Some NDPers Claim Tom Mulcair Was Illegitimately Ousted As Party Leader

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Those looking back on Mulcair's ouster and claiming special knowledge about desires for him to come back or the idea that he was conservative seem to have some amnesia over what happened post election and why Mulcair failed.

Most of this is not worth a review but some of it is:

After the election, NDP supporters widely considered that the party moved to the right in rhetoric, if not in the program. The party angered members by being out of touch, continually asking for money rather than offering real participation. The anger of the loss of seats was natural. Putting these three together, there was a way out for Mulcair. He did not take it.

After the election Mulcair refused to entertain the possibility that he was at all responsible. He said the party made mistkaes but could have said that his rhetoric was out of step and that his attemtps to calm people to vote NDP was an over moderation rather than a sign of conservatism on his part. He could have taken responsibility, especially since the NDP program was sufficiently progressive and he did not sell it as strongly as his anti-deficit message.

Since he gambled that he could refuse personal responsibility and this failed, he lost the vote.

The NDP is programmed to be patient with its leaders, who generally show more humility. Mulcair's gamble resulted in him being considered unqualified and incompatible with leadership of this party. As well, his refusal to take personal responsibility publicly led many outside the inner sanctum to believe reports of tensions inside. Further, Mulcair gave no indication that the party, under hime, would work particularly hard to engage with members and give them a greater say.

I think I may be representative in a number of respects of the response:

I supported another person before Mulcair (Saganash in my case) but later moved to support him and be hopeful that he could do well.

I supported "angry Tom" largely. Did not like arrogant or petty Tom and I did not like unambitious Tom. However, humilty after the election could have won me over at least to the point of wanting to give him another chance at redemption.

It was precisely his failure to recognize the disconnect in relations between the party and members (rather than general mistakes in the campaign that he admitted) AND his outright refusal to QUICKLY accept some personal responsibility for the tone of the campaign and the emphasis on the more deficit fighting rather than progressive elements of the platform. There was also the words I wanted to hear which was the party take responsibility for not fighting the Liberal "middle class" campaign directly and pretending that they only had to beat the Conservatives.

I was left concluding that Mulcair was arrogant and lacked good judgment.

The party itself, under Mulcair, led a sham consultation that seemed designed to avoid what Members really wanted to say after the election. It made things worse rather than better.

This ALL related to his post election performance which I found infuriating.

I cannot say what percent felt as I do. I have no access to polling and do not know if anyone actually asked these questions. However, I know I was not alone. Some disagreed with me here but a good many agreed.

It seems many want to not remember this period and suggest either that Mulcair was screwed -- which he wasn't or that he somehow could not help himself becuase he was too right wing. Neither of these are true. Mulcair lost the leadership because of his post election behaviour and has shown no sign that he understands this.

As I said upthread, Mulcair is not a conservative in my view but a man lacking in the confidence of the party positions that he wanted to sound conservative in order to have a hope at being elected. This is important becuase admitting this could have allowed him to stay on.

***

Fast forward to today. Ask me how I feel about a Mulcair comeback: pretty much the same way as then. Mulcair would need to prior to asking the question show a great deal of humility and willingness to admit not just that he made mistakes but identify which ones they were. By not doing so he left the party both without what he could have contributed but also without the ability to resolve what went wrong. Instead, the party went into another leadership race without looking at what the party itself did wrong and what was wrong about the outgoing leader. It failed to bring to the leadership race the most important lessons of the last election.

Since then many people lost hope in the party and support has collapsed into pessimism that the party could amount to much of anything in the short term.

Sure we have to move on. Only through recognition of some of this will we be able to.

The fantasy of Mulcair coming back when he is not interested and not willing to address these is a distraction that the party does not need. It is too late now for the next eleciton I think. Post election the party will propbably screw up and put the review down to leadership alone then and select another leader to make the same mistakes. Ideally you would get a leader and leadership willing to really engage in an examination of the lessons both with respect to the behaviour of the leader, the campaign, the platform etc. Then it would matter less if that leader stayed on or left. Mulcair could have had that review and could have remained leader or another leader could have implemented the learning. By refusing to do this we have kicked the solution down the road and the party will struggle to mean anything much.

For whatever it's worth to you, I'd originally thought Saganash would be the dream NDP leader-from Quebec, FN, connected to the social movements and a believer that they should be made welcome in and should be accepted as valid forms of political expression by the party.  The personal issues Saganash has had to battle are what knocked him out.  I still hope someone like him could be chosen as leader in the future.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

I supported another person before Mulcair (Saganash in my case) but later moved to support him and be hopeful that he could do well.

So did Saganash.

