The 20th Anniversary
of the Waffle
The Waffle's Impact on the New Democratic Party JOHN SMART n
I
March, 1971 the Security Service of the RCMP, in a brief on the Waffle submitted to the Solicitor General of Canada, Jean-Pierre Goyer, noted:
The prime aim of the Waffle Group within the NDP is the establishment of an independent socialist Canada to be achieved through the existing structure of the New Democratic Party. The Waffle Group hope to change the NDP from within and radicalize the NDP socialist policies. Considering the Waffle group as a whole, it is felt that they will be a viable political force within the NDP.1
It is, perhaps, surprising that the RCMP has supplied us with a definition of the Waffle's aims which is both concise and accurate. It is regrettable, however, that they were wrong about the Waffle's viability within the NDP. For myself, active in the CCF and the NDP since age 18, the Waffle represents the NDP's lost opportunity to become the party Canada needs and that NDP members deserve. Rather than changing the NDP, the Waffle gave us a brief glimpse of what a New Democratic Party with guts, brains and a soul could have been like and what it could have done for Canada. The NDP retreated from the opportunity and has been a regular disappointment to its best friends since it kicked the Waffle out in 1972. In one cycle after another since then, the Canadian people have shown Studies in Political Economy 32, Summer 1990
177
Studies in Political Ecomomy
more interest in the NDP than the party has shown in them. Come election time (both provincial and federal), most working people in this country have decided, a little sadly, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the NDP. In the three years that the Waffle existed as part of the party, however, its impact was profound. For those of us directly involved in it at the time, the Waffle was an intense political experience, albeit a brief and unsuccessful one. Although I've continued to work in the NDP, I do so in the knowledge that it is neither a socialist party nor a nationalist party and that it is not likely to change in either of those directions in the near future. The story begins with the Waffle Manifesto, written by a group of political activists and academics, brought together in late 1968 and early 1969 by Mel Watkins, Jim Laxer, and Gerry Caplan. Basically, it said that Canada could not remain an independent country unless it was also a socialist country, and that the New Democratic Party was the instrument through which the transformation must be made. Political change certainly seemed to be on the Canadian agenda. In the twelve months before the Waffle Manifesto was written, Rene Levesque split with the Liberal party in Quebec and founded the Parti Quebecois. Pierre Trudeau become Prime Minister. Mel Watkins' federal task force report for Walter Gordon on foreign ownership awakened large numbers of Canadians to the facts and dangers of American economic penetration. Ed Schreyer formed an NDP government in Manitoba (with Cy Gonick as an MLA). Looking south to the United States, we saw the student movement, the anti-war movement, Eugene McCarthy, and the retirement of Lyndon Johnson, and wondered about the potential for political change in that country. When the Waffle Manifesto was circulated in the NDP in the summer of 1969, it met with a positive response from party members and organizations well beyond what those of us who had drafted it had expected. Between 400 to 500 party members signed it publicly, while more than 20 constituency associations passed the Manifesto and its associated resolutions and asked that they be debated at the federal convention. The Provincial Council of the Saskat178
J. Smart/On the Wame
chewan NDP passed it for debate at the convention, where the Saskatchewan NDP leader, Woodrow Lloyd, voted for it. The signatories of the Manifesto included NDP MLAs in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia (including Dave Barrett) as well as the leader of the Nova Scotia NDP, Jeremy Akerman. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Waffle signatories included most of the people in the party who could have been expected to provide leadership in the NDP after Coldwell and Douglas. People like Jim Laxer and Mel Watkins, who were, in my opinion, the most creative political thinkers English Canada produced in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote the crucial drafts of the Manifesto. But there were hundreds of other people, less gifted, perhaps, who took courage from the collective strength shown by the Waffle. They came forward to playa role in politics in 1969 and after, in the NDP, in their union, in the women's movement, or in the nationalist movement. At the 1969 Winnipeg Convention itself, thirty-five percent of the delegates voted for the Waffle Manifesto and nine Wafflers were elected to the federal executive or Federal Council of the party. Waffle resolutions and policy positions developed for the convention by Wafflers on foreign ownership, NATO, women in the party, and extra-parliamentary activity received significant support. In some cases, they formed the basis of compromise or co-opting resolutions drafted by the party leadership. The convention debate on the Waffle Manifesto was televised and the CBC ran a TV documentary by film maker Ralph Thomas called "What's Left" in the days before the convention. By the end of 1969 the Waffle had given the NDP a strong left wing and had made it respectable to talk about socialism, nationalism, and Quebec inside the NDP (and outside it as well). More important, it had restored to people in the NDP a belief in the possibility of changing the party and creating a better politics in Canada. As the Toronto Star noted: The Canadian people have been provided with a more distinct political alternative and, of even more importance, an alternative 179
