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Matthew Lau: Every way you look at NDP you lose

Would-be leaders favour government grocery stores, more municipal EVs and CEO salary regulation. Even former leaders are opposed

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Regarding political candidates’ debates, Simon and Garfunkel famously sang: “Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose, every way you look at it you lose!” They weren’t singing about last week’s NDP leadership debate, but they might as well have been. The line about losing would be true for two reasons. First, with any of these candidates and their policies, Canadians lose. But second, whoever becomes leader, the NDP will lose the next election. There’s no need to shout about the NDP; we can laugh about them instead.

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There is a leadership race to begin with because of the party’s performance in last year’s election, which was itself a bit of a joke. Jagmeet Singh resigned as leader after the NDP’s worst election defeat in its 64-year history. It won only seven seats and 6.3 per cent of the popular vote, down from 25 seats and 17.8 per cent in 2021, and it failed to achieve official party status for the first time since 1993. Singh finished a distant third in his riding of Burnaby Central, with fewer than half the votes of even the second-place finisher. Not really a laughing matter.

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The vote for leader is on March 29. The three main candidates are author and socialist activist and Avi Lewis, who is Naomi Klein’s husband, Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, and union leader Rob Ashton. There are also two lesser-known candidates, Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail.

So far, Canadians have largely been ignoring the bunch of them. A CBC article on January 11 asked whether anyone was actually paying attention to a leadership race that was turning into a “snoozer.” Rob Ashton did manage to generate headlines a few days later. How? He was caught using artificial intelligence (AI) to answer NDP voters’ questions during an online “Ask Me Anything” session — a session during which, ironically, he denounced AI for “being used to replace workers, exploit artists and creators, spread misinformation, and undermine democracy, all in the interest of corporate profit.” Hilarious!

The mainly laughable policies being proposed are another source of amusement. At last week’s debate, front-runner Avi Lewis highlighted his campaign’s proposals for “the essential role of public ownership,” including having government-run grocery stores, government-run cell phone and internet companies, and even a government-run bank operated through Canada Post.

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This is all so insane it has even former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair making fun of it. As he told CTV News after the debate:“I guess he wants the government to run grocery stores because the government is so good at doing everything else. Actually, no, the government is not good at doing everything else because they can’t get you your passport or your pension cheque. So the very idea of having the government involved in something like groceries is mind-boggling.”

Mulcair was more generous to Heather McPherson, Lewis’s main challenger. He called her a “solid” MP trying to build a bigger tent than the more radical Lewis. But her policy book is full of howlers, too. Her environmental plans include: doubling federal funding to help municipalities turn to electric vehicles (a disaster in every Canadian city that has tried it); imposing a $4.2-billion “excess profits” tax on oil and gas companies whose earnings “exceeded previous standards”; establishing an “Office of Environmental Justice to address the disproportionate impacts of pollution and biodiversity loss on Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities”;  and having government take ownership stakes in early-stage clean technology companies.

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Meanwhile, likely third-place finisher Rob Ashton’s policies are exactly what would be expected from a union leader. In addition to using AI while denouncing AI, they include: decrying CEOs who are “paying themselves millions” (though CEO pay is in fact determined by shareholder-elected boards); an estimated $1.7 billion in punitive taxes targeting companies whose CEO compensation is more than 50 times its median workers’ pay; and significantly higher taxes on corporate income, personal wealth and capital gains.

Is further reducing investment, productivity, and economic growth the goal here? With policies and candidates like these, Canadians’ laughter won’t stop until the NDP has left and gone away, hey, hey, hey.

Judging from where it sits in the polls, it may already have.

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