Address to Vancouver Island NDP Renewal Meeting

August 25, 2001

Bill Blaikie, MP for Elmwood-Transcona

The invitation to this event begins with a question – where is democracy? I would like to shape my remarks this morning around the structured questions of an anti-war folk song that was popular back in the 60’s, in the coffee houses that had sprung up across the nation for a while: “Where have all the flowers gone?” And so today, we might legitimately ask, where has all the democracy gone? And how do we get it back, not just as it was, but hopefully deepened and broadened, because even at its best, liberal capitalist democracy was not the truly democratic society and democratic economy envisioned by many on the left.

 

 

Where has democracy gone? And where is it going? And how can it be claimed, or re-claimed by those of us who want to be full citizens of our countries and our world, fully free human beings who are more than just consumers who are compensated at varying material levels for leaving the world to be run by our corporate masters.

 

Suffice for starters to say that sometime in the mid 1970’s, in a variety of ways, the power of capital has been in a state of rebellion against the strictures democratically imposed on it, or the obligations democratically placed on it, by the post-war social and political consensus, a consensus not easily arrived at, and which owed its existence to the struggles of all kinds of social activists, inside the New Democratic Party, and outside it, in civil society, in the labour movement, in the churches, etc.

 

At some point, however, thanks to the end of the high growth era, the progressive redistribution and relative equalization of wealth associated with the post-war years could only continue if there was a real sharing of the pie and not just more pieces of an ever expanding pie. This was not to be. Economic growth masked the real intransigence of the powerful as far as their basic orientation was concerned.

 

And so you might say, in the mind of some, there was a surplus of democracy, a lack of market discipline, and too many people doing uncommodified things, and dreaming uncommodified dreams about what an uncommodified future might look like. The very things that had been regarded as achievements by liberals and social democrats alike were, overtime, re-cast as the villains of our public policy universe. Government spending, the welfare state, regulatory bodies, public ownership, all became increasingly vilified as burdens.

 

A re-assertion of the market, it’s values and its alleged virtues, was in order. It was especially needed in places like Canada, a country which had the unmitigated gall to countenance taking an entire sector, the health care sector, out of the marketplace, or having a publicly owned national railroad, airline and oil company, or to flaunt the power of private intellectual property with its laws on generic drugs, or culture.

 

When all this could not be achieved directly through politics, we first had the FTA, then NAFTA. And so we have and still have regional and global free trade agreements, and what is called globalization, or at least the corporate model of it. All throughout the world, especially with the end of the Cold War and the failed non-capitalist models of the Soviet bloc, the mantra of free trade and free markets was being sung. And none have sung more conspicuously, and more ironically, given the Liberal position on the FTA in 1988, than our current Prime Minister. Between the FTA, the NAFTA and the WTO, the world was becoming the playground that the multi-national corporations have dreamed of for years.

 

The power of democratically elected governments to get in the way of corporate profit strategies was to be severely limited, put beyond politics and beyond democracy in these agreements. Many public policy options and public policy instruments were declared illegal by virtue of being trade barriers, and many others were put on a hit list of things to be eliminated because they don’t conform to the market ethos enshrined in these agreements. This is where democracy went. And few things have been more insidious in this regard than the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in Chapter 11 of the NAFTA, which has, for example, been used by U.S. companies to challenge Canadian environmental policies.

 

This attack on the policies and the powers of democratically elected parliaments and legislatures produces a curious silence on the political right. The same people who are outraged by domestic court decisions that allegedly usurp the power of Parliament, care not at all when Canadian laws, Canadian cuture, and the Canadian environment is put at risk by NAFTA or WTO rulings.

 

Where has democracy gone? Where has the power to act in the public interest gone? Where has the power to act for the common good gone? It has been abdicated, shamefully, by democratically elected governments themselves, through the signing of free trade agreements, through de-regulation, and through privatization. A self-inflicted powerlessness, or what Linda McQuaig has called a cult of impotence, has descended upon our democracies, and with it has come not just damage to or destruction of certain policies or institutions, but an even greater danger, the danger of despair.

