Since its surge in the polls in the lead-up to the 2018 provincial election, the New Democratic Party of Ontario has been a serious contender for power. As New Democrats strategize and plan for events to come, collective memory of the party’s one term in power can offer an important reference point for debates. With that end in mind, this article’s goal is to collect and distill the existing scholarly and popular literature on the ONDP government led by Bob Rae from 1990 to 1995.1
After laying out an overall chronology of events from the lead-up to the 1990 election to the NDP’s defeat in 1995, further analysis in the ensuing sections will go into specific topics of economic strategy, state administration, and political strategy, and engage in some critical reflection in dialogue with the limited existing scholarly writing. The conclusion will put the Rae period explicitly into dialogue with the present day to offer some important comparisons and contrasts. Ultimately, the success of today’s ONDP depends on its ability to hold its coalition together by delivering on substantive reforms that materially benefit Ontario’s diverse working-class.
“Storming the Pink Palace”: A Chronology
The most consistent theme in existing writing on Ontario’s first NDP government is that they were not prepared to take power and had not been expecting to win. Prior to governing, ONDP leader Bob Rae and his caucus at Queen’s Park achieved important policy victories in 1985 through a deal with David Peterson’s Ontario Liberals, made in exchange for the necessary votes to win the confidence of the legislature and abruptly ending more than 40 years of uninterrupted rule by the Progressive Conservative Party. After two short years of Peterson’s minority government, the Liberal Premier called an election and won a crushing majority in 1987. Rae then led an Official Opposition of 19 Members of Provincial Parliament that was smaller than the 1985 caucus, and privately planned to retire as leader after the next election. (Ehring & Roberts, 1993, p. 136-262)
Peterson called an election in the summer of 1990. This strategic decision was related to poor economic forecasts, and that the Liberals anticipated growing public resentment related to scandals like the Patti Starr affair. (Crow, 1999, p. 93; Gagnon & Rath, 1991) Demoralized from their 1987 loss, the ONDP caucus generally faced, “a choice between working the issues and working the scandals,” and chose the scandals. (Walkom, 1994, p. 48; Ehring and Roberts, 1993, p. 216) At the time of the election call, the ONDP sat around 26 percent in opinion polls, and had never polled higher than 30 percent. A hastily assembled platform reiterated historic commitments to introduce public auto insurance and a minimum corporate tax. (Crow, 1999, p. 94)
With PC leader Mike Harris new and largely unknown to Ontario voters, Rae broke through in the polls by channeling the public’s discontent with the Peterson Liberals. Following the leaders’ debate on August 20, polls began to show that the ONDP “universe” had “exploded” in size. The leadership team only began to seriously consider the possibility of victory during the last ten days of the campaign. On election day, Rae appointed former ONDP leader Stephen Lewis to lead the transition team. (Rae, 2006, p.147) Rae’s ONDP took office at the beginning of a severe recession. Their first response was to “fight the recession” rather than the deficit, tabling a budget in Spring 1991 that avoided significant cuts to public spending at a time when it felt like, “the bottom had fallen out of the Ontario economy.” (Rae, 2006, p. 163) By the fall of 1991, the pressure of media criticism and business resistance was beginning to show. Following a caucus retreat, the government announced it would indefinitely suspend its commitment to bring in public auto insurance. In the lead-up to the 1992 budget, the impact of the recession on public finances led senior figures in the government to believe that they had no choice but to implement significant austerity measures. After an awkward silence at a dinner in New York City, Goldman Sachs executives advised Ontario Deputy Minister of Health Michael Decter that a deficit in the $40 billion range would be, “uncharted territory for a non-sovereign borrower.” (Decter, 2010, p. 185)
The New Democrats attempted to use revenue tools to address the fiscal situation, notably through the Fair Tax Commission which tabled its report in 1993. Nevertheless, to meet their deficit reduction target, they felt that reducing spending on public sector salaries was unavoidable. Cuts to this sector led to the most acrimonious episode of the ONDP’s tenure: the Social Contract Act and its fallout. To avoid public sector layoffs, the government used legislation to open existing collective agreements and imposed a combination of wage cuts and unpaid holidays—known in popular memory as “Rae Days”—on civil servants, teachers, police officers, and others whose salaries ultimately came from the province. Although praised by some commentators, (Monahan, 1995) this move proved toxic because of the split it caused between the party and much of the labour movement. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) adopted resolutions withdrawing organizational support for the ONDP, and many grassroots members quit the party. Minister Karen Haslam resigned from cabinet, and MPPs Peter Kormos and Mike Morrow refused to vote with their caucus in the legislature. (Crow, 1999, p. 183; McBride, 1996, p. 187)
The ONDP’s ensuing defeat was so widely anticipated that books commemorating the government’s brief and novel life began to appear before they were even out of office. (Walkom, 1994; Monahan, 1995) Many of their accomplishments were then dramatically undone by the “Common Sense Revolution” of Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservatives who were swept into power by the summer of 1995, and further transformed the province over the following eight years in office. Nevertheless, Rae’s government did plant seeds that could have germinated into a more progressive path for Ontario, including strong labour laws, environmental protections, groundbreaking employment equity measures, and a minimum wage increase.