Studies in Political Ecomomy
that is more strongly nationalist. A convention that can make a claim like that can't have been a complete bust.2
The Waffle did not, of course, invent the desire for socialism or nationalism on the part of Canadians, nor the deep concerns Canadians had about foreign ownership and our relationship with the United States. But we did articulate those positions inside the NDP and provide an organizing centre for others who shared such concerns and wanted to work with us there. The reason why so many people who lived through that era have such positive memories of the Waffle (though they may never have gone to one of it meetings at the time) is that the Waffle gave them something to hope for and occasionally something to vote for. People thought it appropriate and necessary that there be a left wing in a left wing party. There was also a good deal about our political practice within the NDP that was different and that had an impact. We kept going as a political caucus after the convention. There had been left caucuses in the CCF and the NDP before but they had been single shot efforts aimed at one convention and had always disbanded afterwards. The Waffle did not. We took work in the NDP as our primary focus and urged others to do so as well. We wrote about our ideas in Canadian Dimension, Canadian Forum, Last Post, This Magazine Is About Schools or in the local papers. We went on television and radio. We held public meetings and rallies on the issues we cared about. We had a newsletter and eventually a small newspaper. There were Waffle groups meeting across the country. The meetings were open to any New Democrat, and only New Democrats could take steering committee positions in the Waffle. We ran for office in the party at all levels and we did constituency work in a conscientious way. When we could, we got our riding associations to sponsor or co-sponsor the rallies, panels and lectures we staged. In March of 1970 the Waffle held a major teach-in on the "Americanization of Canada" at the University of Toronto. A number of people from outside the Waffle spoke, including Liberal nationalist and former Finance Minister 180
J. Smart/On the WaMe
Walter Gordon. and Michel Chartrand. president of the Conseil central des syndicats nationaux in Montreal. In April the Ontario Waffle held its own convention to plan for the provincial party's fall convention. In the same month. the Toronto Waffle organized a massive campaign against the closure of the Dunlop Canada plant in east Toronto.3 In August 1970 the first national conference of Wafflers was held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Resolutions were planned for the next federal convention. as was strategy for a Waffle campaign for the federal leadership of the NDP in 1971. In the fall of 1970. the Saskatchewan Waffle (which had been organized for months) ran Don Mitchell of Moose Jaw for the leadership of the provincial party. as a successor to Woodrow Lloyd (who had angered his party's right wing by supporting the Waffle). In September 1970 the national Waffle held a series of successful rallies across Canada protesting energy exports to the United States. The same month Jim Laxer's influential book. The Energy Poker Game. was published. Tommy Douglas told the Ontario NDP convention that every New Democrat should read it. A key chapter in the story of the Waffle's impact on the NDP was written at the Ontario Convention of the NDP in October 1970. This was the convention at which Stephen Lewis was selected to replace Donald MacDonald as Ontario NDP leader. The Waffle showed remarkable organizational and policy strength at the Convention. riding a wave of desire for reform in the party and reaping the rewards of a year of its own political work. The Ontario Waffle Manifesto nearly passed the Convention as a policy resolution. Waffle policy resolutions on energy. on housing and women's rights were accepted by the convention and a third of the newly elected provincial executive were Wafflers. Wafflers also ran. on a program of internal party reform. for President and Provincial Secretary of the Ontario Party. and received about one-third of the vote. But it was one thing to cause the federal party a little disturbance. To threaten control of the party in Ontario. the home of the Lewis family and the site of the union base of such people as Lynn Williams of the Steelworkers. and Dennis McDer181
Studies in Political Ecomomy
