NDP Need The Help Of Tories To Survive

It is becoming more and more obvious that Jack Layton is dropping the ball when it comes to putting forward issues that benefit the party......

Will Harper and Layton make a green deal?
Dec. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
CHANTAL HÉBERT

Ottawa

After the NDP/Liberal budget of the last minority Parliament, will this one soon see the birth of a Harper/Layton green plan on the environment? As counterintuitive as such a development might seem, mutual need certainly dictates it.

In the wake of Stéphane Dion's leadership victory, getting the environment card off the table before the next campaign has become an absolute priority for both Stephen Harper and Jack Layton.

Earlier this fall, the government's proposed Clean Air Act landed with a loud thud in public opinion. Rather than shore up the environment credentials of the Conservatives, the bill highlighted the absence of them.

To make matters worse for Harper, the environment has inched its way up the voter list of priorities since the last federal election, especially in markets where the Prime Minister's party needs to break into to secure a majority.

But as high as the stakes may be for Harper, they pale in comparison with the predicament of the NDP. The survival of the party could hang in the balance in the next election. To put it bluntly, the NDP dropped the environment ball earlier this year and it may not recover.

In the lead-up to its September convention, the party set out to make its position on the Afghan mission its top calling card with voters. The environment issue had less presence at the NDP gathering than at the Liberal leadership convention.

In hindsight, it is clear that the party's brain trust, or what passes for it these days, outsmarted itself.

Its approach was the cumulative result of a string of bad calls.

Back in August, New Democrat strategists rightly assumed that, in a contest with the Green party and its new leader Elizabeth May for the green mantle of champion of the environment, their own party could not win. But they erred in not catching the significance of losing the environment card.

At the time, the NDP was after bigger game; it was seeking to replace the Liberals as the governing alternative to the Conservatives. For some NDP strategists, the best way to achieve that and avoid losing a bidding war on the environment was not to engage in one, by taking the fight to other battlefields — ones where May might not even be a factor.

As a Toronto Star/La Presse EKOS poll published Saturday indicates, all the NDP achieved was to relegate the party to the sidelines. Only 13 per cent of Canadians now feel the NDP is best placed to address the environment — 22 percentage points behind the Green party and 18 behind the Liberals. And if an election had been held last week, the NDP would have lost almost half of its support from the last vote.

New Democrat strategists did not foresee that Harper's Clean Air Act would so completely miss the mark with the public.

By Layton's own admission, it did not expect Dion, who had made the environment front and centre in his campaign, to win the Liberal leadership.

Perhaps most damaging of all, they missed the emergence of the environment as a defining issue in national politics and treated it like a sideshow.

Those miscalculations came back to haunt the NDP in a by-election in London-North-Centre last month.

While the Greens took votes from all the other parties to vault to a second-place finish, it was the NDP that took the biggest hit: Its score went down almost 10 points to a fourth-place, 14 per cent finish. And if that was not bad enough, Dion's victory now exposes the NDP to a pincer attack in the next election.

At the convention, the sight of young Liberals being drawn to Dion's green flag like moths to a flame should have put fear in the hearts of NDP observers.

Even if Harper came up with the most aggressive environment plan in decades at this point, it would have little credibility without some outside support. The imprimatur of the NDP could make the difference.

Without the New Democrats, the Conservative Clean Air Act would already have died in the Commons. Instead, at Layton's request, it has been sent to a committee without being subjected to a vote it could not have survived.

The climate-change sections of the bill have lots of blanks begging to be filled. If the NDP and the Conservatives can come to a meeting of the minds, the environment may yet be neutralized as a leading-edge election issue.

If that were to happen, Canadians could also end up with a real action plan on climate change over the life of this Parliament rather than a mega-war of words on the environment in the next campaign.