The NDP's principles

Editorial

An interesting wrinkle in the provincial election campaign, which intrigues us, is the incomprehensible swing by the New Democratic opposition to come out against Premier Gordon Campbell's carbon tax.

Campbell, the Liberal party leader, in what appeared to be a massive swing on environmental issues, introduced a carbon tax intended to discourage the use of fossil fuels. The fuel tax has added 2.4 cents to the cost of a litre of gas, with the intent that the tax will triple over the next three years. The revenue would fund a tax cut in other areas.

The NDP supports a so-called cap-and-trade system, arguing that, despite an uproar of outrage this week from environmentalists, they have the better plan for the environment.

To say that NDP leader Carole James has taken a dangerous step is an understatement. The environmental movement has been one of the party's core pillars of support for decades. The apparent summary abandonment of these allies just days before the election call seems like madness. It could, of course, prove crazy like a fox. It allows James to spend the campaign howling against a tax that almost every voter can see and feel right where it hurts. The NDP may be counting on the populist measure to gain them votes from pocketbook voters that they will lose from hard-core greens, and then some. But it is a risky path.

It also speaks to something else. While James may contend that she still has the best plan for the environment, her former friends in the environmental movement disagree. Vehemently. On the one hand, the NDP is sometimes criticized for being in thrall to their specific constituencies ("big labor" being the most common friendship cited) and this policy switch can deflect that allegation. James has certainly showed that she is not afraid of angering her erstwhile core supporters.

But whatever happened to solidarity forever? Through all the decades of struggle for social justice, a new tomorrow, the good fight, a New Jerusalem and the other rhetorical promises made by the Canadian left, the one thing they could always be counted on was adherence to principle and that totemic value expressed in the anthem of the left: solidarity forever. It was often said that, in the argument over whether it was, at heart, a "movement" or a political party, the NDP could usually be counted on to do what was clearly in keeping with its own moral compass.

Those days are gone.

The NDP's opposition to this carbon tax, a tax that would seem in keeping with a former core principle of the NDP, mirrors a similar policy turn at the federal level: an abandonment of core principles based on a shockingly blatant quest for a few votes. Now, nothing in politics should shock a worldly adult, least of all a political party abandoning principle for expediency, but what we have seen of the NDP recently is something else, something more.

The first and most appalling proof was the abandonment of the Jews. Jewish Canadians built the socialist movement in this country, nurtured its grassroots and provided a number of its early leaders. In the labor movement especially, but also in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which preceded the NDP as this country's left-wing party, Jewish Canadians were as stalwart a constituency as trade unionists and environmentalists.

That began to change in the 1970s and, by the 1990s, the federal NDP had fallen hopelessly into the hands of an Israel-hating group of zealots. The reality is that most members of the NDP are not Israel-hating zealots; they demonstrate, in their response to these zealots, what Martin Luther King termed "the silence of the good people." The NDP and others will argue that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, blah, blah, blah. But they are harder pressed to explain the exodus of Jewish activists from their party. Oh, there are some Jewish New Democrats, but their views on Israel and their connections to the community tend to be peripheral.

Meanwhile, there are NDP candidates in this election who have shown utter contempt for Jewish self-determination and the leader herself showed a deep misunderstanding when, in castigating one of her candidates, Mable Elmore, for past Israel-bashing, seemed to convey a belief that the term "Zionist" was, by definition, a slur. The unintended message from James is that, in today's NDP, "Zionist" is a slur.

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