Ontario Politics: Here’s why voting NDP is NOT a “slippery slope” toward communism:
The NDP are leading in the polls, but our asinine Westminster system still means that we could end up with a Doug Ford Government (even though he may lose his own riding), and the NDP suddenly finds itself in the position of being the party who can stop them. So here we are in a negative situation where we’re voting against something rather than in favour of something else. This dance typically happens between the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals in Ontario — let’s note that’s not the case in many other provinces, (Quebec often goes PQ, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, esp often go NDP, and so have BC and Alberta recently) but here we are.
And yet, confoundingly, some are genuinely worried a vote for the NDP will somehow lead us into communism. It won’t. We’re not even close to that. The NDP isn’t in any way close to communism.
We do have this weird thing where 30 years ago, during a nasty recession, and a whole heckuva lotta political turmoil in this province (weird coalition governments, anyone?), we ended up with an NDP government, led by the honorable, hated, horrid, lovable Bob Rae. But here’s the thing. Bob Rae, the vilified, heroic, hilarious Bob Rae, who I believe is actually a rather fine man, but who could never decide if he was a liberal or a social democrat, ended up running the province. He did, and indeed continues to, oscillate between “liberalism,” and “social democracy.” I dredge him up here not only because he’s one of the world’s weirdest political pariahs, but also to demonstrate the fine line between progressive liberalism and social democracy. He’s hopped back and forth__and continues to do so__because there is space in both parties for his generous, empathetic worldview.
Okay, the NDP absolutely is a friend of unions. This helps you, whether you like it or not, so I won’t spend any more time on that here, (but be assured I certainly can!) Just the same, the party has also taken a very significant step to the centre that has recently bewildered its base. Federally, Jack Layton started the populist movement to the centre, and if anything, Jagmeet Singh has dragged the party further into Liberal centrist territory.
At the same time, Andrea Horwath strikes me as someone who is almost a bit *too* policy driven for her own good. She is, after all, the one who gave up the balance of power provincially and forced an election that delivered a majority win to Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in the first place. It was a stupid move in the eyes of many of the base voters here. But she needed to follow her values as a social democrat. She did something similar during the college instructors’ vote last winter. It meant nothing material to vote for the union to go back to work immediately, but she had to vote against immediate back-to-work legislation (she lost voters over it) because it was really the right thing to do *on principle*. And as much as I want you to vote NDP, her utterly incomprehensible position on beer sales in corner stores is actually driven by the same thing. It’s got more to do with OPSEU than it does with her curious aversion to mixing beer and cheese.I do wish she’d just own that, but it’s coming from an honest place that, as I’ll get to shortly, has little to do with actual “communism.”
The point is that none of this is any way, shape, or form is dragging us toward anything that looks like communism. Indeed, if you bother looking, you’ll likely find a communist running in your riding (especially in urban centres), and they’ll demonstrate how woefully the NDP falls short of communist ideals. And that’s because the NDP have always been social democrats. They actually believe in capitalism — they just think it needs to be contained so that everyone can benefit from its bounty. That’s the opposite of communism, which believes that capitalism is the ultimate social cancer and needs to be annihilated. The fact of the matter is that all four of the major parties running in this election believe in capitalism as an a priori good at various degrees. But even the conservatives believe in imposing fetters on it. Just look at how they fell over themselves during the 2008 fiscal crisis, looking for handouts. None of the four main parties actually believes in unfettered capitalism, so it’s actually a moot point. Unless you’re a hardcore libertarian, you don’t believe in it either.
Nothing about the NDP that I have ever seen has indicated to me that they want to in any effective way overthrow the capitalist system. They do absolutely want to intervene and make space for a more viable system that allows everyone to benefit from it. But they aren’t communists. They absolutely, simply are not. They are social democrats who wholeheartedly believe that capitalism is the best system we’ve managed to come up with as a culture, but we need to mediate it.
