The NDP's great continental game falls flat

The British Columbia election on Tuesday had all the delightful ingredients of the upset that makes the solemnly self-important appear absurd and irrelevant. In the whole democratic process, few events are more agreeable than when the people surprise those who would masquerade as their Svengalis, or at least as their infallible social-scientific interpreters. This is particularly true when the beneficiary of the upset is a hard-working and plucky underdog. Finally, such an upset as was seen in B.C. is welcome when its policy and wider political implications are benign. All of this applies in this case.

Since the 2011 federal election, the New Democratic Party has, not unnaturally since it achieved the status of federal official opposition for the first time, noisily assumed the airs of the wave of the future, the vanguard of the forces of history being conveyed inexorably forward like a religious effigy by innumerable and fervent masses to an advent of a long-promised liberation from all the ailments of the old order. The NDP is not to be blamed for this; much of it is sincere and even heartfelt, and people are not to be reviled for their beliefs, unless they are absurd, sociopathic or deranged. I have been fairly unstinting and even vociferous in my critique of the NDP since the day it was founded 52 years ago, but I have never felt the need for such mordant strictures as those.

© 2024 Conrad Black