 

I totally agree with you, Ken - Mulcair's "interim" period was a total disaster, even worse than his actual leadership. He was almost entirely absent in that time, "leader" in name only and not in action. I totally believe he was giving the middle finger to the party that just voted him down and was deliberately being a lame duck to torpedo the party, just as he's done since as a media commentator.

It was a crazy decision to let him hang on that long, and should never happen again with any other departing leader.

People are still pre-emptively blaming Mulcair for the loss in the next election? Wow, the amount of power some people ascribe to him as if he is some magician using black magic to curse the NDP for the next 50 years is comical. Mulcair isn't the reason Jagmeet Singh is polling in the low teens. Jagmeet Singh is the reason Jagmeet Singh is polling in the low teens

If Mulcair would've stepped down the day that he lost the leadership absolutely nothing would've changed. The membership voted to have the leadership vote 2 years after Mulcair was voted out as leader, so had he stepped down the day he was voted out there just would've been some other lameduck ineffective leader for 2 years instead of Mulcair.

nicky wrote:

the caucus also voted to have him remain as interim leader and the party executive decided on the timing of the leadership

nicky, here's a major difference between the two of us on the question of what makes a good leader.  If the party leader I supported lost more than half the seats that party held, I would call for that leader to immediately step down, because it isn't possible for a leader who loses more than half the seats of the party that leader was supposed to be leading ever to lead the same party to a comeback in the next election.

nicky wrote:

the caucus also voted to have him remain as interim leader and the party executive decided on the timing of the leadership

Mulcair was never the interim leader. He was the elected leader of the party until succeeded by Singh. The only interim leader the federal NDP has ever had was Nycole Turmel.

As far as I know Mulcair was the only federal leader ever to lose a leadership review. The Tories eventually ousted John Diefenbaker, but there was no formal review per se and the party brass simply called a leadership convention over his objections. Joe Clark won his post-election review but decided to step down and run again because he felt the margin was inadequate.

As for other parties tolerating losers, the federal Liberals let John Turner stick around for a second election after the largest seat loss in Canadian history at the time.

 

brookmere wrote:

As for other parties tolerating losers, the federal Liberals let John Turner stick around for a second election after the largest seat loss in Canadian history at the time.

Though there at least three attempted caucus coups.

1. Yes you are right Brookmere that TOM was not an interim leader but the actual leader until he was replaced.

My point remains, nevertheless, that he was asked to stay on by the caucus. After the vote was tallied in Edmonton, and before it was announced there was a meeting of the caucus backstage at which TOM was asked to stay on as leader until his replacement was chosen. I understand this was by unanimous vote. Then the executive chose a leadership vote 18 months or so away.

A little hard in these circumstances to say TOM was deliberately clinging to the leadership.

2. And Ken, where to start with your Trumpian inconsistencies?

 You say TOM shd have stepped down after losing half the NDP seats but stubbornly claim that Corbyn should remain leader after losing MORE THAN HALF of Labour’s votes in EU election, by-elections, the local elections and almost every opinion poll. 

And remember, when Tom lost the vote in Edmonton he still had a 3 to 2 positive approval rating. Corbyn’s is almost 4 to 1 negative.

But then consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds as someone , possibly a Corbynista, once said.

And in a GENERAL ELECTION, the comparision I was making, Corbyn led Labour to a solid gain in seats and a massive gain in vote share.  The scale of the gains proves that Labour would have won that election if the PLP had accepted that Corbyn's landslide victory in the second leadership vote had settled the leadership issue and had got behind him, rather than continuing to undermine him.  And the humiliating landslide defeat of the PLP's candidate, Pfizer lobbyist Owen Smith, in that leadership vote is proof that Smith would have been a disaster had he been the one leading Labour through an election campaign, since Smith was the candidate who had no crowds turn out at his leadership rallies-he actually resorted to asking to speak at CORBYN'S rallies-and inability to draw crowds while standing for the leadership means he would never have been able to win the support of the electorate during an election campaign.

nicky wrote:

That’s right Ken. Blame everyone except Corbyn himself for Labour tanking under his so called leadership. Everyone is so mean to him.heaven forbid he should assume any responsibility himself.

 

I reference the abuse and disrespect because he's done nothing to deserve it.  He never deserved to be accused of going easy on antisemitism-an infinitesmal phenomenon within the party at most that he had been fully addressing from the start, unlike the Conservative Party, UKIP and the Brexit Party, which have never had any restrictions on antisemitism and virtually never discipline actual antisemites.  And Corbyn never deserved to be endlessly badgered on Brexit when a) the position the party conference took on that matter was the only position it could take without losing EVERY Labour Leave voter, and b)when he is pledged to a second referendum now and that's the most he can do WITHOUT fatally splitting the party.

