Douglas, Tommy - Mouseland Story

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Queens Park, June 5th, 1962

In a CBC Radio News Special broadcast on January 1, 1961, Canadians heard Tommy Douglas tell the story of Mouseland. In this humourous political allegory, he describes a troubled village of mice ruled by cats. Every four years the mice get together to elect a new parliament, but each time they either elect a group of fat black cats or a group of big white cats. “Now if you think it’s strange than mice should elect a government made up of cats,” Douglas quipped, “just look at the history of Canada for the last ninety years and maybe you’ll see they aren’t any stupider than we are!” (CBC Digital Archives). The story culminates with one mouse proposing a radical idea: maybe the mice should try electing one of their own instead. This simple allegory is a perfect illustration of what Tommy Douglas, who less than a year later would become the first leader of the freshly formed New Democratic Party, strived to offer to Canadians: a third political option that would provide an alternative to alternating between Liberal and Conservative rule — finally, a party for the mice.

This essay, but in video form.
Although Douglas served as the founding leader of the NDP for a decade and remains perhaps its most famous figure, it was David Lewis who acted as the key architect in the initial formation of the party. The precursor to the NDP was the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a coalition of progressives, socialists and labour groups. Although the CCF enjoyed success at the provincial level in Western Canada in the 1930s and 1940s (especially in Saskatchewan, where Tommy Douglas served as Premier for 17 years), their support at the federal level gradually weaned in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the mid 1950s, political operatives like Lewis were already painfully cognizant of how associations with communism and growing Cold War tensions were damaging the party’s popular appeal. In response, Lewis helped draft the Winnipeg Declaration of Principles in 1956, which was intended as a more moderate replacement of the party’s original platform adopted in 1933, known as the Regina Manifesto. As Kenneth C. Dewar points out, the Winnipeg Declaration importantly abandoned the Regina Manifesto’s concluding call to arms, which stated: “No C.C.F. Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth” (Dewar 2017). However, despite attempting to rebrand and soften the party’s image, the disastrous outcome of the 1958 federal election demonstrated that a deeper strategic shift still needed to occur. Whereas in the 1945 federal election the party received 15.6 percent of popular vote and elected 28 MPs to parliament, in 1958 the CCF received a mere 9.5 percent of the vote and sent only 8 MPs to Ottawa (The Canadian Encyclopedia).

Around the same time the CCF was attempting to overcome political setbacks at the national level, Canada’s biggest labour unions were concurrently striving to consolidate their influence. Prior to the Second World War, the mainstream labour movement had split over the issue of how skilled versus unskilled labourers ought to be organized and protected. To simplify a rather complex topic, the Canadian Congress of Labour was an industrial union while the Trades and Labour Congress was a craft union; despite both representing workers, they disagreed over organizational philosophy and tactics. However, since the two groups had grown closer through labour negotiations during the war, they ultimately agreed to enter into talks proposing the formation of a new union that would pool membership and thereby expand their collective bargaining power. After years of negotiations, CCL and TLC delegates (who together represented over a million union members) met in Toronto to form the Canadian Labour Congress on April 23, 1956 (The Canadian Encyclopedia). With the two largest labour unions finally united, the position of labour in Canadian society was strengthened and an opportunity to form a new labour party was ripe. Seeing an opportunity, Lewis worked to convince the leaders of the CLC to help him save the cause of democratic socialism by entering into a formal alliance with the CCF. As Dewar explains, the union of the two groups could provide a fruitful marriage: “The party offered the CLC a means of engaging more directly in political action, while the CLC provided an electoral base for the party” (Dewar 2017). Realizing the merits of aligning labour with the rest of the Canadian political left, the New Democratic Party was formed in 1961.

Although the NDP has never formed government in Ottawa, its involvement on the federal political stage has certainly improved the position of labour and workers in Canada. From its founding up to 2008 the party has obtained an average of 15.6 percent of the vote in national elections (The Canadian Encyclopedia). Although this might seem relatively small, the persistent level of support has provided the party with sufficient leverage to make meaningful policy impacts, especially in situations where a minority government is in power. For example, between 1972–74, David Lewis, who successfully campaigned against “the corporate welfare bums” to succeed Douglas as NDP leader, was able to influence the Liberal minority government’s policies and agenda (Lewis 1972, CBC Digital Archives). From this perspective, the policies that government enacted — a new Elections Expenses Act, pension indexing, the creation of Petro-Canada, and the establishment of the Foreign Investment Review Agency — can all be said to be partly NDP accomplishments (The Canadian Encyclopedia). As another example, Jack Layton’s NDP was able to insist on amendments to the minority Parliament budget implemented between 2004–2006, boosting spending on infrastructure and social programs as well as successfully lobbying Paul Martin to pass same sex marriage legislation (The Canadian Encyclopedia). Indeed, as is argued in the book Party of Conscience, not enough credit has been given to the contributions of the NDP in terms of both enacting actual policy as well as shifting the overall tone of debate in the country. Several major cornerstones of Canadian society — a national health care system, universal social assistance programs, worker’s compensation, minimum wage laws, improved pension and unemployment plans — were all originally pillars of CCF/NDP platforms.

The NDP has undoubtedly worked toward transforming the workplace into a more equitable environment and provided workers with a voice on other issues of national significance, but the way in which it has pursued its goals has nonetheless been subject to criticism. Most interestingly, much of this criticism has come from more radical members within the party itself. An article entitled Whatever Became of the CCF’s Dream? on the website Socialist Project offers a taste of the flavor of far left critiques of political compromises made in the lead up to the formation of the NDP. JF Conway describes the CCF’s shift in the 1950s in the following way: “The reborn, more right-wing and moderate CCF embraced a mixed economy and incremental steps in building the welfare state. There was no more talk of the eradication of capitalism. As far as the official party apparatus was concerned the old CCF dream was buried” (Conway 2017). Although the overall article uses rather hyperbolic language, the analysis it offers is roughly similar to how Dewar characterizes disagreements within the CCF as well as debates within the NDP that continued to fester throughout the 1960s with the rise of “the Waffle” or the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada (Dewar). In effect, there was division on the left as to whether or not the goal of the party should be to achieve legislative power at the cost of compromising its core principles, or maintain an uncompromising stance toward socialist ideology and thereby serve as “the conscience of Parliament” no matter what the political consequences.

The debate over the practical pursuit of power versus the pure commitment to core principals remains an issue for the modern NDP and will likely remain a contentious subject as long as the party exists. The persistence of this internal party struggle was even put on display fairly recently when the party voted to remove the word “socialism” from the NDP constitution in 2013 (CBC News 2013). In some respects, the history of the formation of the NDP outlined in this essay lays bare how this fundamental tension both animates and divides the party, as well as Canadian society in general. In my view, however, the compromises that allowed the aspirational CCF to transform into a the more sustainable NDP should not be regarded as a kind of original sin, but rather should be viewed as a decision that has ulmately allowed the visions of those on the left to bear real, tangible fruit for labourers, workers and the underprivileged in Canada. Whether or not a single phrase or word is included in a platform is not nearly as important as whether or not sufficient political organization can provide for the vision of the party to actually be implemented. Nonetheless, in striving to achieve even greater political power, it will be essential for the NDP not to remember Tommy Douglas’s story about Mouseland. The NDP was created to be the party by and for the mice. It should take care not to ever let itself become just another cat.

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