Ontario New Democratic Party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ontario New Democratic Party | |
|---|---|
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| Active Provincial Party | |
| Founded | 1932 |
| Leader | Howard Hampton |
| President | Sandra Clifford |
| Headquarters | 33 Cecil St Toronto, Ontario M5T 1N1 |
| Political ideology | Social Democracy / Democratic Socialism |
| International alignment | Socialist International |
| Colours | Orange & Green |
| Website | http://www.ontariondp.on.ca |
The Ontario New Democratic Party is a social democratic political party in Ontario, Canada. It is a section of the federal New Democratic Party.
Contents |
[edit] Origins
The NDP was founded in 1932 as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a democratic socialist political party. The Ontario CCF saw itself as the successor to the 1919-1923 United Farmers of Ontario-Labour coalition that formed the government in Ontario under Ernest C. Drury.
While United Farmer Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) joined the Ontario Liberal Party, the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), as an organization, participated in the formation of the Ontario CCF, and was briefly affiliated with the party. It decided to withdraw in 1935, alleging Communist influence in the new party. Many active members of the UFO remained supporters, including Agnes Macphail, who served as president of the Ontario CCF until 1935 when, as a UFO Member of Parliament (MP), she was forced to officially resign from the CCF when the UFO withdrew from the party. She was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as a CCF Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP)1 in 1943.
Other prominent CCFers were Graham Spry who was the Ontario CCF's chairman from 1934 to 1936 and Elmore Philpott, a former Liberal Philpott joined the CCF in 1933 and became president of the Ontario Association of CCF Clubs before resigning from the party and rejoining the Liberals in 1935.
The CCF contested its first Ontario provincial election in 1934. It received 7% of the vote, and won its first seat in the Ontario legislature: Samuel Lawrence was elected in Hamilton East. The Ontario CCF failed to win any seats in the 1937 election.
1 In 1938, Members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly (MLAs) passed a motion to adopt the title "Members of Provincial Parliament" (MPP).
[edit] Breakthrough and decline
The party achieved a major breakthrough under its first leader, Ted Jolliffe, in the 1943 election, forming the Official Opposition with 32% of the vote and 34 seats. The CCF was just four seats short of George Drew's Progressive Conservatives ("Tories"), who formed a minority government.
The 1945 Election is known infamously as the "Gestapo Campaign", due to Jolliffe's May 24, 1945 radio speech that compared Drew's use of the Ontario Provincial Police's Special Investigations Branch to spy on opposition MPPs to the dreaded Nazi secret state police.[1] The information acquired by agent D-208 was used by the anti-CCF forces to place libelous advertisements in the province's newspapers and billboards. Jolliffe publicly alleged that Drew was ordering this spying. The public outcry was so great that Drew had to form the LeBel Royal Commission, to look into these allegations.[2] Although Jolliffe's CCF and the Ontario Liberals called on Drew to suspend the election until the commission made its report, Drew continued on with the election. The CCF dropped 9 percentage points, but were reduced to 8 seats in the Legislature. Drew got a massive majority and Jolliffe lost his York South seat.
In the 1948 Election, the CCF were able to elect 21 members, including Jolliffe. They formed the Official Opposition again. The return to popularity was short-lived though. The prosperity of the 1950s, combined with the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War, caused the CCF's fortunes to rapidly decline. The party was reduced to two seats and lost its position as the Official Opposition in the 1951 election to the Liberal Party. No social democratic party would be the Official Opposition again until 1975, when Stephen Lewis's NDP caucus displaced the Liberals as the second party in the Ontario Legislature.
[edit] End of the CCF/New Party and revival
Donald C. MacDonald became leader in 1953, and spent the next fifteen years rebuilding the party. The CCF changed its name to the New Democratic Party in 1961, when it formed a formal alliance with the labour movement.
The Ontario NDP gradually picked up seats through the 1960s. It achieved a breakthrough in the 1967 election, when its popular vote rose from 15% to 26%. The party increased its presence in the legislature from 8 to 20 seats.
[edit] Official Opposition, again
Stephen Lewis took over the party's leadership in 1970, and the NDP's popularity continued to grow. With the 1975 provincial election, the governing Conservatives were reduced to a minority government for the first time in thirty years. The NDP became the Official Opposition with 38 seats and 29% of the vote as the result of a brilliant election campaign that forced the Tories to promise to implement the NDP's rent control policies.
Hopes were high that the NDP was on the verge of taking power, but in the 1977 election, the Tories under Bill Davis again won a minority government. The NDP lost five seats, and slipped into third place behind the Liberals.
