The Leap Manifesto opens horizon for bold new politics in Canada

From the headlines screaming outrage on the front pages of Canada’s newspapers, you’d think the New Democratic Party had shuttered their convention doors, armed themselves and made for Edmonton’s solitary hills.

“A hard left turn to nowhere,” blasted the National Post, after NDP members voted to debate the Leap Manifesto in local ridings. “How to Kill the NDP,” Maclean’s exclaimed. Captured by the “loony left,” added the Toronto Star.

Was it passionate concern speaking for the future of Canada’s social democratic party? Hardly. If the NDP’s membership had supported Thomas Mulcair instead of unseating him, if convention debates had proceeded spiritlessly instead of firing up over a bold roadmap, the media and political establishment would have quietly celebrated. Their hysteria is calculated to snuff out what they saw on display: sparks of rebirth in Canada’s political left.

Here’s what they would prefer: a NDP shackled to a political consensus that has gripped countries like Canada for decades. This consensus tells us that we should leave our fate to the market. That millions of us should get up every morning and be satisfied to earn our poverty, to subsidize giant corporations with our tax dollars, and to watch powerlessly while inequalities widen, our debts deepen, and the planet’s climate cooks.

It turns out NDP members may have other ideas: to seize the chance to transform their party into a more grassroots and principled electoral option that full-frontally rejects this status quo. They understand that they missed their chance at power by allowing Trudeau to present himself as a bolder alternative; and they have watched the rise of unapologetic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the US and Britain with growing hope and excitement.

If they can help their party shake loose from this consensus, many Canadians will want to join them—or to listen.

Looking for a vision to kickstart debate about an alternative, many NDP members have found it in the Leap Manifesto. The Leap Manifesto is not a party platform. It is not a comprehensive blueprint. It is a new story about the kind of country we could have, if we treat the crises we face with the urgency they deserve—and with the politics they demand.

Like the crisis of climate change, which the manifesto says is not just an existential threat—it is an opportunity to transform our country for the better. If we act according to deep principles of justice, combatting climate change can simultaneously address many other problems: creating hundreds of thousands of good, clean jobs; implementing the land and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples; reducing racial and gender inequalities; welcoming far more refugees and migrants; and localizing agriculture so that people eat healthy.

The breadth of this vision is reflected in the diversity of hands that wrote it: labour unionists, migrant rights activists, food policy experts and feminists, Indigenous leaders and environmentalists and anti-poverty organizers. Would it be unaffordable? Not if we put our hands on the obscene wealth sloshing around in corporate bank accounts and being siphoned offshore. None of this is politically extreme: but it is a break from the well-guarded parameters of “respectable” politics in Canada.

Such a grand transition would not to be easy, but it is scientifically and technologically possible: we could, by mid-century and in every part of the country, be off fossil fuels and powered fully by renewable energy. The workers who now are drilling for oil wouldn’t be abandoned: they could be drilling for clean geothermal energy, retrofitting homes or building public transit.

The notion that getting speedily off fossil fuels would spell economic armageddon serves a specific function: it pit workers against environmentalists, east against west, Indigenous peoples against everyone else. It has been been carefully cultivated to serve the interests of a single group: the corporate and political establishment. It is the politics of fear and division—which only hope and possibility can defeat.

Those insistent that tar sands pipelines are part of our future have an argument not with the Leap. Their argument is with overwhelming majorities in Quebec and British Columbia and First Nations across whom a pipeline will never pass; with an oil glut that has made the export of tar sands increasingly uneconomical; with a renewable energy boom that is outpacing fossil fuel development across the world; and with the hard realities of atmospheric science. Accepting these realities are not just a matter of planetary survival—they can have electoral payoff.

Just look down south, where Bernie Sanders is running on a platform that calls not only for jobs and a challenge to inequality, but for a national ban on fracking and no new fossil fuel leases of any kind on federal lands—far more radical than anything in the Leap Manifesto.

And with that radical platform, Sanders won the Democratic primary in Alaska—an oil state—by a huge margin, against a rival without these demands in her platform. And last weekend, he won the caucus in Wyoming—a major coal exporter—by another large margin.

If Bernie can do this and win enormous political support, then the NDP should be able to have this discussion across Canada—including in Alberta.

Such a party would have new supporters flock to it, especially among the young. And a party willing to take bold stands and become more open may well find itself fuelled by the energy of social movements: Indigenous rights and Black Lives Matter, a $15 minimum wage, electoral reform and sustainable local food.

As the shine wears off the Liberal party—whose leaders are arming a misogynistic Saudi regime, shilling for tar sands pipelines, cozying up to a tax-dodging corporate class—this country will need a party who can distinguish itself with real vision. Don’t forget that the NDP has played that role before, being the political instrument that helped win social advances that Canadians now cherish: healthcare, pensions, unemployment insurance, our public broadcaster.

It can be that yet again. If the NDP uses the Leap to help renew the party, it could be the start of a far-reaching transformation: cracking open the political system and placing deep solutions to climate change and inequality on centre stage. None of this will be happen without movements outside parliament, many of them signatories to the Leap, continuing to build their own power and pressure.

The attacks from the political and media establishment are sure to be relentless. But their fear signals a change that a majority of Canadians will welcome: the opening of a horizon for bold new politics.

Twitter: @Martin_Lukacs Martin was involved in the writing of the Leap Manifesto along with a broad coalition. To read it, visit leapmanifesto.org