mott of the Canadian Autoworkers, was very different. The traditional leadership of the party began to realize that it would have to put an end to the Waffle in the NDP. We know now from documents available in the CCF/NDP Papers and elsewhere that the party leadership planned very carefully its response to the Waffle during the fall and winter of 1970-1971 and that the leadership convention was carefully orchestrated.4 It was to prove a successful strategy. Immediately following the Ontario NDP convention, the fight for the federal leadership began. The Waffle's success in 1969 had already had some important effects on the leadership of the NDP. David Lewis only decided to run for the federal leadership as a successor to Tommy Douglas after observing how poorly the younger leadership candidates fared against the Waffle in Winnipeg. He had been intending to retire as deputy leader of the federal NDP, but decided that types like Ed Broadbent and John Harney wouldn't be able to deal with the Waffle and that he would have to perform one more service for the party. Jim Laxer, then a 28 year-old sessional lecturer in Canadian History at Queen's University, had emerged as the Waffle's candidate, after a process of consultation, during the fall of 1969. Much of the federal NDP leadership campaign turned on the issue of Quebec and was fought during the FLQ crisis and in the aftermath of the imposition of the War Measures Act. Jim Laxer came second to David Lewis on the final ballot of the April 1971 convention with 612 votes to Lewis's 1046. Waffle resolutions were almost all defeated at the convention and fewer Wafflers were elected to party positions, though all who ran received strong support. Carol Gudmundson, a founder of the Saskatchewan Waffle, for example, received 39 percent of the votes cast for party president. The leadership contest and the convention did establish the Waffle as the official opposition inside the federal NDP, and it did draw the lines clearly between a radical platform for the NDP and the more cautious program on which the party usually ran. The existence of the Waffle on a solid basis inside the NDP was deeply frightening to the leader182
J. Smart/On the Waffle
ship. If Waffle leaders became Members of Parliament in an NDP caucus, it was unlikely that traditional NDP leaders and their ideas could continue to dominate the party. If Laxer, an academic who had never run for office before, could come that close to defeating David Lewis, what might he not be able to do as an elected MP? David Lewis said in his post-convention press conference that, although he planned to meet with each leadership candidate in the following weeks, he would make no concessions to the Waffle. "No prizes for coming second," was the way he put it. Despite this attitude, NDP leaders in Ottawa and elsewhere could not ignore the issues the Waffle had raised, and NDP rhetoric reflected this. During the period of minority government from 1972-1974 when the NDP held the balance of power in Ottawa, the party was certainly influenced, in the demands it made on the Liberals, by the existence of the Waffle, even though the Waffle had left the NDP by then. The creation of Petro-Canada, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, the Canadian Development Corporation, and the "Corporate Welfare Bums" NDP campaign theme of 1972 all show this influence.S Within 14 months of the 1971 federal convention, however, the Waffle had been kicked out of the NDP. It was the Ontario NDP where the action was taken, during the spring and summer of 1972. The ostensible grounds chosen were that the Waffle was operating as a 'party within a party', that is as an independent organization within the NDP, and that this situation was creating damaging confusion both within and outside the NDP. To the Waffle, it seemed rather more correct to say that a process of change and renewal had been launched inside the party in a leftward direction and that action was taken to bring that process to an end. For two years after the expulsion, the Waffle, at least in Ontario, tried to operate outside the NDP as an independent organization and, finally, as a political party. It failed.6 It was very significant to us at the time that the NDP leadership outlawed caucuses in the party (at least effective ones) and that the rank and file of the NDP in the unions and the riding associations couldn't save us. Other very 183
Studies in Political Ecomomy
distinct steps were taken at the same time in 1972 as part of the Waffle purge. The New Democratic Youth wing was dismantled too, and the Ontario party passed a by-law (still in effect) that resolutions to conventions must not exceed 250 words in length. It certainly raised questions for us about the limits of social democracy in Canada. But, as many of us discovered, if the NDP is gone, what else is there? I think now that we should probably have tried harder to stay in the NDP (though I certainly didn't think so then). Organized dissent on major issues is still not welcome within the NDP. It is part of the present weakness of the party that it failed to encourage internal debate over the 1982 Constitution and over Meech Lake and NATO at its 1987 convention. The leadership claimed on those occasions that such disputes would hurt the party in the opinion polls; the delegates largely accepted this. At the 1989 convention, the NDP should have had a full debate as to what went wrong for it in the 1988 federal election. Why did Ed Broadbent let go of the free trade issue? Why did the campaign develop in isolation from the ideas and tactical suggestions of labour leaders like Bob White? None of the leadership candidates opened these questions up. Parties on the left which do not, as a matter of principle, engage in fundamental debate from time to time become irrelevant to an important fraction of their adherents and this is happening to the NDP. Audrey McLaughlin ostensibly stood for a more open party in her successful leadership campaign. It is too early to tell whether she will have any beneficial effect in this direction or on the other problems faced by the party. Canadians today watch two political developments with fascination; the emergence of reform governments in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the major bases of their own country's national government and economy. In a real way, the ineffectiveness of the New Democratic Party proceeds from the paralysis affecting all major political institutions in Canada. But the NDP is much less than it should be today because it turned its back on the Waffle and the idea of a left nationalist opposition inside the party. Twenty years ago the Waffle said the NDP had to define itself in terms of the national question. This may 184