Economic Strategy and State Administration
… you can’t take on international capitalism in Ontario. It’s not possible to do that.
Evelyn Gigantes, quoted in Thomas Walkom, Rae Days, pp. 170.
To a significant extent, the legacy of the New Democrats’ time in power is marred by popular memory of the specific economic conjuncture that they faced. In this respect, the period of 1990-95 offers a unique and important case study for Canadian left-wing history, and for progressives today. In particular, this episode illustrates an attempt at implementation of a social democratic project within a complex provincial capitalist economy, under the constrains of Canadian federalism. In contrast to the experiences of NDP administrations in other provinces throughout the latter twentieth century, Ontario’s large population and highly industrialized and financialized economy presented both unique opportunities and unique challenges.
In 1990, Rae and Finance Minister Floyd Laughren faced a recession whose roots lay in macroeconomic policy decisions that were largely outside of their control, made by earlier federal Trudeau and Mulroney governments. Carroll and Little (2001) characterize the economic environment of the time as a “hegemonic project” of neoliberalism, whose core features included a monetarist approach at the Bank of Canada and liberalization of trade with the United States. Under these conditions, capital was more mobile, and the national economy was more volatile. With the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in effect alongside the global recession of the early 1990s, corporations began to close and downsize their operations in Ontario. Job losses resulted in higher social assistance costs, while tax revenue declined. (Watkins, 1994)
What could a provincial government do in the circumstances? Social democrats internationally generally moved toward a strategy of “progressive competitiveness.” (Albo, 1994) In this model, the solution to liberalized markets and the impasse of Keynesian stimulus was for the state to support a high value-added, export-driven industrial strategy, notably by supporting training programs for an adjusting workforce. Economic policy debates in the ONDP and the labour movement in this period were rooted in different approaches to this paradigm.
On the approximate ‘right’ of this debate were arguments aligned with the Peterson-era Premier’s Council, which had already come up with the broad strokes of a ‘knowledge economy’ strategy under the Liberal aegis. (Wolfe, 1992; Mackenzie, 1992) On the ‘left,’ Canadian Auto Workers’ staff researcher Sam Gindin argued for a version of progressive competitiveness that would have attempted to realize local economic democracy in
various ways. The government ultimately leaned closer to the thinking of the Premier’s Council, notably in an annex to the 1991 Budget, which emphasized structural change through training and innovation. (Evans, 2011, p. 68; McBride, 1996; Walkom, 1994, p. 102) A less ambitious industrial policy document appeared in 1992, which shied away from major initiatives out of concern for deficit reduction. (Walkom, 1994, p. 107)
During the early 1990s, progressive undercurrents in Ontario opposed these apparent concessions to encroaching neoliberalism. Toronto was then home to a vibrant Marxist political science community, and many of its members attempted to steer the ONDP towards a boldly progressive economic strategy at this conjuncture. Political scientist Daniel Drache edited Getting on Track: Social Democratic Strategies for Ontario (1992) with his colleagues to demonstrate potential alternatives that the government could have explored, such as solidaristic wage decrees, (Mackenzie, 1992, p. 16) and industrial democracy initiatives. (Gindin & Robertson, 1992) Many ONDP elected officials and activists attended a conference at Toronto’s York University in 1991, whose deliberation were later published as the edited volume, A Different Kind of State? (Panitch, Albo & Langille, 1993) The creation and contents of this latter volume illustrated the real transformative ambition that existed within the party and its associated milieus, early on in the Bob Rae government’s life. The ONDP did not seem to suffer from the “bovine admiration for bureaucracy” that is sometimes thought by Althusserian Marxists to be the defining characteristic of social democracy. (Perry Anderson, quoted in Thompson, 1978, p. 66)
On the contrary, they had the opposite problem. Walkom (1994) reports that former, “Trotskyists and Maoists were scattered throughout the government,” often in “senior positions” like the Treasurer’s office. (p. 266) Coming from a place of ideological suspicion, they had so little knowledge of the actual operation of the Ontario government that they struggled to translate their ideals into a program for steering the aircraft carrier. (Cameron & White, 2000, p. 33; Schwartz, 1994) Nevertheless, their attempt to develop actionable ideas from a de facto critical, transformative theory of the state, represented an interesting departure from the openly Fabian doctrines of the Saskatchewan NDP tradition. (McGrane, et al., 2019; Blakeney & Borins, 1998) This conversation in the 1990s ONDP would certainly be relevant again today.
