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Quebec opinion
For some, the main goal is to serve in government. For others, it's about ideals. However, the electoral path is littered with abandoned principles.
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Stephen High – Montreal Gazette Feature
Published May 14, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • Reading time 3 minutes
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Emilie Lesard-Therrien, who was elected co-chair of Quebec Solidarity along with Gabrielle Nadeau-Dubois in late November, resigned last month. Concordia history professor Stephen High writes that there is an inherent tension between the far-reaching ambitions of the political left and the limits of real-world political power. Photo by Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
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Watching Quebec's solidarity drama unfold, with co-spokesperson Emiliese Lessard-Therrien resigning due to differences in the party's “vision,” I feel like I've heard it before. I can't help it. And in fact, they do. Around the world, left-wing parties regularly split over the perceived irreconcilability of protest and power.
There is an inherent tension between the far-reaching ambitions of the political left and the limits of real-world political power in liberal democracies under global capitalism.
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For some people, it doesn't make sense to go into politics unless your main goal is to serve in government. For others, the program behind the party is important. However, the electoral path is littered with abandoned principles. Too many left-wing governments have disillusioned their supporters.
Just such arguments tore apart the Ontario NDP in the early 1990s, when Bob Rae ruled Ontario. He would eventually come to understand this tension in linear terms of political maturity. He wrote his own political memoir, From Protest to Power, not with the election night excitement that everyone expected, but with the NDP retreating from deficit financing and eventually embracing austerity. It was published with this in mind. Clearly, Ray preferred the harsh realities of power to the noble certainty of opposition protests.
But, as political economist Mel Watkins reminded us in his review of Ray's book, “The irony here is that if a left-wing government abandons protest altogether, it loses its power. ”. He's right. Protest and power are best understood as complementary rather than competitive.
That said, I think that if the political left is to break the cycle of disillusionment, it needs to do more to truly prepare itself to serve in government. Once again, there are hard-won lessons to be drawn from the Ontario NDP's years of government experience.
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It came to power in 1990, winning 74 of the 130 seats in parliament with just 37.6 percent of the vote. It was a government like no other. In fact, 40 percent of the newly elected councilors were trade union members. One of the most powerful cabinet ministers, Francis Rankin (now a senator), previously served as a prison warden. The government had only five lawyers. It was a Labor government in the truest sense of the word.
But the Ontario NDP has never come close to power and never had to wrestle with its constraints. Its policy thinking reflected this lack of context. Just saying the NDP was not ready to take power fails to capture how fundamentally unprepared the NDP was. As the election approached, key advisers huddled around the government's telephone directory, trying to guess what each person in the outgoing prime minister's office had actually done. They had no idea. The NDP's transition team was formed the day after the election.
And the timing didn't help either. Canada was in the midst of its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and the NDP was struggling. In Ontario, he says, between 1989 and his 1992, about 300,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, and welfare payments doubled. For the first time since the 1930s, state tax revenues actually declined.
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When I interviewed Ray and other members of his cabinet for my next book, The Left in Power, they all said they were learning on the fly. Ultimately, Ray considered himself a realist. To get things done, we must accept political and economic realities.
But the interesting thing about pragmatism is that the perception of reality has as much to do with the dominant ideology as anything else. Sociologist Stuart Hall, writing about Thatcherism in the 1980s, said that while “the dominant or dominant ideas of the world do not directly prescribe what we think”, “the dominant ideas… The circle certainly accumulates (and) becomes the horizon of what is acceptable.” Indeed, for all practical purposes what the world is and how it works. ” The challenge then, as now, is to define political reality.
If history has shown us anything, it is that electoralism, with its opportunistic political triangles and focus groups, is an ideological dead end for left-wing parties.
Stephen High is a professor in the history department at Concordia University.
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