Singh looks for a touch of Layton magic
NDP leader visits home of man behind party’s famed 2011 orange wave
It was a pilgrimage, of sorts, for Jagmeet Singh, when he stepped out of the humid Toronto air into the welcoming confines of Olivia Chow’s home, a place made even hotter by the warmth of the New Democrats crammed inside to wish him a happy election campaign.
Three days on the trail to voting day, and the NDP leader has spent all his time in ridings held by his Liberal opponents — counterintuitive, perhaps, given the lowly position of his party in the polls. But Singh has maintained a positive demeanour through the opening phase of the campaign, emphasizing at every turn his party’s pitch that only New Democrats can be counted on to care, when corporate interests hold sway in Ottawa and Liberals and Tories govern on behalf of the rich, not the many.
There is the matter of the polls, though. And the fact that the NDP has far less money than the parties it wishes were its only opponents, as the emboldened Greens make the case to displace them as the first choice for true progressives on the federal stage.
Against that backdrop, Singh arrived at Chow’s house, which the former MP and mayoral candidate shared with her late husband, Jack Layton, the NDP leader who rode the famed orange wave to historic results in 2011. The hope, Singh told a room of supporters, was that a bit of much-needed magic might rub off on him.
“There’s something about the space here, the energy here, a lot of amazing activists have come out of this space, out of Olivia’s and of Jack’s energy, so being here on 38 days to the end of the election feels really special,” said Singh, standing with Chow behind her kitchen table.
“We’re going to need that,” he said. “It’s a tough road ahead.”
Earlier Friday, Singh took the anticorporate, pro-affordability theme of his campaign to the east Danforth, where he repeated a suite of platform promises to cap cellphone and internet bills and force Canada’s telecom companies to offer affordable unlimited data plans to their customers across the country.
It was the third day in a row that Singh described Canada as a place where corporate influence in the nation’s capital has created a rigged system in which the wealthy benefit and the rest don’t share in their growth and success.
It also came after a debate performance, which the spin machine in the NDP attempted to portray — the Greens and the Conservatives did much the same — as a raving success. Moments after the leaders made their closing statements, the party sent out a list of quotes from media commentators, many of them plucked out of context, to suggest Singh was the clear winner.
Christo Aivalis is a post-doctoral fellow and historian at the University of Toronto who has a YouTube channel where he discusses the intricacies of the political left in Canada, and is a strong NDP supporter. He sees two things in Singh’s campaign so far: a link in style and comportment with the late Layton, and a refreshingly leftist platform that breaks out of the cautiousness of the Thomas Mulcair era and hearkens back to the unabashed social democratic tilt of the party’s earlier days.
Where Mulcair and Layton stuck to pledges to keep the budget balanced or eliminate deficits in a matter of years, Singh doesn’t pretend to have a plan to do so. His campaign has a decidedly populist flavour, pitching “everyday Canadians” against a corporate elite.
He vows to raise corporate and income taxes for the richest Canadians, and has tapped into the progressive plans of U.S. Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren in promising a new “super wealth tax” on household network, including real estate and stock market holdings that exceeds $20 million.
For Aivalis, these are leftist ideas that have been missing from the NDP for years. Singh is promising an “historic expansion” of the public health-care system, a Canadian institution credited to the NDP’s founder, Tommy Douglas, into areas that have always been private services on the free market: pharmacare, dental and vision care, addictions counselling, among them.
“He is saying major things in the economy need to be decommoditized,” said Aivalis. “Singh has been much more open that this is about class conflict this election.”
At lunchtime Friday, the NDP leader spoke at an event hosted by the Canadian Club in the Imperial Room of the Royal York Hotel. While the crowd was full of union reps who cheered and clapped, Singh used the venue to highlight that he won’t shy away from delivering his message of higher taxes on businesses to people who could be affected by it.
While discussing his proposal to limit how much credit card companies can charge merchant fees for small businesses, Singh gestured to his right and quipped: “I know this is kind of tough because we have MasterCard sitting right there.” Laughter filled the room, and he shrugged. “That’s what we believe in.”
It’s that type of interaction that Aivalis said might link Singh with Layton, in terms of their styles as “happy warrior” politicians: scrappy, yet affable, tough when it’s called for, smiling all the while.
Whether any of this excites anyone beyond the party faithful remains to be seen. But back in Chow’s kitchen, at least, the former MP and Toronto mayoral candidate tried to give Singh the boost that he and the campaign was looking for. She called Singh “the first racialized prime minister of Canada.”