Ultimately, the ONDP faced the immediate task of running a provincial state that was not of its own making. Important decisions took place in the form of typical Canadian style executive politics among Rae and his immediate entourage, mostly composed of senior partisan staff such as David Agnew, Chuck Rachlis, Ross McClellan, and others. Career civil servants like Michael Mendelson and Michael Decter were also influential at the centre of government, sometimes trusted because of service to past NDP governments in the prairie provinces. (Walkom, 1994, p. 53-57; Wolfe 1997) The New Democrats tried to strengthen the centre of government out of a desire to impose political direction on the bureaucracy, but stopped short of the large, politicized cabinet offices that were part of the CCF-NDP tradition in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. (Cameron & White, 2000, p. 37)
Implementing a social democratic agenda was particularly difficult in the context of Ontario’s neoliberal moment, which began years earlier with the Committee on Government Productivity (COGP). This committee outlined thoroughgoing reforms to Ontario’s public administration over the course of its reports in the early 1970s. From approximately 1975 onward, Ontario’s budgets abandoned the language of full employment and shifted to an overriding emphasis on expenditure control, following the lead of Conservative federal governments through the 1980s on containing public sector wage growth. The New Democrats inherited this Treasury department in 1990. (Evans and Shields, 2017, p. 137)
Moreover, Rae seems to have believed in the zeitgeist of the 1990s. He saw a way forward for social democracy that involved greater acceptance of the centrality of markets, and a kind of corporatist ethic through which the state would try to co-operate with business (Rae, 2006; Walkom 1994) Key NDP notables elsewhere in Canada saw things similarly during this period. Although real budgetary impasses may have existed at different conjunctures, the core of the prevailing line of thought was an eminently conventional kind of economics: balanced budgets are desirable because they indicate to business that future tax increases are less likely, and this will incite businesses to invest (Mackinnon, 2003, p. 76). These were hardly consensus views in the ONDP, and internal pushback against Rae began more or less immediately at provincial council meetings and other fora. (Crow, 1999)
When the cabinet and the caucus ultimately came around to supporting austerity measures as the approach to global recessionary trends, it was above all due to the prevailing sincere view that the government simply had no alternative—it would otherwise face default or unmanageable debt-servicing costs. The idea of a “debt wall” created anxiety within the cabinet, and has since been debunked. (Crow 1999; McQuaig 1995; Walkom 1994) The broader issue of debt servicing costs was a legitimate concern, but existing literature leaves substantial room to imagine that a different NDP Premier’s Office might have charted a different course. Certainly, informed voices outside government argued at the time that an alternative economic strategy, without public sector wage cuts, was possible. This was the position of a report by the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU) and of the ad-hoc “Public Services Coalition,” which developed with the support of key left-wing intellectuals. (Panitch & Swartz, 2009, p. 172; McBride, 1996, p. 82). At the time, prolific Keynesian economist Harold Chorney argued that concerns over the deficit were widely overblown at all levels. (Chorney 1992,
1999)
Nevertheless, there was a strong mainstream view in favour of deficit reduction across Canada during this period. Its proponents included the federal Conservative government, business-funded think tanks like the C.D. Howe institute, and much of the ‘common sense’ of mainstream media. (Crow, 1999) Rae and his closest advisors were on-side with Treasury bureaucrats, and even prominent social democrats who were convinced that there was no alternative given the conditions outside of the province’s economic control. (Rachlis & Wolfe 1997)
As the years went on, the government found itself subtly drawn into the market-driven zeitgeist across many areas of public policy. The genesis of Highway 407 as a public private partnership was in the ONDP’s Ministry of Transportation during this period. With the Premier’s blessing, high-profile capitalist Maurice Strong began taking steps as chair of Ontario Hydro to lay the groundwork for future privatization. (Walkom, 1994, p.253-255) Regarding environmental policy, the government slid over the years into “market environmentalist” approaches. (Stewart, 2000) In social policy, the government scrapped its plans for comprehensive welfare reforms due to concerns over costs. (Sheldrick, 1998, p. 58) In the absence of a strong alternative strategy, the politics of deficit reduction pervaded virtually all areas of the ONDP’s public policy. Walkom (1994) opines that the cabinet and caucus were operating on “the most pessimistic and determinist elements of Marxism”—the belief that their hands were tied in a world overdetermined by international capitalism. (p. 170)
