Plus ça change: Cycles of history and the 2004 federal election

Inroads, Winter 2005 by Schachter, Harvey

That is clearly the hope of Jack Lay ton. But it is equally clear that he faces an uphill battle within his own party. Throughout its history, the federal NDP has essentially tailed the Liberal conception of Canadian federalism. To mention only two salient events, in 1982 it supported unilateral patriation and quite recently its caucus voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Clarity Act, notwithstanding a vote to the contrary in the party's Federal Council.

Laytons pledge to oppose the Clarity Act is a modest - very modest - attempt to distance the party under his leadership from that record. In fact, he went a bit further than that. As reported in the Quebec press, he said, in part, "I think [the Clarity Act] has not helped to promote Canadian unity ... It was like repatriating the Constitution without the support of Quebec. These things increase division within our country and I think it is time to move on to other things ... I think Canadians are ready to go beyond the past, a time that created divisions. Some of those elements are in the Act [C-20]." More important, perhaps, is his further statement that he would accept a vote for sovereignty by Quebecers, without any qualifying statements about the need for a "clear question" or for a majority of more than 50 per cent plus one, etc.

In Reg Whitaker's cynical realpolitik, those are "foolish remarks." Well, the reaction to them by some prominent NDPers, as Reg indicates, certainly illustrated the resistance to even those modest statements within the NDP hierarchy. But I think Layton is indicating some awareness, at least, of the dilemma faced by his party federally. At the same time, his message is ambiguous: he has also extended a welcome to Sheila Copps (the flag-waving exemplar of the sponsorship campaign) and invited "Red Tories" to join the NDP. Layton's statements are not taken very seriously in Quebec.

The Quebec national question has plagued the NDP from its inception. At its 1961 founding convention, attended by some 300 delegates from Quebec led by Michel Chartrand, the former CCF-Parti Social Démocrate leader in that province, the new party adopted a position that recognized Quebec as a distinct "nation." Even then this was controversial; Eugene Forsey, the research director for the Canadian Labour Congress at the time, quit the party on the floor of the convention over that nod to reality.

Within a couple of years, faced with the antmationalism of the party's federal leadership and some key members, mostly anglophone, in Montreal, most of the party's supporters in Quebec had left, first to form the Parti Socialiste du Québec, a separate party under Chartrand's leadership, then to join the Parti Québécois or one of the groupuscules further to the left. Since then, with the notable exception of some goodwill earned by the party's opposition to the War Measures occupation ol Quebec in 1970, the NDP's support in Quebec has been inversely proportional to the fortunes of the sovereigntist movement: rising in the late 1980s when the PQ was in retreat, and falling precipitously with the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord and the party's support of the Charlottetown agreement, and the PQs return to a sovereigntist perspective under Jacques Parizeau.