You just never know when the old paradigm is going to shift on you. But when it hits you up-side the head, there’s no doubt that it’s happened.

Just ask Stephen Harper. The relentlessly melancholy leader of the Canadian Alliance, now languishing at ten per cent in the polls, must be wishing he could just move to the U.S. and drop the thankless task of convincing Canadians that their country sucks.

But just as interesting, paradigm-wise, is the fact that the party which all the neo-con pundits in the country had declared dead on dozens of occasions has suddenly risen from the ashes under its new leader, Jack Layton.

Irrepressibly optimistic, and with enough energy to lead a couple of parties, Layton seems to be everywhere at once — putting the lie to the notion that he had to have a seat in the House of Commons to move the party ahead.

Layton has been credited by some with forcing Paul Martin to (almost) get rid of his shipping company. Meanwhile, the normally combative Harper has been reduced to whining that Layton is getting more media scrum time.

The resurgence of the NDP will make for very interesting politics in the West between now and the next election. The landscape is changing quickly, and the battle between these two parties could shape the politics of the region for years to come.

The Liberals, of course, will continue to form the government in Ottawa for the foreseeable future. But the Liberals in the West have always been sensitive to the shifting tides of populist sentiment, redefining “the centre” according to the political currents of the day.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the centre was decidedly “left,” as the NDP successfully captured the imagination of more Canadians in a period of rising expectations of government. But in the 1988 election, positioned to once again determine the direction of the country, the NDP made the biggest strategic error in its history by initially ignoring the issue of free trade. Had they harnessed their early forty-three-per-cent support in the polls to join the Liberals in an attack on free trade, Canada might well have ended with a minority Liberal government obliged by NDP pressure to genuinely oppose continentalism.

Instead, they belatedly attacked the Liberals, confused their supporters and helped hand the country over to Brian Mulroney and free trade. Equally important, the Reform party and its right-wing populism gradually filled the political vacuum. Reform shaped the political debate that allowed the Martin-Chrétien Liberals to implement an agenda of deep spending reductions and tax cuts for the wealthy. Canadians were told for more than a decade to expect less — much less — from government.

But things are changing. Extensive polling by several firms, most notably Ekos Research Associates, reveals that there is a sea-change happening in Canadian political culture. In unmistakably large numbers, Canadians are looking for a return to what the pollsters call “activist government.” That means a return to nation-building, sovereignty, funding the common good, paying more attention to community and paying less to some abstract notion of “the economy.”

Canadians, says Ekos President Frank Graves, are expressing “a strong rejection of trickle-down economics” and the idea of minimal government.

This is extremely bad news for Stephen Harper. A February Ekos poll revealed that the Alliance had plummeted from its election high of 25.5 per cent to an almost historic low of 10.7 per cent — a nearly sixty-per-cent decline in support. The NDP had doubled its popular support, going from 8.5 per cent in the last election to 17.2 per cent. In B.C., the NDP was actually nine points up on the Alliance, while the two were in a dead heat in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Only in Alberta is the NDP going nowhere, with the Liberals, Tories and Alliance all tied at around thirty per cent.

Of course, this could all turn out to be just a flash in the pan — a quick and fleeting bump as the new guy takes the NDP helm. But what should worry Harper and the Alliance is that they are totally out of synch with increasing numbers of Canadians on a whole range of issues. While Canadians in the millions supported the Romanow report on medicare, Harper denounced it as unaffordable and irresponsible. When he beat the post-budget tax-cut drum, low and behold, no one was listening (except Bay Street).

Over and over, the polls show that people don’t want tax cuts — they want medicare, education, child care and fewer kids going hungry. That’s pretty much what the NDP is calling for.

Harper, on the other hand, now seems to have bet the Alliance farm on the demand that Canada join the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Instead of defending Canada’s right to sovereign and independent decision-making against the backdrop of implied retaliation threats from U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci, the Alliance leader acts almost as an American Fifth Columnist.

While attitudes toward the war are highly volatile and Canadians are worried about U.S. retaliation, Harper isn’t listening to the increasing number of Canadians who wish to maintain a distinctive identity and not simply mimic all things Yankee.

The rising popularity of Layton and the NDP is directly linked to their unequivocal anti-war position and implicit recognition of Canadian values. While the NDP slipped a bit in one new poll — as the Liberals jumped six points to fifty per cent, likely due to Chrétien’s decision to stay out of the war — the Alliance remains stuck with its core support of ten per cent.

As the Alliance and its dreary leader find themselves, in Graves’ words, “increasingly on the margins” of Canadian opinion, the NDP’s Layton will be challenging Harper on another front: popular democracy. The founders and supporters of Reform and Alliance have always laid claim to the role of promoting democratic reforms — the old populist ones of recall and referenda, with an elected Senate thrown in. Of course, none of them have been enacted.

Layton supports democratic reform too, such as proportional representation. But he is also promising to democratize the way politics is done. The NDP leader intends to remake the party in the image of its populist predecessor, the CCF. He has established five caucus advocacy teams on key issues facing Canadians and intends to use these to begin to transform the NDP into a popular-movement party.

The five advocacy teams — peace and independent foreign policy, healthy communities, sustainability, community investment and democracy — are tasked with proposing solutions and connecting the parliamentary team with academics, community organizations and citizens across Canada.

This will not be easy for Layton and his caucus. It is clearly a long-term project for a once-populist party that devolved over many years into a parliamentary and electoral machine. But at least it has the appeal of offering hope to a citizenry that has come dangerously close to rejecting politics as irrelevant. And it is being launched at exactly the time that Canadians say they want their political leaders to be there for them and to start listening to what they are saying. Which, unless I am missing something, is just what Stephen Harper seems determined not to do.

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Murray Dobbin

Murray Dobbin was rabble.ca's Senior Contributing Editor. He was a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over 40 years. A board member and researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy...