Seeing the drama that Québec solidaire (QS) has been the scene of this month, I can’t help but have a feeling of déjà vu. And for good reason. Across the world, left-wing parties regularly tear each other apart due to the perceived incompatibility between protest and power. There is indeed an inherent tension between the vast ambitions of the political left and the real limits of political power in a liberal democracy subject to global capitalism.
On the one hand, represented in this case by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, we believe that there is no point in playing politics if our main objective is not to be in power. In other words, power only belongs to who governs. On the other side, there are those for whom the priority is the party program and in whose eyes the electoral path is littered with abandoned principles. Far too many left-wing governments have left their supporters disillusioned.
However, it is precisely this type of debate that tore apart Ontario’s New Democratic Party (NDP) in the early 1990s, when Bob Rae led the province. He would later title his political memoirs From Protest to Power, capturing this tension in the linear terms of political maturity. He therefore begins the work not with the excitement of election night or the euphoria of the swearing-in ceremony, as one might have expected, but rather with the decision of the NDP government to break with a policy of deficit financing and to adopt an austerity approach (following, in some way, the path taken a decade earlier by the Parti Québécois of René Lévesque).
Obviously, Bob Rae preferred the harsh realities of power to the virtuous certainties of an opposition party driven by protest.
However, as political economist Mel Watkins points out in his review of Bob Rae’s book, “the irony is that when a left-wing government completely abandons protest, it loses its power.” He is right. Protest and power must therefore be considered as complementary, not competing, forces. That said, I think the political left needs to do a lot more to actually prepare itself to be in government if it wants to break the cycle of disillusionment.
Here again, the years during which the Ontario NDP was in power are rich in lessons.
On September 6, 1990, the Ontario NDP took power, winning 74 of the 130 seats in the Legislative Assembly (a gain of 55 seats) with only 37.6% of the vote. This government was unlike any other. No less than 40% of the new elected officials were trade unionists. One of the new ministers had left school after 7e year to work in a paper factory and another had interrupted his studies in 9e year to work in a factory. One of the most influential ministers, Frances Lankin (now a senator), had been a prison guard — in fact, one of the first three women to work in a men’s prison in Ontario. The government only had five lawyers, believe it or not. This was a Labor government in the truest sense of the term.
However, the Ontario NDP had never been close to power and had therefore never had to deal with the constraints that came with it. His political vision reflected this ignorance. To say that the NDP was not ready for power is not enough to capture how fundamentally unprepared it was. On election night, top advisers gathered around a government telephone directory and tried to guess what exactly each member of the outgoing prime minister’s cabinet was doing. They had no idea. The NDP transition team was only formed the day after the election.
And the context didn’t help. Canada was then plunged into its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, forcing the NDP to improvise and govern on the fly. Three hundred thousand manufacturing jobs were lost in Ontario between 1989 and 1992. The number of welfare recipients doubled. For the first time since the 1930s, the province’s tax revenues declined in real terms. When I interviewed cabinet members, including Mr. Rae, for a book I am writing about the ruling left, they all told me they just learned on the job.
Ultimately, Bob Rae saw himself as a pragmatist. In his eyes, we had to accept political and economic reality if we wanted to move things forward. But the interesting thing about pragmatism is that the perception of reality has as much to do with dominant ideologies as anything else.
As British sociologist Stuart Hall explained when writing about Thatcherism in the 1980s: “The ruling or dominant conceptions of the world do not directly prescribe the mental content of the illusions which are supposed to fill the heads of the ruling classes. But the circle of dominant ideas accumulates [et] […] becomes the horizon of what is self-evident: what the world is and how it ultimately works. »
One of the essential aspects of politics is therefore to attempt to define political reality. The challenge, then as today, is to capture the public’s imagination. This is why the protest is important.
If history teaches us anything, it is that electoralism, with its opportunistic political triangulation and think tanks, is an ideological dead end for left-wing parties. Protest is a strength, in the opposition as well as in the government.