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Gunter: Federal NDP doomed after abandoning traditional, big-tent labour roots

Vancouver NDP MP cautioned party members last December they should focus on working people’s issues instead of becoming obsessed with identity politics

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Don Davies, the Vancouver New Democrat MP who served as his party’s interim leader until the election of Avi Lewis last weekend, cautioned party members last December that if the NDP wanted to avoid another drubbing at the polls, it should focus on working people’s issues instead of becoming obsessed with identity politics.

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The party didn’t listen.

The NDP convention in Winnipeg was the most identity-focused political gathering ever for a major Canadian party.

Much has already been said about the radical economic and environmental agendas the party endorsed by electing Lewis. Lewis wants an immediate end to oil and gas development, including LNG, then tens of billions spent to replace all fossil fuels with renewable energy (as if that were possible outside an environmentalist’s fevered dreams).

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He promised a bank for ordinary Canadians run by Canada Post, I guess, because the postal service is so gosh, darn good at delivering mail and turning a profit. Lewis also wants grocery stores run by bureaucrats, which would lead to increased prices and dramatically reduce the selection of products.

Lewis has even mused about “collectivism” for small business.

But even more prevalent at the NDP convention was the presence, front and centre, of identity politics. Every aspect of convention business and party policy was filtered through lenses of gender, race, nationality, Indigeneity, orientation, White privilege, economic status, ability, non-Christian faith and so on.

Extra points were given for “intersectionality,” overlapping memberships in more than one of these identities.

A disabled, Indigenous, lesbian would have scored a trifecta. If they identify non-binary, that’s a quad!

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Identity politics are by their nature divisive. They focus on what sets people apart, not what unifies them.

The convention became so focused on identity that at one point two female delegates argued in front of cameras whose list of grievances trumped the other’s. Whose combination of gender, orientation and other identity factors gave them the greater claim to speak first.

(See what I mean about gender politics dividing more than uniting?)

Delegates of colour and those with other minority identities were issued “equity cards” at registration. Whenever they rose to speak, if they waved one of these cards, session chairs were to recognize them ahead of all non-minority speakers.

(There’s that divisiveness again.)

But it only worked when chairs were hawkeyed. Occasionally, cardholders were passed over inadvertently and non-minority delegates snuck through. The cardholders were often miffed or insulted.

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(That’s unity through a hierarchy of entitlement.)

The NDPs identity madness began just days after MP Davies had cautioned against the NDP becoming obsessed with identity politics.

When the party laid out its rules for its leadership selection process, it placed strict limits on the number of cisgendered men who could sign a candidates’ nomination papers. Most signatories had to be women, people of colour, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ or non-traditionally gendered.

(Unity through exclusion.)

A month into the selection race, the National Post reported the contest was “a battle between building a big tent and returning to the party’s labour roots.”

Not quite. Returning to the NDP’s traditional roots in the labour movement would have been the big tent. That would have made the party much more broadly based than its current identity-fixated iteration.

Can anyone imagine voters who hang out at union halls, work assembly lines and push tools for a living being attracted to a party wrapped up in endless internal debates over intersectionality?

Maybe public-sector union members can be persuaded to vote for the new NDP, but private-sector unionists are still going to be drawn to Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives, who better understand their concerns.

When the NDP concentrated on labour issues, affordability, ending poverty and trumpeting income equity (and not whose grievances out grieved others’ grievances), it was never going to become government, but it wouldn’t have been reduced to six seats; on its way to even fewer.

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