Union clout cost the NDP

The coalition of the left could have erased the Green Party by bringing them in the tent. It’s the unions’ fault they didn’t

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

According to the logic seeping around the cafés of the born-disgruntled urban NDP strongholds, the Green Party are to blame for the failure of the NDP to win government in the May 17 BC election. Indeed, if you add all Green votes to all NDP votes, the result outnumbers the Liberal votes in more than 40 ridings.

But of course not all Green votes would go to the NDP if the Green candidates didn’t exist. Surely some portion, maybe 25%, wouldn’t vote at all; internal Green polling suggests that of the remainder, 66% would vote NDP, 33% Liberal.

So, do the math yourself: find the close ridings, take 75% of the Green vote and give two-thirds of that to the NDP and one-third to the Liberals. The result? No ridings switch from Liberal wins to NDP wins. The NDP still get 34 seats even in the absence of a Green party. But in politics, perception is reality, and there’s no dissuading NDP supporters from the perception that their vote was split by the Greens.

Fine, let’s proceed on that assumption. But even if the Green vote spoiled the chances for NDP candidates, is the Green Party to blame? Or is the NDP to blame for opening up enough room on the environmental issues to allow there to be a market for Green candidates in the first place?

In the devastating aftermath of the 2001 election, the NDP brass had a chance to rebuild from the ground up. New leader Carol James spoke about lessening the role of the unions in NDP policy and getting rid of guaranteed union delegations adding up to 25% of the total at leadership conventions. She wanted, she said, to steer the NDP to the middle, to include small businesses, all political moderates, and even environmentalists.

While the first two groups have always been courted by the NDP with more or less success, it was the third group, the environmentalists, with whom the NDP had a strained relationship that required the yeoman’s share of the rebuilding work.

NDP stalwarts could rightfully point to parks created by NDP regimes in the 90s, to the Aircare car exhaust legislation, and innovative experiments in creating a sustainable forestry industry. But where unions perceived their interests clashing with those of the environmentalists, the unions prevailed. When the chips were down and a choice emerged between jobs and environmental preservation, more often than not, the NDP government that preceded the present Liberal government chose jobs. The NDP did little during the rebuild era of the last four years to indicate a new NDP government would be any different.

The strategy beginning in 2001 should have been to let the Liberals have the 40% of the vote they were bound to get, count on the 35% the NDP would be sure to get, and battle for the remaining 25%, more than half of which was at that time being parked with the Greens.

Battle is the wrong word. Given the history of NDP treatment of Greens and environmentalists while in power, there would have been little reason for Green voters to trust the NDP now, and even less to be persuaded by them in argument. The only real solution is the one the CCF, forerunner of the NDP, came up with in 1962: rather than make speeches to them, bring the outsiders directly inside the tent and let them make the speeches.

What the NDP could have done over the previous four years is ignore the bleating of the union leaders—for whom there is absolutely no other choice anyway—and invite the environmental movement into the policy and leadership conventions with guaranteed levels of delegation representatives and guaranteed votes on platform policies, in exchange for the collapse of the Green Party. Big business and big media would have howled, but that could hardly matter: they howl about anything not served to them chilled on a silver spoon.

The unions would have howled as well, but it’s hard to decide if that would be a bad thing or a good thing for NDP marketing. It would have blunted the Liberal’s complaint that the NDP was in the unions’ pockets.

Such a pro-environmental stance, even at the expense of resource-extraction jobs in the BC hinterland, may well have cost enough votes in those marginal ridings for the NDP to fail to capture them in the 2005 contest. But if that’s the case, then by choosing to capture those votes with pro-industry policies instead of Green votes with pro-environmental policies, the NDP made its bed and must lie in it.

There is at least an argument to be made that by bringing the Green vote inside the NDP at the expense of the resource workers’ votes, the NDP might have captured even more seats than they did earlier this month, and might have even captured enough to form government. It is then the unions that have to ask themselves: do they prefer a thoroughly hostile Liberal government, or the slightly cooled shoulder of an NDP-Green government.

If it’s the latter, then we may reasonably conclude that it was the unions, not the Greens, who cost the NDP the overall goal of an election—to reign victorious and form government. Had the unions backed off and encouraged the NDP to make a deal with the Greens that they couldn’t refuse, there might today be even more shock at the success of the NDP on May 17 th than there already is.

The Greens now will surely go through a leadership contest that will also likely include a serious revamping of policy given their nearly 30% collapse in support last election to this one. They will likely create updated and attractive policies, relaunch under a new, re-invigorated leadership, and successfully rebuild now that they have, for the first time, a core of support to work with.

The NDP, flush with what they regard as success by winning official opposition, will be much less inclined to make any drastic moves before the 2009 election. If they didn’t reach out and embrace the Greens in 2001, they will never do it now. The result is likely another win by the Liberals in 2009, followed by even more misguided complaints about how the Greens split the vote and destroyed the NDP’s chances. Or maybe, by 2009, it will be the NDP splitting the Green vote.

****