NDP Leadership Race Gets Occupied

Have the "99 per cent" taken over the wide-open race, or has the mainstream finally started to turn orange?

On Sunday, Nova Scotia MP Robert Chisholm became the eighth member of the NDP to make a bid for the party's leadership official, adding further variety to a race that's added a new member each week since getting underway in September. The National Post's Tasha Kheiriddin remarks that with Chisholm's entry, and following Peggy Nash's bid on Friday, "the contest promises to be lively, and as the recent Alberta PC leadership proved, potentially unpredictable." This is especially true compared to what's happening with the Liberal race. Two of the party's leading lights, Justin Trudeau and Bob Rae, won't take part, as that contest has come to resemble "a scene from Shaun of the Dead: deserted streets with a few shell-shocked zombies staggering about." Of course, the Grits might just be holding their tongues until the NDP race is decided in March, but Kheiriddin notes that the NDP has seized the tenor of the times – that 99 per cent/ tax-the-rich chorus – with aplomb. And the longer the Liberals confine themselves to the margins, the lower their chances of stirring widespread interest in their race, due to be decided in 2013, will be.

Few of the leadership candidates have gone after the Occupy vote as heavily as former party president Brian Topp, whose call to raise taxes on the rich is a welcome addition to a political climate in which such talk would have doomed his bid just a short year ago, offers Barbara Yaffe of the Postmedia chain. Once a proposal that would have "had appeal only for hardcore NDPers," tax increases have suddenly become an acceptable talking point among the mainstream (the horror!). Topp's bid will only stand to benefit if the Occupy movements carry on through the winter and into March. And with Barack Obama beginning to campaign on a similar such taxation proposal, Topp's platform stands a good chance of resonating with a broader public once coverage of the U.S. election kicks into its quadrennial frothing frenzy. Or it could entirely backfire and doom the NDP to years of Tory attack ads claiming they want to steal your hard-earned money to pay for gay daycare thereby reducing the pot of gold needed to build more gazebos in Muskoka. Either way, at least someone's finally brought progressive taxing to the table. The public might now get to decide through an actual engagement on the substantives of the issue whether they want them or not.

The Toronto Star's Chantal Hebert cooly casts aside such prognostications, cautioning us that "the current media narrative of the campaign should be taken with a grain of salt." That narrative – Topp's the establishment favourite, Thomas Mulcair the scrappy No. 2 and de facto Quebec candidate, and the other six are a bunch of wild cards – stands to fall apart due to the NDP's voting process, in which every member has one, equal vote. The last two times a leader was decided by such a process, Hebert notes "the media bet on the wrong horse," with Stockwell Day winning the Canadian Alliance leadership over Preston Manning in 2000, then some guy named Stephen Harper usurping Day in 2002. And the dynamics of the NDP's membership throw things for even more of a loop, as only a tiny fraction of members come from Quebec, despite that province boasting the lion's share of the party's MPs. So for now, B.C. and Ontario have a much larger say in the vote, potentially opening the door for Paul Dewar, Nathan Cullen, or Nash to steal some of Mulcair and Topp's thunder. Our only prediction? Martin Singh won't win. If we're wrong, we'll buy him a round.