TORONTO —Niki Ashton, the only prairie candidate in last weekend’s NDP leadership race, says the party must plot out a strategy to re-win the West.
In her March 23 speech to delegates at the convention that chose Thomas Mulcair as the new leader, she proposed a 2013 meeting of western New Democrats in Lethbridge to craft a party platform that responds to regional issues.
“I think there is a tremendous opportunity for our party in the West,” the MP from Churchill, Man., said in an interview March 24, hours after she was dropped from the leadership ballot after placing last out of seven contenders with slightly more than 3,700 of 65,000 ballots cast.
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She said her result was not a reflection on the party view of western issues.
Ashton was the only leadership candidate to propose a specific attempt to reconnect with western voters, who once gave New Democrats a majority of Saskatchewan and Manitoba seats and now have largely abandoned the party.
The NDP holds just three of 56 seats in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and has not elected an MP in Saskatchewan since 2000.
In 2011, the Prairies were immune to the “orange surge” that swept Quebec and made the NDP Parliament’s second party.
“I think there is a real opening because the West has given Stephen Harper support for years and he is taking it for granted,” Ashton said. “Reform once stood for grassroots control and now it is control from the centre. We can offer the ‘democratic’ in NDP.”
Ashton said an NDP meeting in Sherbrooke, Que., that produced the Sherbrooke Declaration on Quebec policy before the last election, helped the party win a majority of Quebec seats. It was pivotal in identifying the NDP with provincial political aspirations.
“The issues will be different, but we could do a Lethbridge Declaration that would set out our goals for Western Canada,” she said.
