Broaden support base | NDP members want Thomas Mulcair to tour prairie provinces to listen to concerns of rural Canada
TORONTO — If Malcolm Allen has his way, the New Democratic Party will soon invest far more energy and resources into winning back the West and the rural seats it once owned.
He will be telling new leader Thomas Mulcair that the party must re-establish its prairie base if it is to ever compete for government.
Saskatchewan, which has been NDP-free for almost a decade, is a prime target.
The southwestern Ontario MP and agriculture critic says the parliamentary caucus, with its strong northern Ontario and Quebec rural representation, plans to create a rural and northern caucus group to focus on rural issues.
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He also wants the new leadership to make it a priority to visit rural prairie areas to let residents know that the party is back.
“To form government we need 70 more seats and many of those must come from Western Canada,” Allen said during the March 23-25 NDP leadership convention, hours before the new leader was chosen.
“We need to get a tour organized quickly to get into rural Canada to listen, to let them know we are not going to show up every election for five weeks to say, ‘here we are. Vote for us.’ ”
Allen said that with recent success in some rural areas of Eastern Canada, the party is realizing it must and can broaden its appeal to include rural Canada.
He said on his frequent forays into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, he talks and hears about issues far broader than agriculture.
“There is a real level-of-service gap between rural and urban that I hear about all the time and in a way I live it,” said Allen. “I live in a rural area between two cities, St. Catharines and Welland, and I cannot get high speed internet. I’m on dial-up and it is slow.”
Bill Knight, a former Saskatchewan NDP MP and party official, said the party continues to receive one-third of the vote in Saskatchewan, despite being shut out of seats through four elections.
“What is missing in this is not a policy commitment or organization,” It’s a leadership commitment.”
Winnipeg MP Pat Martin made the same point about being close.
“With one or two additional percent of the vote, we’d be at a tipping point that could give us eight or nine seats,” he said. “We just have to keep working.”
Liberal pollster and strategist David Herle saw another force at work. Saskatchewan has changed since he was growing up there. It has become more prosperous and both Liberal and NDP fortunes have suffered.
“I used to think Saskatchewan had more progressive values than Alberta,” he said during the convention. “It turns out we were just poorer.”