Economic Strategy and State Administration
CLASS, BROKERAGE AND ELECTORAL VOLATILITY
The centrality of debates over economic policy and public finances in the literature on this government suggests one clear generalization: by today’s standards, in 1990, the ONDP was all about class politics. Rae recounts that, in conversations among downtown Toronto businessmen, instead of discussing who in the new government they had gone to school with or golfed with, a common joke in fall 1990 was : “my cleaning lady’s in the cabinet!” (Rae, 2006, p. 261) Civil servants sometimes compared NDP political staff to the unsophisticated Clampett family from the 1950s TV show The Beverly Hillbillies. (Cameron & White, 2000, p. 34) The cabinet contained new and substantial representation from Ontario’s working-class, including blue collar union activists like steelworker Bob Mackenzie and prison guard Frances Lankin. (Panitch & Swartz, 2009, p. 164) The solid core of the ONDP’s support was working-class Toronto ridings like York South, along with industrial centres across the province like Hamilton, Oshawa, Sault Ste-Marie, and Sudbury. Party President Julie Davis was also Secretary-Treasurer of the OFL. (Walkom, 1994, p. 6)
Some authors have tried to minimize the NDP’s working class anchorage. (Evans, 2012, p.55) They have a point insofar as the nineteenth century European-style mass party model—featuring millions of members organized into an elaborate complex of counter-hegemonic institutions—was never realized in Canada. Things might have been easier for the ONDP had this been the case. Unfortunately, Toronto was a small colonial outpost at the time that Karl Marx was writing. The Ontario CCF and the industrial labour movement grew later and concurrently in the 1930s and 1940s, while the declining Communist Party attacked and undermined organizations that it did not control. (Horowitz, 1968; Caplan, 1973)
In Ontario, the CCF-NDP and the labour movement built and maintained enough organic strength to be a major force in provincial party politics from the 1940s onward, periodically forming official opposition and appearing as a contender for government.(Morley, 1984) In contrast to the 2000s-era federal NDP activists who viewed the party’s ‘relative autonomy’ from labour as a fruitful strategic step, many scholars of this period point to labour movement support as a key variable in the party’s success: the party was stronger when the unions were prepared to invest in it to a greater degree. (Archer, 1990; Brodie & Jenson, 1988) It is possible to imagine a scenario in which the NDP-labour institutional complex might have become strong enough to affect a true realignment of Ontario politics, of the kind that occurred in Britain in the early twentieth century, and to some extent in the party systems of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia. Such a scenario could have involved the NDP working to build up class consciousness among white collar and service workers, possibly through the types of grassroots organizing approaches advocated by people like Rae’s leadership rival Richard Johnston. (Jenson & Brodie, 1992; Ehring & Roberts, 1993, p. 82)
This conscious, slow-burning organizing scenario did not unfold. The ONDP was unexpectedly propelled into power due to changes in the dynamics of electoral politics that were only beginning to be understood at the time. Increasing “volatility” in voter behaviour across Western Europe and North America was coming to replace the old party loyalty that tended to be firmly engrained with other sociological characteristics. (Dalton & Wattenberg , 2002) In Canada, scholars have described these voter trends as the “decline of deference.” (Nevitte, 1996) The electorate had grown more inclined to judge incumbent governments over scandals, economic performance, and other factors. Under these conditions, the embrace of “catch-all” or “brokerage” politics that had begun with the Ontario CCF in the 1950s finally bore fruit: the New Democrats surged in the polls when voters began to consider them as a credible alternative to the scandal-tainted Liberals. (Tanguay, 1997)
The New Democrats had edged into power with 30 percent of the popular vote and governed with great sensitivity to this fact—perhaps too much sensitivity. When they backed down on social democratic initiatives, they alienated the popular movements whose organizational muscle powered their electoral machine in the first place. They won some praise in mainstream media for implementing austerity measures, but this did not win the loyalty of Ontario voters. Conversely, the price they paid was great: the labour movement would spend the next twenty years waffling around a strategic voting strategy that benefited the Liberal Party at all levels, because of the disappointment and losses in Ontario. (Pilon, Ross & Savage, 2011) What ultimately broke down during the ONDP’s time in power was a core bargain with the working-class, theorized by political scientist Adam Przeworski. (1986) For the party to succeed, social democrats in power must deliver material gains to their working-class constituency. In too many cases, the New Democrats appeared unable to hold up their end of the bargain.