Corbyn never deserved to have his own MPs briefing against him to the press.

He never deserved to have them try to remove him from the leadership with a "no-confidence motion" that was entirely outside party rules

He never deserved to have Margaret Hodge scream slanderous abuse at him in the House of Commons, within earshot of anyone walking by.

He never deserved to have senior Labour figures trying to hold Labour's vote share down at the local elections by continuing to attack him and demand his resignation DURING the local election campaigns.

He never deserved to have a dozen Labour MPs resign in a one-a-day-sequence during the 2017 election campaign, in an effort to try and force him to stand down during the campaign, at a time when it was impossible to change leaders by any legitimate means before polling day.

He never deserved to have his own MPs repeat the false accusation that he SUPPORTED Hamas and Hezbollah when all he ever did was to use diplomatic language to try and get those organizations into peace talks with Israel.

He never deserved to have those same MPs repeat the slander that he "supported the IRA" when, firstly, he simply supported a unified Ireland in the Eighties-at a time when that was the only possible socialist or social democratic position to take and when, at that time, supporting continued partition meant supporting the perpetual repression and persecution of the Catholic/Nationalist minority in Northern Ireland.  He reached out to Sinn Fein because he realized that there was no chance to get the physical force party among Catholic/Nationalist people in Northern Ireland to cease using violence WITHOUT working to get them into negotiations.  Corbyn was later assigned by Blair to be an emissary to Sinn Fein in order to get them to accept the Good Friday Accord-the accord which is the ONLY reason why sectarian violence in Northern Ireland has largely come to an end, since there was never any possibility of getting the IRA to sign a surrender document and give up the armed struggle without getting anything in return.  

Every slur against Corbyn, every line of attack, was and is bogus.  There are reasonable grounds for critique of his  leadership-more than anything else, he should have stood up firmly against the anti-Corbyn claque in the PLP and should have given his support, at the last party conference, to Open Selection, which would require all sitting Labour MPs to actually CONVINCE their constituency parties to renominate them at each general election, rather than treating re-selection as an entitlement.  Corbyn should not have tolerated the spectacle of Labour MPs-most of whom were imposed as candidates, against the will of their constituency parties, in constituencies Labour would have won with any candidate, colluding to undermine a leader those constituency parties don't want them to be undermining.   

At this stage of the game, there is no longer any justification for a relationship between Labour MPs and constituency parties in which those MPs are only re-selected because party rules make it virtually impossible to de-select them, even though those constituency parties never wanted those people to be the Labour candidate in the first place and even though that candidate acts as if she owes the constituency party nothing.

An MP is simply another human being.  There is no reason for any MP to be acting as though he is above the party whose work at elections time keeps that MP in her seat.

Corbyn should have supported Open Selection at the last Labour conference.  He should support it again at THIS conference, and should also support changing the leadership selection process to remove the MP nominations requirement from the leadership contest, replacing it with a mininum number of signatures gathered from paid Labour members and supporters.  And Corbyn should order the immediate readmission of every paid Labour member and supporter who was suspended or expelled in order to prevent them voting in the 2016 leadership re-vote.  There were no just grounds for those suspensions and expulsions and the party would only benefit from those people being readmitted as a bloc.

Misfit wrote:

Ken Burch wrote; “Pearson also never established any real resonance with Quebec voters.”

The NDP has never really had any resonance with Quebec voters either. 2011 was an anomaly only so you smash Mulcair for not maintaing a 2011 Quebec last minute impulsive election switch to the NDP for strategic reasons only when the NDP has never been a significant factor in Quebec and likely never will be.

People voted NDP in Alberta in 2015 and most people were aware that the chance of an NDP re-election victory were very slim just like the NDP fantasy of maintaining their handle on Quebec federally was just as silly. The NDP put Mulcair in as leader to try to maintain Quebec support for the party but it didn’t pan out. I also honestly don’t think that Mulcair was responsible for that. It just wasn’t to be.

The NDP in Alberta actually got more votes losing power than they did winning it. Their popularity didn't go down, it went up. It was the united right that beat them. Would be nice if the federal NDP vote in Quebec had gone up under Mulcair, but it obviously didn't, and it's certainly not going to go up under Singh either.

Full disclosure: I thought (and said) that Mulcair should have resigned after the 2015 election, and definitely thought should have stepped down a lot sooner after he lost the leadership review. But watching him rip Trudeau a new one over SNC Lavelin here I kind of wish the NDP had him back as leader now.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1753885

Robbie-dee”s CTV video didn’t link properly. I will try here.

CTV video of Mulcair eviscerating Justin Trudeau

Anytime. And yes, I wish too that we had someone with his strong speaking skills was leading this campaign right now. His strength is missing from this campaign which hasn’t started yet.