The NDP leadership contest, which culminates tomorrow in Toronto, has had an oddly untimely quality, at least as reflected in media debates. Take two examples. One main issue has been foreign policy, especially the war on Iraq. All candidates are opposed. But their reasons — war solves nothing, peace must have a chance — could have come from opposition to war with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, or Vietnam in the seventies, or anti-nuke campaigns in the eighties. Yet the Iraq threat occurs against a far different background: fear and anxiety in our own population about more terror attacks such as September 11. Surely the point is not to sound antiwar in the manner of another decade, or anti all war, but anti this war.

Or take economic debate, which has focused on our trade deal with the U.S. and policies such as privatization that accompanied it. On these topics, it has often felt like 1988 again, with arguments against getting into those deals. Yet back then, one could only predict dire effects. Now the results are in, but we’ve heard, at least in those TV debates, little on Walkerton, declines in health care and education, or the pirates at Enron and some of their shabbier cognates here.

I raise these matters not just to be cranky (as I tend to be re the NDP) but to try to make some professorial points on political leadership in the narrow sense of party leader. I don’t think the essence of leading in an electronic age is charisma, a term as devalued as, well, charisma. Nor is it about being “relevant.” You don’t escape marginality by trying to be relevant any more than you find happiness by pursuing it. The job of leading in our system — I’m tossing this out for consideration — is to sense the deeply felt concerns of the moment among your fellow citizens, their anxieties and aspirations; then show them how those concerns can be met through the programs or principles of your party.

What concerns Canadians today? I’ll suggest: First, a fear of loss of national identity from being bullied or ignored by the U.S. — always a Canadian worry but now even greater, since America is utterly unrivalled. Second, a sense of loss of democratic and economic control to global corporations, operating through faceless international trade deals and bodies, in the name of an unstoppable globalization. Third, and most recently, fear of personal obliteration through attacks such as September eleventh. As I say, the first half of leadership’s task in our time is sensing such concerns, and showing it senses them; the second is responding. You don’t begin with your principles and program, but you get to them.

Let me digress a moment to another leader, Fidel Castro. (I’ll request any pundits present to restrain catcalls and guffaws till I’m finished.) I recently watched a film about him. At one moving moment, shortly after Cuba’s 1959 revolution and in response to American threats, he announces from a balcony to a million Cubans the expropriation of a list of huge U.S. companies such as United Fruit. To each name he reads comes a vast roar of approval. They knew those names, deeply and well, and he knew his people. It made for endless trouble, but he is still around to deal with it. He survived and sometimes thrived, criticizable as he is. He showed that even a small country can take a stand and make a difference, for itself and for others such as Angola; and when he attended Pierre Trudeau’s funeral, I think Canadians were not dismayed but rather, most of them, pleased and proud.

It’s odd how the NDP, which considers itself so principled, has for fifteen years been obsessed with shallow image concerns. When Audrey McLaughlin succeeded Ed Broadbent, it was “time for a woman,” though no one explained why. Now it’s time for something “new.” Other parties don’t try tha t— can you see Paul Martin pitching himself as new? Only Stockwell Day went that route, and became a joke. You don’t declare yourself new, fresh or different; you leave that judgment to voters. It’s embarrassing, like old folks shouting, “I’m hip, I’m funky.” Hmm, must be the NDP at the door.

Let me end on a cranky revisionist note. There’s been talk of returning the NDP to the glory of 1988 when it won fourty-three seats under Ed Broadbent. But a year before that, the NDP led the polls and was poised to win. Then came the free-trade deal, and the NDP made a strategic decision, against its own principles, not to stress that in its campaign, since it might work for the Liberals as well. So the Liberals led the fight against free trade, and Canadians turned to John Turner to express their concerns. In desperation, the NDP then attacked him, helping Brian Mulroney and free trade to a victory, while salvaging a mere fourty-three seats. It was, I’m saying, a low, not a high.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.