RACE, GENDER, DECOLONIZATION AND QUEER LIBERATION
Although the economic core of the social democratic bargain broke down under the strains of governing, a narrow focus on wages and public expenditures would exclude other elements of the ONDP’s experience, which still bear relevance for collective memory. An interesting feature of class politics in Ontario in the early 1990s was the way in which the institution of the NDP acted as a kind of incubator for a class-political base to germinate into an intersectional movement with strong demands in areas of ‘identity politics’ that were much more contentious three decades ago. The integration of these causes, as well as the environmental movement, into the NDP sometimes drew veiled criticism at the time, with commentators seeing an incoherent amalgam of ‘special interests.’ It may be true that thinly resourced NDP caucuses often drifted into a strategy of “contentless populism,” (Bradford & Jenson, 1992, p. 192) rather than articulate exactly how they would be able to harmonize all these interests in power.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that identity politics was a major force powering the labour movement in structuring the very articulation of class politics. British historian E.P. Thompson provides a helpful analysis in viewing class as a process; something that “happens” when members of an exploited group come together to act in class ways. (Thompson, 1968, p. 9-13) Though rooted in capitalist social relations that have an objective character, class formation is a cultural process that looks different in different cases according to the complexities of the real human beings involved. In Ontario, this process often had gendered and racialized elements at its core. McKay (2006) comments on the “centrality” of “socialist feminism” as an ideological and organizational force in the NDP between the 1970s and the 1990s. (p. 198) McKay continues:
…in some respects feminism was far more “organic” to the massive socio-economic change ushered in by the post-war socio-economic formation than were traditiona labour-based ideologies of the left… Socialist feminists… strongly rooted in the labour movement… could now present themselves as being more connected with what was actually happening within a rapidly feminizing working class itself than were conventional Marxists.
McKay, 2006, (p. 204-205)
This was certainly true of the ONDP in the 1980s. (Praud, 1999) Rooted in the labour movement, the NDP provided an institutional base for the expression of different demands emanating from a diverse working class. Jamaican-Canadian British Columbia MLA Rosemary Brown expressed her intersectional politics as the result of having had to, “learn well about racists and about sexists and about capitalists.” (Brown, 1989, p. 87) The ONDP cabinet in 1990 had the highest proportion of women in Canadian history and included a black high school principle—Zanana Akande—in the important portfolio of Community and Social Affairs. (Walkom, 1994, p. 52)
In office, the ONDP took many steps that were progressive for the time, such as the creation of an Anti-Racism Secretariat which funded a variety of projects led by minority communities. It also introduced an employment equity regime that included regulations for government agencies and large firms. The ONDP declared its intention to have a “political relationship” rather than a clientelist relationship with First Nations and made major investments on reserve while devolving responsibilities and attempting to improve consultation. (Walkom, 1994, p. 225; Rae, 2006)
Holding together different elements of the ONDP coalition was not always smooth sailing in government. White male auto workers cited employment equity as one factor in their decision to disaffiliate from the NDP in Oshawa. While previously touted in cabinet, Akande resigned from her role when controversy arose over her conduct as a landlord. She and black community groups publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with Rae and white feminists in the party over the handling of the Carleton Masters affair, in which a black corporate executive was the subject of sexual harassment complaints. (Walkom, 1994, p. 229) Rae permitted a free vote in the legislature on a comprehensive gay spousal rights bill, which resulted in its defeat due to splits within caucus. (p. 213)
When it came to many program proposals driven by feminist and anti-racist movements, there was a recurring theme: “the equity agenda could be derailed if it interfered with the overriding goal of deficit control.” (p. 213) In this very tangible sense, the ONDP’s experience illustrates Canadian political philosopher James Tully’s point that “struggles over recognition” are indissociable in practice from “struggles over distribution.” (Tully 2000)
Conclusion: Now and Then
In many respects, today’s ONDP faces a very different society and economy from that of 1990-95. While notions of fiscal responsibility still underpin the game of party politics in the media, the “deficit hysteria” that pervaded Canadian politics at the time feels like a distant memory. (McQuaig, 1995) The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in destabilizing widely accepted understandings of state fiscal capacity remains to be seen, but more broadly, the discourse around public finances has also shifted since the 2008 Financial Crisis. The public is increasingly facing the realities of growing inequality, offshoring of wealth, and the diminished role of the state in the economy that began in the 1980s. The really tough questions of provincial fiscal capacity can be avoided in the absence of another severe recession.
