A worker at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, a country that seems to be thriving with NDP-style policies.
Ferdinand Ostrop/AP
During the NDP leadership campaign, one thing you almost never hear about is Europe. Browse through the leadership candidates’ websites and you will struggle to find any mention of the continent. If you watched the leadership debates carefully, you might have heard a bit of praise for some European environmental policies, but you would have scarcely any sense that events in Europe are constantly in the news.
This neglect is in part because, as a number of commentators have noted, the NDP leadership campaign has been devoid of discussion of substantial policy questions in general. Instead, there has been almost incessant talk about “values” and “principles” and which candidate has shown the purest faith in them.
But an even larger reason for the NDP leaders to avoid Europe is the political impact of the continent’s debt problems. The eurozone crisis has become a club for conservative politicians and commentators to use in beating up on parties — like the NDP — that have leftward leanings and strong attachments to expensive social programs such as public health care. Indeed, there is now a quick and easy set of code works in public discourse: “Europe” equals “overspending,” “bloated government,” “debt crisis” and finally “economic catastrophe.”
Simply referring to the most crisis-ridden country, Greece, has become an instant answer to questions about government budgets and the public sector generally. As Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently put it: “Not a day goes by without some politician or pundit intoning, with the air of a man conveying great wisdom, that we must slash government spending right away or find ourselves turning into Greece, Greece I tell you.”
The Drummond report on Ontario’s finances triggered a major outburst of this talk around Canada, with the province being widely dubbed “Canada’s Greece.” The more responsible coverage of Drummond’s report did pause to note that while Greece is in default and can hardly sell government bonds right now, a credit crisis for Ontario is, as one Globe article conceded, “a decade or two away.” But no matter, the Drummond report led to an endless series of hysterical (and corny) headlines about Ontario’s “Greek Tragedy.”
These reactions also explain why the NDP will not be able to stay away from Europe for long, especially once the party’s leadership is settled. Whoever becomes leader and however much he or she might want to shift the party to the centre, the Tory attack machine and the conservative media will inevitably link Europe, particularly Greece, to the NDP — to potentially devastating effect.
To respond effectively, the NDP needs to challenge what exactly “Europe” represents. Other parts of Europe, namely northern Europe, should fortify the NDP’s position — and not only against attacks over debts and deficits. Even more important, northern Europe provides answers to the biggest economic question facing Canada and other western countries, a question the NDP must answer as the official opposition claiming to be ready to govern: How can developed countries create meaningful prosperity in a globalized economy?
The countries that have fared best, especially in weathering the Great Recession, are the ones that have long pursued policies similar to the NDP’s. Indeed, some of the most basic economic facts testify to the continued success of countries with large welfare states, relatively strong labour movements, and governments that spend big and stay active in the economy. The acknowledged economic powerhouse in Europe (and beyond) is Germany. The country that tops many charts for global economic competitiveness is Norway. The country with the greatest economic growth in the developed world for most of 2010 and 2011 was Sweden. To highlight both the significance of this feat and the pressing need for credible answers to globalization’s broader challenge to the western world, Sweden was the only developed economy (along with Israel) to place among the world’s top 100 countries in economic growth in 2011. According to the CIA World Factbook, the others (aside from some tiny places like Gibraltar and the Isle of Man) were either developing nations or former members of the Soviet bloc.
To be fair to the NDP, northern Europe’s successes have been easy to overlook in some ways — European social democratic parties themselves have hardly been shouting about their accomplishments from the rooftops. This is why many who sit further to the left struggle to take social democrats seriously as advocates of major change: Social democrats often fail to fight for their positions in difficult moments, even when those positions are being proven right. Many social democratic parties have also jumped on the austerity bandwagon — but crucially, their countries are not the ones facing the most serious deficits. All of the Scandinavian countries have government-debt-to-GDP ratios under 50 per cent — some of the lowest in the developed world. Canada’s ratio for 2011 (including all levels of government) was estimated at about 83 per cent.
In short, the time is rapidly approaching when the NDP will no longer be able to run from larger policy questions — and from questions arising from Europe in particular. But the NDP hardly lacks for ways to rise to this challenge. The experience in much of Europe shows that social democratic policies can actually work. Why run from that?
David Goutor is an assistant professor in the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University.