The NDP declined further in the 1981 election under Michael Cassidy, but the party's fortunes turned around under the leadership of Bob Rae.
[edit] The Rae years
The 1985 election resulted in a minority legislature: the Tories under Premier Frank Miller won 52 seats, the Liberals won 48, and the NDP 25. The New Democrats entered negotiations with both the Tories and the Liberals. The NDP signed a two-year accord with the Liberals, in which the Liberals would form government with the NDP's support in exchange for the implementation of a number of NDP policies.
Miller resigned, opening the way for Liberal leader David Peterson to form a government. This was not a coalition government as the NDP declined an offer to sit in Cabinet, preferring to remain in opposition.
When the accord expired in 1987, the Liberals called an election and were re-elected with a majority. The NDP returned as the second largest party with Bob Rae becoming Leader of the Opposition.
In the general election of 1990, the party won power for the first time by heavily defeating the Liberal government. Most of the party's own supporters hadn't expected to win. However, Peterson's popularity tailed off dramatically between 1987 and 1990. With the Tories in considerable upheaval, the NDP was able to take advantage of the situation. Although the NDP finished only three percentage points ahead of the Liberals, they managed to take many seats in the Greater Toronto Area away from the Liberals. As a result, the NDP won a strong majority government with 74 seats while the Liberals suffered the worst defeat in their history.
Bob Rae became Premier of Ontario during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In government, the NDP disappointed supporters by abandoning much of its ambitious program, including the promise to institute a public auto insurance system. As the recession worsened, the NDP implemented what it called the Social Contract — which represented a shift to the right that echoed that of Tony Blair's Labour Party in the United Kingdom. This was a package of austerity measures that;
- reopened the collective bargaining agreements of public sector unions;
- implemented a wage freeze for public servants; and
- imposed Rae Days, which were a schedule of days in which government workers were given days off without pay.
The Social Contract resulted in a major breach in the NDP's alliance with the labour movement as several unions turned against the party. At one point, the NDP fell to a low of 6 percent support in polling. An ominous sign for the party came in the 1993 federal election, in which all of the NDP's Ontario MPs lost their seats. It was obvious by the 1995 election that Rae would not win another term. In this election, the NDP was heavily defeated by the Tories under Mike Harris. The NDP fell to 17 seats, third place in the Legislative Assembly.
[edit] After Rae
Rae resigned a few months after the election and was succeeded by Howard Hampton, a longtime rival. Rae has since joined the Liberal Party of Canada and was an unsuccessful candidate for party leadership in December 2006.
Under Hampton, the party has largely repudiated Rae's policies and renewed its commitment to a moderate form of socialism. Shortly after the 1999 election, Hampton cited the Swedish model of social democracy as closely reflecting his own beliefs. However, the party has never really healed the breach with organized labor that resulted from the Social Contract. It has also never approached the popularity it enjoyed in the late 1980s.
NDP support fell even further in the 1999 election, leaving the party with just 9 seats. However, this was largely due to NDP voters voting Liberal in hopes of removing Harris and the Tories from power. As a result, Hampton was not blamed for this severe defeat and stayed on as leader.
Under the rules of the Legislative Assembly, a party would receive "official party status", and the resources and privileges accorded to officially-recognized parties, if it had 12 or more seats; thus, the NDP would lose caucus funding and the ability to ask questions in the House. However, the governing Conservatives changed the rules after the election to lower the threshold for party status from 12 seats to 8. The Tories argued that since Ontario's provincial ridings now had the same boundaries as the federal ones, the threshold should be lowered to accommodate the smaller legislature. Others argued that the Tories were only helping the NDP so they could continue to split the vote with the Liberals.
In the 2003 election, the party alienated some traditional supporters with an over-reliance on photo ops. It won over some new supporters by emphasizing a few key issues, primarily "public" hospitals and "public" electricity. Despite a slight increase in raw vote, the party lost two seats, once again losing official party status and the concommitant speaking privileges and funding. The newly elected Liberal government refused to change the rules as the Tories had done. However, the NDP regained party status when Andrea Horwath won a massive victory a by-election in Hamilton East on May 13, 2004.
The NDP's representation in the Legislature was again reduced to seven seats when Marilyn Churley resigned her seat to run in the 2006 federal election. However, the Liberals reversed their position and declared that the NDP would retain party status even if they lost the upcoming Toronto—Danforth by-election. Some opposition sources believed the Liberals, mindful of their humiliating defeat to Horwath, had loosened their interpretation of the rules so that whomever ran for the NDP in Toronto-Danforth couldn't use the threat of lost status in a campaign. This issue became moot when Peter Tabuns won the seat for the NDP comfortably by 9% over the Liberals' Ben Chin.