Communities of left-wing economists that were less visible in the 1990s have become much more institutionalized through organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Progressive Economics Forum, and an emergent left-wing think tank sphere that has grown to respond to right-wing attacks on independent credibility. To reinforce itself against the “ideological and policy failure” that plagued the party during the Bob Rae-era, (McBride, 2005) the ONDP must focus on developing intellectual self-confidence regarding how exactly to realize a social democratic economic strategy, given the opportunities presented by stronger policy and intellectual communities that have developed since the 1990s To push back against business-funded ‘stakeholders’ whose agenda openly influences the current Doug Ford Progressive Conservative government, the party will need to be clear on its own analysis.
The agenda will also be different in an economy that is much more knowledge-sector and service-sector driven than it was in 1990. Instead of worrying about maintaining old Fordist industrial jobs, the NDP could reflect on how it might use the provincial state as a tool to bring about an industrial strategy in Ontario with the emerging green economy in mind, while reigning in the financialization which has influenced today’s affordability crises in housing, foods, and fuel. As decades of austerity take their toll on public services, and homelessness and poverty reach crisis proportions, there is great appetite in 2024 for the kind of expansionary fiscal policies necessary to house, feed, clothe, and care for the population.
Selling a forward-looking social equity agenda in the middle of a recession was a difficult task in the early 1990s. Ontario has changed a great deal since then. The population is much more diverse, and once-controversial subjects like queer people’s rights have become objects of mainstream consensus. The ONDP itself has arguably come a long way in becoming a more diverse party—it struggled to even hire racialized people in political staff positions in Rae’s day. (Walkom, 1994, p. 211) In recent years, successful organizing in ridings like Brampton East and Scarborough Southwest has demonstrated the party’s ability to appeal to a very broad electorate. To consolidate its gains, the ONDP must remain in touch with the class politics on which it has always been built, and put forward distributive demands and an economic strategy that can offer tangible, material gains for working people of all backgrounds.
Furthermore, electoral volatility has only become more pronounced since the 1990s. Some NDP strategists and partisan scholars take the view that these conditions should be exploited as an opportunity to double down on brokerage politics and ‘market-oriented’ campaign strategies. In 1990, as in 2011, these did appear to deliver the goods. However, the Rae experience reminds us that forming a government is only a first step. Although the New Democrats enacted many progressive policies, they also made many sacrifices that they believed would be rewarded by mainstream public opinion—and that they imagined lining the road to consolidating their status as a governing party. Instead, they were ‘hung for a penny’ by a hostile media and opposition parties. Faced with a choice between two ‘liberal’ parties, Ontario voters tend to opt for the real thing. Longtime NDP activists George Ehring and Wayne Roberts criticized their generation of NDP strategists for failing to realize this, and the observation remains relevant. (Ehring & Roberts, 1993, p. 38).
An alternative path would be to win the allegiance of a new electoral coalition by making structural changes to Ontario’s society and economy that break with the prevailing neoliberal model. At a time when centrism is discredited in the public eye, and voters are drifting into abstention or right-wing populism, the conditions may be more favourable for attempting such a task now than in 1990. Provincial social democratic governments have achieved lasting gains and impacted the policy paradigm of federal politics in the past. In the days of Tommy Douglas’s Saskatchewan CCF and Dave Barrett’s BC NDP, the party did not hide its anchorage in socialist principles, and it drew on a large and motivated membership base. If today’s New Democrats aspire not only to form a government but to change Ontario and Canda, then it will be necessary to draw inspiration from these elements of the party’s tradition—as well as from the brief moment in fall 1990 when everything seemed possible.
Notes
- My thanks go out to Dennis Pilon, Paul Kellogg, Keith Brownsey and Peter Graefe for their valuable feedback on a conference paper that laid the groundwork for this article. Outside the academy, I am grateful to many people who have prompted and influenced my thinking on this topic through conversations over many years. All errors are my own. ↩︎
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Click to expand for a full list of references
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