If there is a hole in the New Democratic Party electoral strategy to move from second place to first in 2015, it has to be rural, agricultural and Western Canada.
This vast region once was the core of NDP strength, particularly on the Prairies, the party’s birthplace.
Now, NDP rural strength is scattered among a few British Columbia, Ontario and Atlantic ridings but mainly concentrated in first-time Quebec NDP wins in 2011 that are far from a given for repeat in 2015.
Numbers aside, it is an embarrassment for the party that Saskatchewan, the cradle of the CCF-NDP movement almost 80 years ago and that still holds the record for consecutive CCF-NDP years in power at 18, has not elected an NDP federal MP since 2000.
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The party has launched a campaign across the Prairies to try to find out how they lost their political mojo and how they might get it back.
NDP national president Rebecca Blaikie, a long-time activist and daughter of long-time MP and then Manitoba cabinet minister Bill Blaikie, said last week the disconnect between voters and the federal party even as they vote NDP provincially is mystifying.
So MPs including Churchill’s Niki Ashton and Winnipeg’s Pat Martin and Edmonton’s Linda Duncan have joined Blaikie in hosting meetings across the Prairies to figure out what has gone off the rails and what can be done about it.
The plan is to have a report, or perhaps a resolution, at the pre-election 2015 convention in Edmonton to make rural, prairie and agricultural voters a target.
As they did in Quebec in their successful-beyond-their-wildest-dreams campaign in 2011, New Democrats dream of importing the Quebec campaign model to the Prairies next time — a coals to Newcastle scenario if there ever was one.
Still, if that is part of the party plan to move from opposition to government, a part of the strategy could well have been approving or at least debating some rural or agricultural resolutions at their biennial convention in Montreal last weekend.
It would have been a signal.
Instead there was a perfunctory group hug for supply management and then … nothing.
But policy time was limited on a convention floor dominated by feel-good speeches and assertions of how Canada needs more New Democrats.
So there really was one forum in which there could have been an important message to rural and agricultural Canada that they have a place in party plans — the keynote speech by leader Thomas Mulcair April 13.
As he unloaded on a long list of Canadians forgotten by the Conservatives there was a Newfoundlander who could not find a job, an Ontario teacher, a Quebec mother worried about her kids, a Calgary business woman unhappy because she cannot get a Crown corporation board appointment, a Halifax veteran, a Vancouver transgendered who faces discrimination.
Nowhere in Mulcair’s list was a suggestion that rural or agricultural Canadians have been left off of the Conservative winners’ list.
For those trying to resurrect the party in rural and prairie Canada, a mention by the leader that they are part of the downtrodden under the Conservatives would have been helpful. Unless, of course, the leadership considers that swath of Canadian voters a lost cause.
