Thomas Mulcair wants to stay on as leader of the NDP and says he won’t resign. He says it’s up to NDP members to decide his fate, as they will … sort of … at an automatic leadership review in April.
In striving to hang onto his job he’s presenting his party with a ticklish puzzle: Mulcair suggests that all he needs to keep hanging his coat in the leader’s office is a vote of 50%-plus-one at the review. That might seem awfully low: Cheri DiNovo, who isn’t even an MP but has made it her goal in life to get rid of Mulcair — say’s it’s “absurd.” But what’s the party to do? Official NDP policy holds that Quebec should be allowed to break up Canada on a vote of 50%-plus-one. Are DiNovo and her supporters going to argue the NDP rates a higher standard than the country they seek to govern?
The NDP leadership quandary is becoming must-see TV.
The NDP quandary is becoming must-see TV. In most cases a party that appeared to have a real chance of victory, only to plummet to third place in the latter stages of an election it had years to prepare for, would quickly jettison the boss. Whatever the excuses – and there are many legitimate ones – 2015 was the NDP’s best chance of running Canada, and they fumbled it away. Fair or not, the buck stops with Mulcair. He took a second-place party and moved it to third. Been nice to know you.
Mulcair begs to differ. Facing the press Monday, he declared himself energized and ready to take up the cudgels once again. There was no more talk of balanced budgets or other namby-pamby middle-of-the-road proposals aimed at the moderate middle. The new Mulcair is devoted to good old left-wing anti-free-trade, and is dedicated to defeating its latest iteration, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
He’s up against history. The Parti Quebecois’ Bernard Landry resigned after getting just 76% support in a leadership vote (he wanted 80%). Ralph Klein resigned after receiving a 55% vote of confidence. Joe Clark called a leadership convention after deciding 67% support wasn’t enough. Mulcair’s 50%-plus-one sets the NDP bar well below the minimum acceptable by any other party.
But, again, if the NDP is willing to give Quebec its independence at such a meager level of support, why should it expect different treatment? The party’s 2005 Sherbrooke declaration states that it would recognize a “majority decision (50 per cent +1) of Quebec people in the event of a referendum on the political status of Quebec.” Mulcair defended that position any number of times during the election, insisting it is “at the heart of (the NDP’s) approach with Quebecers.”
You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. Mulcair is now under fire from within, in particular from DiNovo, who is an NDP member of Ontario’s provincial government and has made herself a one-woman anti-Mulcair movement, dismissing the election “a disaster” and insisting Mulcair has “got to go.”
That’s not the way Mulcair sees it. “I’m also determined, very proud to lead this party, and I’m going to go before the membership without presuming anything … and ask for their support, and it has to be, of course, beyond 50 per cent,” he said Monday.
“I know that that support can be there. I sense it is there, but I’m not taking anything for granted.”
Mulcair is no fool. He realizes a leader who can command the respect of barely half his party is not likely to last long. He also knows he has no obvious rivals at the moment. By refusing to set a minimum level of support he leaves his options open and avoids handing malcontents like DiNovo a target.
A vote in the low 50s would almost certainly be the end of Mulcair. The NDP may be willing to break up the country at one vote over 50%, but there’s little chance they’d saddle themselves with a leader who can barely command the support of his own party.
