Many Canadians were surprised when the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada formed the Official Opposition after the 2011 federal election. Yet the groundwork for this unprecedented “orange wave” began nearly a decade earlier in the wake of the 2000 federal election. The NDP embarked on a new path with the goal of becoming much more than just the party of “social movements or [the] political arm of labour” (9). David McGrane examines this transformation in The New NDP.
McGrane leverages an impressive amount of original data to explain moderation and modernization between 2000 and 2015. He conducted over 60 interviews with NDP operatives, 58 interviews with caucus, a survey of party members, a panel survey of voters in the 2015 election, a content analysis of Question Period debates and news releases, and textual analyses of party documents and advertising. The mixed-methods approach allows McGrane to develop a compelling insider's narrative supported by rich quantitative datasets.
Situated in literature on political marketing, McGrane's book unpacks the organizational reforms and communications strategies used to transform the NDP from a third party into a government-seeking party. McGrane demonstrates that whereas the old NDP oriented itself toward party members and external stakeholders, the new NDP oriented itself toward voters and its main competitors. Similarly, the new NDP relied more on professional strategists, public opinion polling and focus groups when setting its legislative priorities, instead of on caucus, party members and organized labour.
McGrane addresses modernization from an organizational perspective in the first four chapters. The NDP was very decentralized in 2000; the federal party relied heavily on its provincial counterparts, to the point where regional organizers and membership lists were controlled at the provincial level. Modernization, however, began at the Winnipeg convention in 2001. Delegates rejected the New Politics Initiative, something that would have enhanced the federated structure and shifted the NDP further to the left, and also adopted the “one-member-one-vote” leadership-selection rules eventually used to replace Alexa McDonough. NDP members then elected Jack Layton—a proponent of moderation and modernization—as party leader in 2003. Modernization was further fuelled by party finance reforms that took effect in 2004. The reforms ended the party's financial dependence on trade unions and replaced the lost income with a per vote subsidy. As McGrane concludes, the NDP now had enough autonomy and resources to reorient itself.
The next three chapters examine moderation from the perspective of party positioning and voter behaviour. McGrane tracks how the NDP evolved from a niche market party in 2000 to finally a market challenger in 2015. Interviews reveal that the new NDP leveraged its potential non-confidence vote during consecutive hung parliaments (2004–2011) to attract more earned media coverage. McGrane uses Question Period debates and news releases to show that party leadership successfully established a handful of legislative priorities that were more onside with voters. The new messaging strategy apparently worked. Public opinion data suggest that the NDP began stealing “market share” (voters) from the Liberal party in English Canada and all other parties in Quebec (212, 241). Party members accepted a diminished role inside the NDP because the moderation strategy appeared to be working.
Regrettably, McGrane misses an opportunity to seriously address the consequences of moderation and modernization after the NDP failed to form government in 2015. Readers are left wondering what to make about the end to the per vote subsidy, the apparent resurgence of social movements (as demonstrated by the LEAP Manifesto) and the move to replace Thomas Mulcair as party leader in 2016—even though these events are reported in the concluding chapter. Simply put, the book skirts the issue of whom the NDP should represent. This is a perennial question debated inside all parties. In an earlier period, Carlyle King, a quasi-predecessor to McGrane as the president of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, had summarized the position of moderation skeptics: “They have wanted Success, Victory, and Power; forgetting that the main business of socialist parties is not to form governments but to change minds” (quoted in Young, Reference Young1969: 127). Instead of addressing this issue head-on, McGrane writes that it “is a debate that the activists and leaders of the party should have” and then outlines two competing solutions (328). McGrane is the former president of the Saskatchewan NDP. Surely, he is a leader that can stake a position—although perhaps this criticism is targeted more toward the political marketing literature, which, to my reading, propagates the myth that parties are unitary actors.
To his credit, McGrane documents factionalism inside the NDP and presents readers with the tools for understanding the party after 2015. His members survey uncovers two main factions: “left-wing marketing skeptics” and “right-wing marketing enthusiasts” (85). If we carry these findings forward, the two groups may have found compromise when selecting Jagmeet Singh as party leader in 2017. Singh was the only contestant on the ballot who had not participated in the moderation strategy under Layton or Mulcair. Yet, as the deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, Singh could demonstrate to party stalwarts that he was not just another outsider. Using the party positioning framework that McGrane outlines in chapter 4 (123), readers might conclude that the NDP went back to being a “market follower” after the 2019 federal election (as it was between 2004 and 2011) instead of completing returning to niche party status.
McGrane undoubtedly makes two important contributions in The New NDP. First, the book stands alone as a very accessible case study for transforming market intelligence into political communications strategy. Pundits and partisans would be wise to consult. Second, The New NDP fills a large gap about developments in Canadian party politics since the turn of the twenty-first century. R. Kenneth Carty (Reference Carty2015) has taught us much about changes to the Liberal party in Big Tent Politics. Tom Flanagan (Reference Flanagan2009) does the same for the new Conservative party in Harper's Team. David McGrane joins these distinguished scholars by introducing us to The New NDP.
