, a giddy Winnipeg North MP Judy Wasylecia-Leis summoned the media to triumphantly wave a letter from former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli accepting her request for a criminal investigation into a possible federal Finance Department leak on taxing income trusts. The Liberals went into free-fall. In the excitement, no one, least of all, the party of the left, challenged the propriety and motives of the head of the national police force interfering in a federal election. Borrowing a leaf from his party’s strategy during the 1988 free trade election, Layton directed 99 per cent of his fire at the Liberals and said next to nothing about the threat Harper’s U.S. Republican-style neo-conservatism posed to Canada’s national institutions and very survival.

With Harper in power, the “happy couple” settled into a form of domestic bliss, as the NDP unfailingly scorched Liberals and enabled Conservatives, working with them to pass an Accountability Act hobbling federal power and rescuing their joke of a Clean Air Act.

The prime minister was impressed. At a dinner last spring, he approached Elizabeth May, then campaigning to lead the Green party, to ask her this peculiar question: “I just want to know, what do you have against the NDP?” Canadians familiar with Harper know he holds “socialists” in utter contempt. But he’d love them as his main adversary, because he thinks they’d be an electoral walk-over.

York University political scientist Jim Laxer, a founding member of the NDP’s left-wing Waffle movement, fears Layton is determined to follow former NDP leader Ed Broadbent’s 1988 game plan and strive to replace the Liberals, no matter the cost to the country.

Harper’s new environment minister, John Baird, is already preparing to bill and coo with the NDP on the Clean Air Act. “I worked very well with Jack Layton, I worked very well with Pat Martin…” he said right after his swearing-in. “If you just put aside who gets the credit and work together, I think we can accomplish a great deal.”

Instead of cuddling up to the Conservatives, the NDP should seize the agenda from the Liberals and become the neo-cons’ primary foe, Laxer says. The party also should seek a deal with the Liberals to implement proportional representation to end the vote-splitting among the four parties on the centre-left that permits the sole right-wing party to rule with only 35 per cent support.

“It ought to be clear to any New Democrat that if Mr. Harper were to win a majority of seats in the next election, he would attack Canada’s social state with a vengeance and seek a deal with Quebec sovereigntists by savaging the power of the central government,” Laxer writes in the Globe and Mail. “The next election is going to be a tough one for the NDP,” he predicts. The party has to be “unequivocal” in making Stephen Harper the target.

But if Layton goes back to saying the Liberals and Conservatives are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, “not only is his party going to be punished at the polls by progressives who want Mr. Harper out, he will be endangering the long-term survival of the NDP.”

This article was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 and is filed under Canadian Issues and Politics, Extra! Extra!, General, NDP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.