The recent by-election in the Toronto-Centre riding offered the NDP an excellent opportunity to begin the provincial fight back against the cuts and attacks that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals are promising. As we have written over the past couple of issues, the Liberals are vowing to attack public sector jobs and services in order to balance the massive $25-billion Ontario deficit. Although the NDP did not win the by-election, there were some positive signs that if the party adopts the correct slogans and platform, it can play a major role in organizing resistance to the bosses’ attacks.
The Liberals’ candidate, former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray, held the riding with about 45% of the votes. Cathy Crowe, the NDP candidate, finished in second place and captured 33% of all votes. This was a major step forward for the NDP. They nearly doubled their vote percentage from the 2007 election and handily surpassed the Tory vote in the riding. Furthermore, the Liberals were forced to pull out all of the stops to get Murray, a very high-profile candidate, elected in what is one of the most Liberal-friendly ridings in Ontario. The Toronto Star noted how Liberal officials found the election campaign to be “too close for comfort.”
Toronto-Centre is a riding of extreme financial contrast. In the north lie the mansions of Rosedale, home to some of Canada’s richest people. Towards the west lie the downtown condos along Bay St. However, the riding is also home to neighbourhoods such as The Esplanade, St. Jamestown, and Regent Park, which are characterized by social housing, housing co-operatives, and poverty. Recently, this area has experienced creeping gentrification. The building of condos has removed many social housing units and displaced their tenants.
Part of the NDP’s success in this by-election can be attributed to recruiting Crowe as a candidate. Popularly known as “street nurse”, Crowe has a track record of activism against homelessness and fighting for more accessible health care services for the most impoverished Torontonians. During this by-election, the NDP’s campaign begun by just focusing on Crowe’s personality. But, after pressure from the community and youth activists to highlight real issues, they put forth a platform for increased social housing, improved access to health care, fighting to save a local hospital, opposing privatization, and opposing the Liberal’s implementation of the harmonized sales tax (HST).
Another reason for the NDP’s success in this election was the active participation of young workers who helped out in Crowe’s campaign. Encouraged by what they saw as a grassroots-oriented campaign that spoke to working class people’s issues, a sizeable number of youth from the Esplanade did mass canvassing of their community. For many of these youth, organized through the Esplanade Community Group, it was their first time getting involved in electoral politics and the NDP. Many youth explained, “Cathy Crowe’s a member of our community, and unlike some of the vague campaigning that the NDP has done in the past, she’s speaking about issues that matter and she’s about fighting for our community”.
At the same time, a group of young NDP activists launched a new NDP youth club aimed at getting young Toronto workers active. The Toronto Young New Democrats (TYND) invited Crowe and Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath to speak at their launch event and organized mass youth canvasses in the riding. Both the TYND and the Esplanade Community Group organized a town hall meeting that encouraged workers and youth in the riding to vote, to get involved in their community, and to get involved in the NDP. At the same time, several speakers at the town hall indicated that working class people must fight to make the NDP a grassroots activist party. People have had enough of the “knock on your door every four years” electoralism that has turned off many working class people. This new engagement with youth was noted in the media; the Star commented how Crowe’s campaign had “swarms of youth” volunteering.
However, the NDP campaign needed to go further. The official NDP campaign was still reticent in putting forward a program that better reflected the needs of people in the riding, fearing that they would be seen as too “radical.” There was too much attention put on the condos in the riding, rather than targeting the working-class neighbourhoods, even if many of these people traditionally do not vote. As well as the NDP did in the by-election, the voter turnout was less than 30%. Over the past few elections, Canada has had a very low voter turnout that is a result from a lack of leadership to inspire working class people to vote. Often, many people are disillusioned by elections and politics because they feel there are no real alternatives to a political system based on corruption, bickering, and favours for the bosses.
We are set to see mass cuts and attacks aimed at workers and young people in this province and the NDP needs to place itself at the head of a movement fighting back against cuts and privatization. The results from Toronto-Centre show that the party can be well placed if they put forward a real program that answers the Liberal and Tory attacks and if the party actively mobilizes within working class communities.
