ANALYSIS: Is a united left now a possibility?

Ashley Terry
Canwest News Service

Some observers are whispering about the possibility of uniting the parties of the left to compete with the now-united right. (Tom Hanson/Reuters)

Stephane Dion toured a Thanksgiving open-air market in Orillia, Ont. on Saturday, telling shoppers to vote Liberal. He also said his party was doing everything it could to make sure Green party leader Elizabeth May won her Nova Scotia riding.

A little confusing, perhaps, but with so many parties on one side, the left vote is split. Dion’s support for May has sent the message that Canadians should vote strategically to prevent a Conservative majority.

Sid Ryan, president of CUPE Ontario and former NDP candidate, says voters are “torn between the NDP, the Liberals and, to some extent, the Greens. Clearly around 65 per cent of the public are saying these are the issues that matter to me.”

Some observers are whispering about the possibility of uniting the parties of the left to compete with the now-united right. “I think it is realistic, I think something will happen eventually. There isn’t room on the left for three viable parties,” says Tom Flanagan, a Conservative Party strategist and key architect of the Conservative merger.

But he also cautions that a merger is a slow and difficult process. Discussion of uniting the Canadian right began back in 1996. But the parties didn’t make serious moves to unite until the last straw: a 2003 third-place finish by the Canadian Alliance in the Perth-Middlesex by-election. It was a huge disappointment for the party that had poured extensive resources into the campaign.

Flanagan says the party realized at this point that they would never be an effective opposition to the Liberals unless the right-leaning parties came together. “You don’t transcend the differences until you’ve tried everything else and failed,” he says.

But has the left come to this point? The answer seems to be a resounding no. Not yet, at least. Although the left side of the political spectrum is crowded, there is a list of factors keeping the parties apart.  

One is history. The parties of the right emerged from the same political ancestry – John A. Macdonald’s 19th-century Conservative Party. Regional divisions led to the emergence of protest parties such as the Progressive Conservatives and, later, the Reform Party.

But the NDP emerged from the CCF in Alberta completely separate from the Liberals. Then there are the Greens and the Bloc, with their own separate histories. And just as they were all founded separately, they still disagree on many issues.

“The dynamic is different,” says Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “They all want to defeat Harper, but they have different agendas.”

The differences have been articulated during the campaigns. On the environment, the Liberals support a carbon tax and the NDP support a cap-and-trade system. The Green party wants both of these and the Bloc wants a cap-and-trade system in a provincial framework. On Afghanistan, the Liberals support legislation extending the mission to 2011, and the NDP, Greens and Bloc are outspoken against it. The list goes on.
 
Another key difference is that the Alliance party had little support, and no real chance of forming a government. But the NDP and the Liberals consider themselves strong and able to make gains in the future.

“The Liberals think they’re going to form the government again,” says Wiseman. With this expectation, the party is unlikely to make any major concessions involved in merging.

Flanagan concurs. “If the Liberals do better than initially expected in this election, I think they will feel they have the wind at their back. They will feel they can afford to wait.”

In the short term, there is much greater chance of seeing a coalition than a merger. The prospect was raised early in the campaign by Jack Layton and acknowledged recently by Stephen Harper. It could be a real possibility next time Canadians head to the polls.

The agreement between Dion and May not to run candidates in each other’s ridings is a start. In Flanagan’s opinion, they are further along than any of the other parties. “If anything was going to happen, I would think the first domino to fall would be the Liberal-Green cooperation.”

A coalition could take many forms. One would be for the Liberals to leave a number of cabinet seats to be filled by the other parties and they would come to an agreement on four or five of the key issues like health care and the environment.

Ryan is in favour of this form of coalition, and says many others are as well. “Everywhere I go people on the left are saying this,” he says. “I’d rather see that approach than see Harper dominate the government.”

Ironically, it is another major roadblock to unification in the short term since it could enable the Liberals to form a government without merging. However, in the long term it would encourage the parties to unite.

“If you work together for two or three years as a coalition, the question that arises is ‘how will we position ourselves the next time around?’” says Ryan. “It’s difficult to start taking swings at the party you’ve just had a coalition with.”