 

Where has democracy gone? How can we re-claim it? Democracy requires hope, and right now democracy is the victim of a kind of despair. Perhaps Corky Evans will help us with this tonight in his speech entitled. It is a despair born of empirical observation and rigorous analysis. It is true that the free trade agreements, and the resurgent and expanding market ethic which now seek to commodify or marketize even that which it formerly left alone, creates a situation in which it doesn’t seem to matter who is elected. They all, so the conventional wisdom goes, have to behave in a certain way in any event. If it’s not the trade agreements, or the all-pervasive market ethos that makes them behave, it’ll be the IMF or the World Bank that constrains the policy choices of governments. In any event, the real policy makers will be beyond the reach of the people, beyond the reach of democratic action. To a certain extent this was always the case. There has always been an invisible unelected government contending, more or less, with the visible elected one, depending on the government. What has happened now is that the invisible has become visible, in the form of the WTO etc., and too many democratically elected governments visibly pay homage to these non-democratic powers that were created with their compliance.

 

The world is, according to some, improving its democratic nature, because there are so many new democracies. But, in my view, though the proliferation of democracy may yet prove to be as good a thing as it is made out to be, the fact is that democracies are tolerated by the powers that be where they once weren’t, because things like the WTO have made the world not safe for democracy, but safe from democracy. The scope and role of governments, democratically elected or not, has been so constricted, the reach of politics is so limited and the reach of the market and its corporate keepers so vast, that what once had to be achieved by authoritarianism, intimidation, violence, or other ways of subverting the democratic, is now achieved in the open for all to see at the WTO, or, in addition, if they had had their way, through other agreements like the MAI.

 

All of this is cause for despair, and eats away at the hope that is the oxygen of the fire of democracy. And yet, I mentioned the MAI. Wasn’t its defeat a sign of hope? I believe it was, but not completely in the way that some would read it. And certainly Seattle was, for me, a sign of hope, but not necessarily in the way that some would read it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In any event, the one virtue of the WTO, is that it has made the invisible visible and has given people something to rally against and to focus their ideological analysis and thought upon.

 

Despair is the enemy of democracy. And the despair about democracy and about the efficacy of electoral politics has been particularly hard for those of us who have been the electoral remnant of the hope that the NDP once was, and I believe still is. Because I can tell you, as one who lived through the Parliament of 1993-1997, when the NDP did not have official status, the parliament that, among other things, brought us NAFTA, the WTO, the privatization of CN, and the gutting of our social programs, that we did not despair, though we were sorely tempted. We were a force, however small, of resistance to what was happening. And resistance was important, as it is today, both inside and outside Parliament. Resistance speaks the truth to and about power. Resistance keeps alive ideas and values that are being trampled. And resistance is something that needs to happen not just on the streets, but in the parliament and legislatures of this country and others.

 

Where has democracy gone? It was abdicated and cordoned off by trade agreements, which created despair, which further eroded democracy, and which led to the politics of protest that we have seen in Seattle, in Windsor, in Washington, in Quebec City and in Genoa. These protests were taking place under the umbrella of a common theme and common cause. Democracy. People who don’t always agree with each other, whether they be trade unionists, environmentalists, aboriginal people, food safety activists, farmers, or whom ever, came together to say that what they had in common was a desire to see their differences and their mutual interests dealt with democratically, and not by corporate rule. They gathered in the name of creation, of cultural and political diversity, of human rights, of social and economic justice, and argued for a world in which these things had priority over trade.

 

Seattle was successful in the sense that it signalled an end to the easy triumphs that the corporate culture had enjoyed for too many years. And it was a hopeful event because it was an event enlivened by the participation and by the leadership of so many young people, young people who see that the corporate emperor has no more democratic clothes on and are willing to say so. And, like California Senator Tom Hayden, whom I met with in Seattle, those of us who were politicized by an earlier era of protest, against the Vietnam War, I am encouraged by the willingness of so many young people to question the dominant way of thinking.

