At the New Democratic Party’s convention this weekend in Ottawa, their new leader Jagmeet Singh declared “the time to be timid was over.” For a party whose shambling meekness in the last election let Justin Trudeau claim the mantle of progressive champion, such a shift could not come sooner.

That an opportunity exists to capitalize on enormous hunger for change is apparent. Trudeau harnessed it for his route to power, only to betray it in office. The environmental Adonis transformed into an oil barons’ salesman. An electoral reform promise was broken with a shrug. Instead of a peace offensive, we’ve gotten a military spending spree; instead of novel social programs, novelty socks.

The agenda the NDP began unveiling this weekend, however, needs to become a whole lot bolder. Expanding healthcare to cover drugs and dental-care, stopping pension theft and new privatizations, closing tax loopholes, and building affordable housing: this is an end to the disastrous right-wing slide of past NDP leaders, but it’s not nearly ambitious enough. For years they’ve seemed to believe success depended on becoming indistinguishable from centrist, corporate-friendly Liberals: the point now is to become demonstrably different.



One problem is that the Liberals can claim they are already pursuing many of these policies – or, as in the case of pharma-care, that it may soon be in their platform. But the main problem is this: it doesn’t truly break with the neoliberal economic consensus in Canada that has devastated peoples’ lives and turned so many off politics.

Massive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatization, corporate trade deals, and more money for prisons and police: this elite agenda has dominated for nearly four decades. It is why two billionaires own as much as wealth as the bottom third; why wages for a majority have not budged; why corporations have been unshackled to treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump. And yet the population seems more clued in than any of the political parties: “Trickle-down economics has been laid bare as a cruel hoax, in the view of many Canadians.” That’s not a line from an issue of the Socialist Worker but from mainstream pollsters.

None of neoliberalism’s consequences is more insidious than the structural timidity it has entrenched. As the state’s capacity for positive intervention has been shrunk, political parties have withdrawn from proposing solutions that match the scale our crises. Policy has been eclipsed by a fixation on personality.



It is folly to think Singh can succeed by playing into this trend, rather than bucking it. Dapper suits, boasts about boxing or wrestling skills, hopey slogans, making a show of public access to candid private moments: all of these are already found in Justin Trudeau’s playbook. And while the discrimination Singh has faced is vital to share to show the need to combat racism in Canada, his individual story can’t become a stand-in for a collective vision: he has to be a pitchman, not the product.



What is firing people up around the world are not flashy personalities but far-reaching policies. It’s a good start that Singh has rejected balanced budgets – a destructive neoliberal mantra that has transfixed the NDP for a generation, and allowed them to be out-flanked by Trudeau. So too is the refreshing fact that Singh has begun arguing the case for taxation. A bold and transformative agenda funded by taxes and historic government spending, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated in the UK, is not a risk in elections. It is a sure-fire recipe for success.

A dramatic challenge to neoliberalism would be just as popular in Canada. The NDP could propose not merely to close tax loopholes, but to hike the rates paid by the corporations and ultra-rich – which haven’t been lower since WW2. To expand healthcare, but also create new public services: free tuition, universal childcare, and a public bank to supplant the predatory loansharks. To defend our deteriorating public infrastructure, and to move to publicly own other sectors: energy, railways, or telecoms providers. To go beyond symbolic support for reconciliation to amplify concrete Indigenous demands for land restitution.

And it is not the moment to address the crisis of climate change with prevarication and platitude. That is already the method of the governing Liberals. People are ready to vote for a clean and cooperative economy that unleashes good-paying jobs in renewable energy instead of stop-gaping an oil industry that is on the way out.

The surest way to tell that a NDP agenda could massively lift ordinary people’s prospects and electrify the public? A backlash from the media and political class. As organizers from the Corbyn and Bernie Sanders campaigns shared on the outskirts of the convention, backlashes only underlined their anti-establishment bonafides. The elite aren’t too worried, going by their current response: a murmur of self-serving approval for Singh’s plans. The NDP has yet to realize that the howls of out-of-touch pundits would not be a mark of its failure but a guarantee of its promise.

It’s also how the party could inspire people to go door-knocking for it across the country. What was on display at the Ottawa convention - while larger, younger and more diverse than ever - was a party still bent on controlling and managing the energy of its grassroots, rather than empowering and channeling it. Widely-supported resolutions on free tuition and more democratic decision-making were resisted and could end up ignored; another on Palestinian rights was stifled completely. There was a similar dynamic when members voted in 2016 to study and engage with the Leap Manifesto: it generated a flood of enthusiasm and revived interest in the party, before it was buried by the establishment. The vibrancy of a new generation of activists should not be squandered.

If the NDP wants to revive their chances, becoming a less timid version of Justin Trudeau won’t cut it. They can’t hem and haw within Canada’s neoliberal consensus – they have to overthrow it.

Twitter: @Martin_Lukacs