Review of From Layton to Singh

 From Layton to Singh, by Matt Fodor

reviewed by Ruth Latta

Matt Fodor’s book, From Layton to Singh (Toronto, Lorimer, 2022, ISBN 978-1-4594-1670-0) is subtitled: “The twenty year old conflict behind the NDP’s deal with the Trudeau Liberals.” This deal, announced in March, 2022, is a “supply and confidence” agreement between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals and Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats, in which the latter promised to support the Liberal government and keep it in power until June 2025. The arrangement included one item from the NDP’s 2021 election platform, which called for the inclusion of dental care in the public health system.  All other elements of the deal were Liberal promises and commitments, including pharmacare, child care, emissions reductions, a fairer tax system, and measures to make voting easier.

Fodor, a graduate student in Canadian history, says that the NDP’s social democratic base has been subdued by “Orange Liberals”, who have turned party policy from the left to the centre.  He sees the Trudeau-Singh deal as the culmination of top-down control, rejection of grassroots  input, and a growing “professionalism” in the NDP, which he traces from Layton through Tom Mulcair, to Singh’s leadership. Fodor suggests that, in earlier days, the New Democrats saw themselves as the conscience of Parliament and in tune with grassroots movements on the left of the political spectrum.

Fodor  has written an excellent overview of the ups and downs of the NDP from Layton to Singh. His sources are reports from the mainstream media and a variety of books and articles about the NDP, the earliest of which dates back to 2004.  Actually, the tension between “movement” and “party” and the issue of who controls the party, the brass or the grassroots, predates Layton, going as far back as the early days of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the NDP’s ancestor, founded in 1933.  The dilemma of whether the party should aim for Parliamentary success or whether it should be in tune with contemporary social movements has been going on for years, as well.

George Ehring and Wayne Roberts’ 1993 book,  Giving Away a Miracle:  Lost Dreams, Broken Promises and the Ontario NDP (Toronto, Mosaic, 1993) involved  an examination of the top-down, central-control tendency in the party.  In 1985, a formal accord was struck between the Liberals and NDP in Ontario, in which the NDP agreed to support certain legislation. This deal seemed at first to  turn out badly for the NDP, when the Ontario Liberals won a majority in 1987, but the bright side was that the NDP became the official opposition. Then, in the next election, the NDP under Bob Rae won and formed a government.  (Can Jagmeet Singh in 2023 win credit for the achievements of the 2022 deal and go on, at least, to bringing the federal NDP back to official opposition status?)

Roberts and Ehring blamed the Ontario NDP’s defeat in 1995 on Ontario NDP leaders who made the party into one like all the others. Once  in power, the Rae government was short on progressive legislation and sought to reassure Bay Street of its moderation. Matt Fodor’s study of  this NDP shift to the right, outlined in From Layton to Singh, covers a different jurisdiction and time period, but echoes the same concerns as Ehring and Roberts.

While few will quarrel with Fodor’s thesis, some will contend that, to survive, the NDP had to become more mainstream.  In fact, social democratic parties are tightrope walkers. Their fate  is always dictated by the ups and downs of our economic system, and they are always under pressure from both the right and the left. Here in Canada, if the NDP compromises too much with capitalism they become indistinguishable from the Liberals, and voters think, “We might as well vote for the real Liberals, who are more likely to form a government.” Meanwhile, they lose support from disappointed voters on the left.  Yet if they throw caution to the winds and fight for their most progressive principles as formulated by the grassroots, they may not elect enough members to the legislatures to make any kind of difference.

Fodor tends to ignore other factors besides the NDP’s shift to the right that may have led to its poor showing during the Layton to Singh years.  For instance, he sees Tom Mulcair’s decision to run on a balanced budget in 2015 as being a consequence of Mulcair having been a Liberal Quebec cabinet minister, with weak ties to the NDP.  Actually, Mulcair first joined the NDP in 1970 in response to Tommy Douglas’s defence of civil liberties at the time of  the FLQ Crisis and the War Measures Act.  Later, Mulcair ran as a Liberal in Quebec because the only other option at the time was the Parti Quebecois and he was a federalist. Later, he quit his cabinet post over an environmental issue. Fodor sees Mulcair as an Orange Liberal careerist. Others might see his path as one of experience in government.

Those who remember the atmosphere of the Stephen Harper years may have another explanation for Mulcair’s and the party brass’s choice of platform in 2015.  The NDP’s opponents have always characterized it as a spendthrift party, in spite of the fiscal responsibility demonstrated by NDP provincial administrations. Since Harper’s Conservatives seemed to have a strong chance of winning again in 2015, one can see why Mulcair and the NDP brass wanted to show that they did not support wild spending. Fodor is accurate in saying that the Liberals’ 2015 platform “out-lefted” the NDP’s, but another big factor in their victory  was the Canadian icon/celebrity status of their new leader, Justin Trudeau.

When the 2015 election reduced the NDP  from 94 to 44 members of Parliament,  Mulcair was blamed, and soon dumped as  leader.  Was his rejection about the 2015 platform, or was it also that the delegates at the convention couldn’t forgive him for being neither Jack Layton nor Justin Trudeau? Mulcair’s “firing” was a sharp contrast to the party support that Jagmeet Singh  received after the 2019 election, in which the party came down from  44 seats to 24, (now 25) and lost all but one of its seats in Quebec.

Regarding the post-2015 NDP leadership race which Singh won, Fodor mentions that Charlie Angus was supported by many longterm NDP members “frustrated by the centralization of the party” and “sought to appeal to those outside the Ottawa bubble and the left-behind working class”.  Despite the fact that Angus was running first in the leadership campaign until Singh sailed in to be the party’s Trudeau, Fodor gives him only a paragraph.  Angus had a seat in Parliament, he supported  big tent movements, and his air of authenticity reminded many of  Bernie Sanders, who was and is very popular among American young people in progressive organizations. Nowhere does Fodor acknowledge that Angus might have been the better choice, and, of course, it’s all water under the bridge anyway now.

Fodor quotes Brian Topp as saying that by 2025, Canadians will have gotten tired of having the Liberals in office. Perhaps, with the Conservatives supporting a form of Trump-style right wing populism, voters will choose the NDP, if Singh “rebuilds the Layton coalition uniting progressives in Quebec and English Canada.”

We’ll see.