 

But for democracy to be re-claimed, and ideally, to be claimed more fully than ever before, we will have to recognize that while it was understandable to go from a politics that causes despair to the politics of protest, the only way ahead is to go back to, or better, through to, politics once again. A politics informed and energized by the memory of the solidarity that such protests foster, but politics none the less. Because the only defense against the logic of the marketplace, the unegalitarian anti-social anti-environmental ethos of the market, is effective democracy and through it effective government, here in Canada and elsewhere.

 

This is the dilemma and the challenge of the political left in Canada and elsewhere. We must contend not just with our political opponents, but with the decline of politics and democracy itself, a development that not uncoincidentally coincides with the neo-liberal agenda of leaving it all up to the market, and those who dominate it. Even those, like the federal NDP, who have resisted this decline in democratic power, and who have stood alone so many times in parliament against the erosion of democracy, are tarred with the same brush. The impression is left that it is the people against the politicians, with the people on the outside of the political process, and all politicians on the inside looking out, waiting to be impressed by or changed by the next demonstration. This is a fatal error.

 

First, it is inaccurate, because there have always been some politicians fighting for the very things and espousing the same views as those on the so-called outside. To create or re-enforce the impression that there are no choices, is not hopeful or helpful. And secondly, it puts us all right where neo-liberal governments want us, in a funk about politics and unable to muster any real electoral challenge to their political supremacy. This funk apparently extends, in its own, bizarre way, to the political right.

 

Protest alone will not do it, when we are up against international forces. It would be a mistake to let ourselves be too informed or inspired by the history of protest associated with the civil rights movement, or the anti-Vietnam war movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Those were protests that were directed against one nation, or one society, by its own citizens. At the same time we must fight the criminalization of dissent, a tendency which has manifested itself in Canada recently in the way that peaceful protesters were treated in Quebec City.

 

Nevertheless, if the anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movement born in Seattle is to grow into something truly more effective, it will have to go beyond protest, and even beyond articulating alternatives, to seriously addressing how this can be done, how the power of that which we are up against can be vigorously challenged, and ultimately countered.

 

As Sam Gindin, former assistant to CAW President Buzz Hargrove suggested in an article in the most recent issue of Canadian Dimension, the anti-capitalist movement must make the transition from movement to politics, and must pay “greater attention to national politics”. Indeed, as I would suggest, the MAI was stopped, not only and not mainly because of protests, but became one national government, a French socialist national government, walked away from the table. Indeed, Sam Gindin’s point about moving from movement to politics is what the NDP’s successor, the CCF, was about in the first place, when, in 1933, various social, agrarian, labour and intellectual movements came together to form a political party, because they grasped the truth that that was what was needed then. And that is what is still needed now.

 

The greater attention to national politics that Sam Gindin talks about is what the NDP can legitimately ask of those who share its view of globalization and of other issues like the environment, but so far have not turned their attention to national politics. This greater attention to national politics might and even should bring scrutiny of the NDP as to whether, as it is presently constituted, it is the most suitable vehicle for this national political challenge and how it can be reformed or transformed in order to address the challenge more effectively.

 

But one thing is clear, with all its real and alleged inadequacies, the NDP is alone on the national parliamentary stage in opposition to the political culture of impotent obsequiousness to corporate power that we now see throughout the Liberal, Tory, Alliance and dissident Alliance groups in parliament. Even the Bloc has only recently began to be critical of the trade agreements, and even then generally on questions of process rather than substance. There is no difference between any of them on this score, and yet it is in the interests of a powerful few to maintain the pretence that there is, by manufacturing trivial differences on other issues, or with respect to real and alleged scandals, so we can have the sham of democratic choices. Ironically, these interests are well served by those who claim, differently, that there is no difference between any of the parties, including the NDP. All of this prevents us from debating what we really should be debating, which is the future of democracy itself, and how we can someday have a Parliament, and a government that reflects and acts upon our values, and not those of the global corporate elite.