Adam Riggio: What’s the problem with Jagmeet Singh?
(Macleans, Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
Canada’s only consistently progressive federal political party is the New Democrats, and they enter our country’s newest parliament in excellent shape to get the best solutions for the country into government policy.
So why are there rumblings among the party membership that Singh must be replaced for his failure this past October? Why do those rumblings so often include the assessment that Singh can never lead the NDP to anything but greater obscurity?
The most important question: Why does Singh face such scrutiny from within the party at such a critical time as a minority government where the NDP holds the most important balance of power?
Where Does Progressive Government Stand?
Let’s briefly look at where the government of Canada stands now, on actual progressive government. Progress in our time takes three integrated paths: Canada will progress when the prosperity of all people in our land grows, people are treated with more justice, and we transform more of our industry to fight and survive climate change.
Jagmeet Singh’s NDP caucus is in a key position to make progress happen.
In the minority parliament, the Trudeau government requires accord with other parties to continue. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland’s cabinet will work most closely with the party that makes them look best to the Canadians whose second choice in our forty-fourth federal election is Liberal. That party is the NDP.
Top New Democrat priorities for the next few years of federal legislation is expanding the national healthcare system into pharmaceuticals, dental, and vision, as well as boosting investment in renewable energy across Canada. These will likely be Liberal-branded policies over the next two years, just as the Prime Minister’s father did with the Canada Health Act itself.
The election was a mixed hand for the NDP, capturing this place of pivotal legislative influence, but also losing all but one of the party’s entire Quebec caucus.
Rumbles in Mainstream and Independent Press
Opinion influencers in the mainstream media began asking whether Singh would face a leadership challenge virtually as soon as the results were in. But party membership have largely been satisfied with Singh’s policy priorities, core political philosophies, and character.
As last year ended, Gary Porter of the NDP’s Socialist Caucus contributed a piece to The Canada Files accusing Singh and his team of a sort of corporatist coup. Postponing the upcoming party convention would have prevented a leadership review, preventing members from punishing or at least critiquing Singh for his failures in the 2019 election.
He laid blame for the postponed convention on Singh and federal party chief bureaucrat Anne McGrath, former cabinet minister in the ecologically problematic NDP government of Rachel Notley.
Never mind that Anne McGrath left the NDP in summer 2019 to work for the global corporate public relations firm Hill and Knowlton. The troubling pipeline from NDP leadership to the world of public relations is for another column. But the truth is, we can no longer blame McGrath or the leading policy-makers of the Notley government for the party’s failures. Her path of wedding labour rights to fossil-fuel appeasement appears to be a dead end for the party.
The Conflict of Labour and Earth
Yet the contemporary New Democratic Party coalition of supporters remains complex, and most importantly, in flux. One of the biggest dangers that a labour party faces in the era of catastrophic climate change is that labour will turn against ecologically progressive policy and movements.
There are many signs that this has already happened, and it is a serious problem for the NDP. Jagmeet Singh’s election platform and priorities in parliament focus on expanding the health care system, proper Indigenous-settler reconciliation, and making Canada’s economy ecologically sustainable. This has already cost the party significant elements of its traditional base in labour.
The truth is, the left in Canada still faces an uphill battle to retake its labour base from the influence of Rebel Media and its politics of resentment. Notley fell because she could never properly respond to her demonization by the right-wing press that dominates Alberta’s media.
More working people see their prosperity in a thriving extraction industry: oil, forestry, metals. This is true in Alberta, where hundreds of thousands of oil industry workers have chosen a government bent on wrecking the province’s economy with an austerity agenda. It’s true in Ontario, where rural labour unions themselves have begun to support Doug Ford’s Conservatives because they boost an unrestrained mining sector.
The Real Problem People Have With Jagmeet Singh
Two of Singh’s three central philosophies are unacceptable to their priorities of securing high-paying, secure extraction jobs. Those two priorities are reconciliation and a more ecologically friendly economy. Taking Indigenous sovereignty and existence seriously, while also shifting Canada’s economy away from extraction industries that contribute to climate change, would prevent full employment in extraction.
This is why, for many throughout Canadian labour, the Conservatives are their party, not the New Democrats. As labour grows more conservative, they also grow more reactionary. We are already seeing signs of racist fascism in the high ranks of the NDP.
Chad Machum is a member of the Ontario NDP’s executive council. When he ran for re-election to the council at the party’s 2019 convention, he ended his speech with a rousing shout of “Make this province great again!” and his Sudbury-area supporters applauded his open appeal to the fascist style of Donald Trump.
I was a delegate to that convention, I heard his cry and the thundering applause. And I was too shocked to call out his open appeal to racist fascism.
So after all the analysis of policy, philosophy, the shifting priorities of what progress actually is as we face climate change, does it all ultimately come down to race and resentment? Sadly, yes.
The NDP is losing its labour constituency to right-wing media that drive resentment to motivate people to vote for destructive austerity policies. Its federal caucus from Quebec was wiped out thanks to a Bloc Quebecois openly campaigning on the defence of white francophone identity. He actively represents a vision of a multicultural Canada that is no longer shared by all Canadians.
This will not preserve every seat in every election, but it must be the impetus of a movement to change Canada for the better.