J. Smart/On the Warne
have proved very true in the end. The failure of Ed Broadbent and the NDP to articulate an effective position of full opposition to free trade in the 1988 federal election seriously damaged the party. A large section of the party's activists and many of its best friends outside the party were seriously dismayed by the NDP's 1988 campaign. Bob White's admission after the campaign that the labour leadership had no access to Broadbent on the free trade issue during the campaign speaks volumes. If a major union leader and party vice-president can be ignored, what hope for the ordinary party member? The Waffle was a particular initiative at a particular time. That it failed does not excuse those of us who are socialists or nationalists from further political action in defence of our country and its people. What occurred in 1972 does not really excuse us from further political struggle, though it makes that struggle more difficult to undertake. People who were inspired by the Waffle directly 20 years ago or who might be encouraged by hearing about it 20 years later have the same tasks before them today. It is very important that nationalists and socialists in Canada today be active politically, whether in the same organization or not. We achieve nothing politically as individuals. Socialist voices and ideas, nationalist voices and ideas, need to be raised in this country today, even more so than in 1969. Currently, political discussion in this country is limited by the narrow concerns which arise from capitalist, continentalist ideas. Even the most basic ideas and traditions of Canadian naton building are ignored by government, business and the media today. It is regrettable that the Waffle failed in its major objectives and that it disappeared prematurely. The NDP cut itself off from some key ideas and trends in Canadian political culture when it cut itself off from the Waffle. It damaged itself severely as a democratic party on the left and has never made up the ground it lost in 1972. By making itself immune to new ideas from other sources after the Waffle, the NDP severely reduced its appeal to Canadians concerned about progressive political change. Today the NDP is in danger of becoming a marginal party in Canada, as happened with the CCF in the 1950s. In the 1990s we cannot seek 185
-------
Studies in Political Ecomomy
to recreate the Waffle but we should try to learn from the Waffle episode and to emulate the courage, drive and political honesty that characterized it. Notes 1.
2. 3.
4.
S.
6.
186
Quoted in Report of the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [McDonald Commission) Freedom and Security IllUkr the Law, Second Report Volume I, August 1981, p. 483. Toronto Star 3 November 1969. The Waffle continued to organize teach-ins, rallies and meetings around its main issues throughout its existence, even after it left the NDP. A lot of work was done on energy, the Autopact, and de-industrialization, for example. Bob Laxer and others organized a popular public lecture series in Toronto in 1973 and a similar one was staged in Ottawa. The Waffle devoted a lot of time to strike support in strikes such as Texpack, Dare and Artistic Woodwork to take some Ontario examples. See Bob Laxer, (Canada) Ltd. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973). This story is told very well in John Bullen, "The Ontario Waffle and the Struggle for an Independent Socialist Canada: A Study in Radical Nationalism," M.A. thesis, History Department, University of Ottawa, 1981. See also his 1983 article on the Ontario Waffle in the Canadian Historical Review. Robert Hackett's work on the Waffle is also interesting. See the special issue of Canadian DilMnsian devoted to Hackett's work, vol. IS, Numbers 1 and 2, October-November 1980. A useful study could also be done of the influence of the Waffle on Liberal policy makers during those years. There is some evidence that this influence was more than slight. The Committee for an Independent Canada, formed in 1970, was very definitely a response to the Waffle and its success. It was not a Liberal front, but some prominent Liberals, such as Walter Gordon and Mel Hurtig, were instrumental in its creation. (It is also interesting to note that, though the Waffle outside the NDP had many internal problems, it actually dissolved in 1974 over an inability to resolve the question as to whether it should begin to cooperate with other nationalist organizations like the ClC.) The Waffle came to an end not because of its expulsion from the NDP, but because, once out of the party, the socialists and the nationalists in the Waffle could not work together.