In announcing Thomas Mulcair’s victory in the New Democratic Party leadership contest, party president Rebecca Blaikie brashly proclaimed the Outremont member of Parliament as “Canada’s next prime minister.”
Such bravado is, to be sure, standard practice for opposition parties. Expect to hear the same of the permanent leader the Liberals will anoint in due course. But getting from the winner’s podium at a party convention to the prime minister’s office is an arduous journey whose successful completion by Mulcair is by no means as assured as it was made to sound after Saturday’s final ballot.
Mulcair has much to prove. Starting with his own party, to which he is a relative latecomer; it is significant that he was the first choice of just over 30 per cent of the NDP members who registered a first-ballot vote. He has to pull together a group of elected members and backroom talent among which there were significant differences during the leadership campaign with respect to the party’s orientation in its quest for power.
It stands to reason that if the NDP is to attain its goal, it will have to move toward the centre of the political spectrum and ditch a considerable amount of its leftist ideological baggage, to which a significant portion of its following still clings. Of all the candidates, Mulcair is best equipped and inclined to nudge the party in this direction. He cut his political teeth on the provincial level with a pragmatic power party, and has experience in government at the ministerial level under his belt, something none of his leadership rivals could boast.
The Harper Conservatives, who successfully tacked toward the centre from the opposite direction in their quest for power, have more lately been making it easier for such a move on the part of the NDP by catering to their right-side base with things like their heavy-handed crime bill, environmental laissez-faire and the abolition of the long-gun registry.
As far as this province is concerned, the emergence of a federalist Quebecer as official opposition leader, heading a party that holds the great majority of Quebec seats, is a welcome development. This comes after years of having the separatist Bloc Québécois and Gilles Duceppe as the dominant Quebec presence on the federal political scene.
There is, however, a troublesome fly in what should be a soothing ointment. This is the “Sherbrooke Declaration” that the party adopted six years ago in its push to court Quebec voters of nationalist persuasion.
It repudiates both the Supreme Court verdict on what rules should govern any future sovereignty referendum as well as the subsequently adopted Clarity Act. That act stipulates that the question must be approved by the federal government and that more than a simple 50 per-cent-plus-one Yes vote will be necessary for federal authorities to enter any negotiations that might lead to Quebec secession.
During the leadership campaign, none of the candidates was moved to challenge the reckless position the party has embraced. Of all of them, Mulcair should be aware of how reckless it is given that he was a member of the National Assembly during the last referendum for which the question was not only unclear, but decidedly misleading, and the country could have been sundered had just a few thousand votes gone the other way.
It subsequently came to light that Yes side scrutineers engaged in a conspiracy to reject valid No votes as spoiled. With a 50 per cent-plus-one rule in effect, such a fiddle could be what puts the separatist vote over the top. This is also something Mulcair should be wary of in that his provincial riding at the time was one in which there was the most strikingly abnormal rate of rejected ballots.
While it got little attention during the campaign, the NDP’s negation of the Clarity Act will undoubtedly be highlighted by its opponents in the next federal election campaign, particularly if, as current appearances suggest, a PQ government is in power provincially by then.
They will claim that the refusal to stand by the Clarity Act makes the NDP unfit to safeguard national unity and Mulcair unqualified to be prime minister. And they will have a point as long as the NDP and Mulcair stand by their reckless position on the matter.