[edit] 2007 Ontario general election
Ontario is scheduled to hold its next general election on October 10, 2007, its first fixed date election. The Ontario NDP has reason to expect significant gains in this forthcoming vote. A July, 2006, Environics poll showed the party with 27% popular support, its highest level recorded since March, 1992, when Bob Rae's government was still in power.[1] In this poll, however, the NDP still trailed the governing Liberals who received 35% support and the Opposition Progressive Conservatives who led with 36%. Also, subsequent polls have shown the NDP with support in the 20-23% range, further behind the two frontrunning parties but still well ahead of the Party's 2003 election result.[2]
The NDP's performance in several by-elections may be an early indicator of its ability to capitalize on its rising support in the next general election. After first winning the riding of Hamilton East away from the Liberals in 2004, and holding the riding of Toronto Danforth against a strong Liberal challenge in early 2006, the NDP scored a further upset victory over the Liberals in the fall of that year in the riding of Parkdale—High Park. On Thursday, September 14, 2006, less than thirteen months before the forthcoming general election, well-known local United Church minister Cheri DiNovo, representing the NDP, defeated Liberal candidate and incumbent Toronto city councillor Sylvia Watson by a 41% to 33% margin. [3]. The NDP continued its string of by-election wins when Paul Ferreira narrowly won (43% to 41%) the riding of York South—Weston, adjacent to Parkdale—High Park and once the seat of Bob Rae, from the Liberals on 8 February 2007.[4] This string of by-election wins has brought the NDP caucus to 10 members and greatly boosted NDP morale before the October election.
[edit] Leaders of the Ontario CCF/NDP
- E.B.(Ted) Jolliffe 1942-1953
- Donald C. MacDonald 1953-19702
- Stephen Lewis 1970-1978
- Michael Cassidy 1978-1982
- Bob Rae 1982-19963
- Howard Hampton 1996-present
2 The Ontario CCF became the Ontario NDP in 1961.
3 Bud Wildman was interim leader of the NDP in the Ontario legislature from Rae's resignation as an MPP to Howard Hampton's election as party leader.
See also: Ontario CCF/NDP Leadership Conventions
[edit] Election results
| Year of election | Candidates elected | # of seats available | # of votes | % of popular vote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1934 | 1 | 90 | na | 7.0% |
| 1937 | 0 | 90 | na | 5.6% |
| 1943 | 34 | 90 | na | 31.7% |
| 1945 | 8 | 90 | na | 22.4% |
| 1948 | 21 | 90 | na | 27.0% |
| 1951 | 2 | 90 | na | 19.1% |
| 1955 | 3 | 98 | na | 16.5% |
| 1959 | 5 | 98 | na | 16.7% |
| 1963 | 7 | 108 | na | 15.5% |
| 1967 | 20 | 117 | na | 25.9% |
| 1971 | 19 | 117 | na | 27.1% |
| 1975 | 38 | 125 | na | 28.9% |
| 1977 | 33 | 125 | na | 28.0% |
| 1981 | 21 | 125 | na | 21.2% |
| 1985 | 25 | 125 | 865,507 | 23.8% |
| 1987 | 19 | 130 | 970,813 | 25.7% |
| 1990 | 74 | 130 | 1,509,506 | 37.6% |
| 1995 | 17 | 129 | 854,163 | 20.6% |
| 1999 | 9 | 103 | 551,009 | 12.6% |
| 2003 | 7 | 103 | 660,730 | 14.7% |
[edit] References and notes
- Caplan, Gerald (1973). The Dilemma of Canadian Socialisim: The CCF in Ontario. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. ISBN 0771018967.
- Lewis, David (1981). The Good Fight: Political Memoirs, 1909-1958. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada. ISBN 0771595980.
- MacDonald, Donald C. (1998). The Happy Warrior: Political Memoirs, 2nd Ed.. Toronto: Dundurn Press, pp.292-296. ISBN 1-55002-307-1.
- Smith, Cameron (1989). Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press. ISBN 0-929091-04-3.
[edit] See also
- List of articles about Ontario CCF/NDP members
- Ontario CCF/NDP leadership conventions
- List of Ontario general elections
- List of Premiers of Ontario
- List of Ontario political parties
- United Farmers of Ontario
- Progressive Party
- Labour Party
- Co-operative Commonwealth Federation
- Metro New Democratic Party - Municipal NDP in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s
- Ontario New Democratic Youth
- New Democratic Party candidates, 2003 Ontario provincial election
- Ontario provincial by-elections, 2007
[edit] External links
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