“We’re going to win, Judy,” Stephen Lewis told me over the phone a few days before the 1990 Ontario election.
“C’mon Stephen, you guys always get a little delusional as the election approaches,” I replied.
“No, really, we are going to win.”
And they did, an NDP majority in the province of Ontario came out of nowhere as the Liberal vote collapsed because of scandals. I was President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women at the time so despite a decade of activism in the party, including as a candidate, I was non-partisan in that election but I couldn’t resist attending the NDP victory party and joining in with the delirious party supporters.
The polls for this federal election are astonishing. The latest Harris-Décima poll in Quebec puts the NDP 20 points in advance of the Bloc Quebecois, 42% vs 22%. In the national polls the NDP is climbing closer to the Tories by the day as the Liberals fall. I am not a big believer in polls and I hate the horse race coverage of elections but it is hard to believe that all these polls are wrong. If everyone votes, the NDP will certainly be at least the official opposition for the first time in Canadian history.
This week on The National, Alan Gregg projected the possibility of a “transformative” moment in Canadian politics with the NDP winning a minority government. I find that as hard to believe as I found Stephen Lewis’s prediction twenty years ago. But this time, if it happens it will be a lot more understandable politically.
People are fed up with politics as usual. That’s the sentiment that brought Rob Ford to power in Toronto and as strange as it seems, it’s the same sentiment fuelling the NDP vote. Just as economics have been taken over by corporate shills, politics have been taken over by cynical operatives who see elections as number crunching and spinning (another word for lying).
On the federal level, there is another factor. Anyone who doesn’t support Harper, is scared to death of his getting a majority. I got a sense of this the first week of the election when I tore into Harper’s anti-democratic actions on a Q panel in front of a live audience and got such a huge cheer it practically knocked me off my seat.
Harper is being hoisted on his own petard. The people of Quebec in the lead, as they often are, have decided en masse to deny Harper his majority by denying him seats in Quebec and moving to Jack Layton’s NDP.
I don’t like the direction (right) that Jack has taken the NDP in his quest to overtake the Liberals as the mainstream opposition but I do like Jack and I’ve known him for 30 years. He is a passionate, committed politician who believes in equality and social justice and has fought with all his energy his whole life for what he believes in. People can see that, which makes him the choice of those who want to get rid of Stephen Harper. Once Quebec broke to Harper, everyone else started to see that the strategic vote and the heart vote was one and the same.
But more importantly, Jack is riding an unprecedented wave of democratic participation. Not since the 1988 free trade election have we seen a greater participation of citizens in an election campaign. Not since the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 have we seen a more profound revolt against the political elites of this country.
But unlike 1988 and 1992, no organization or individual is leading this revolt. It is happening through YouTube, through Facebook, through Twitter, through vote mobs, through websites, through the creativity, humour, audacity of mostly young Canadians. It is the first time we have seen the dynamic of networked politics, which I wrote about in Transforming Power: From the personal to the political work in Canada.
No one over 40 who has a progressive bone in their body can fail to be inspired by the energy and passion of those vote mob videos. And thanks to the willingness of the people of Quebec to take a risk, Jack Layton and the NDP are now the most viable option for those of us who would do anything to get rid of Stephen Harper and his desire to be President for Life of Canada.
Whatever the result of the election, my hope is that all those young people who mobilized during this election will keep it up and put pressure on Jack and the NDP to represent them and their desire for a Canada that they can be proud of. LeadNow, the website that has joined the vote mob videos together, puts it best: “Vote for the Canada You Want.”
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