The NDP Gets Down to Business

Four years as the official opposition await the NDP. What a long, strange trip this could be.

The New Democratic Party caucus is meeting to plan for the upcoming resumption of Parliament, when the bulk of its 103 MPs will sit in the House of Commons for the first time. Barbara Yaffe of the Vancouver Sun asks how the party will reconcile its traditional western and urban base with the influx of rookie MPs from Quebec, whether Jack Layton will garner Tory support for the NDP's signature file – pensions – and if the party can challenge the Tories on defence and the environment. “With the government and Layton's party holding diametrically opposite views on climate change, Canada-U.S. policy and the role of this country's military, such issues promise to be highly contentious in the next Parliament,” writes Yaffe, providing a handy framework by which to judge Layton and the performance of his caucus come 2015.

Toward that end, L. Ian MacDonald advises the leader in the Montreal Gazette to take a page from Stephen Harper and let his ramshackle caucus know who's boss. “If the New Democrats are to be taken seriously, it's time for them to behave like grown-ups, and lighten up on the sanctimonious grandstanding of front-benchers like Tom Mulcair and Pat Martin,” he says. His principal challenge will be “to lower expectations in Quebec,” which could prove difficult after vowing to reopen constitutional talks and suggesting language laws could be applied in more federal jurisdictions.

Daunting as those tasks may be, Gillian Steward of the Toronto Star provides one precedent from the other end of the ideological spectrum that bodes well for the NDP's continued success in the House: the Reform party. “They are said to be too young, too inexperienced, or too wacky,” the same attitude newbie Reform MPs faced in 1993. Eighteen years later, that party's descendents formed a majority government and one of its wet-behind-the-ears members, a fresh-faced Stephen Harper, is now prime minister. “The Reform party showed that outsiders can become insiders in Ottawa in a relatively short time despite all the early opposition to anyone who breaches Ottawa’s barricades,” says Steward. That prospect, however far off it may be, ought to provide them some comfort through at least four years of Tory rule.