Canada: NDP leadership candidates try to cover up its right-wing record
By
Roger Jordan
31 March 2017
Four candidates have now entered the race to succeed Thomas Mulcair as leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP).
The party top brass, aided and abetted by the pseudo-left, are desperately trying to generate some excitement in the race, which will be decided in the fall, with claims that the NDP is “turning left” and back to its “social-democratic roots.”
The reality is none of the declared or potential leadership candidates has any intention of repudiating the NDP’s decades-long support for capitalist austerity and imperialist war.
The candidates are Peter Julian, the former leader of the NDP’s parliamentary caucus,
Member of Parliament (MP) Nikki Ashton, who mounted an unsuccessful leadership bid in 2012, and fellow MPs Charlie Angus and Guy Caron.
The leadership contest was made necessary because last year’s party convention, to the dismay of the party establishment and most of the trade union bureaucracy, voted to oust Mulcair in a leadership review. A key factor in the vote was rancor among NDP staffers, MPs and ex-MPs at their dashed career prospects after Mulcair led the NDP to a crushing defeat in the October 2015 federal election. Four years after the NDP, under the late Jack Layton, had formed the Official Opposition for the first time ever, it was reduced to a distant third place, winning less than 20 percent of the vote.
All four challengers to succeed Mulcair are determined to bury any substantive discussion of the NDP’s 2015 debacle, including their own roles in supporting the NDP’s lurch still further right. In so far as mention of it cannot be entirely avoided, they intend to place all blame on Mulcair and a handful of his aides.
When…