TANNARA YELLAND
Associate News Editor
Federal NDP leader Jack Layton hopes to stir up opposition to the ruling party during Parliament’s prorogation.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the decision to prorogue Parliament on Dec. 30, 2009. When Parliament is prorogued, all bills and business under consideration end and must be restarted at the beginning of the next session.
Critics consider the decision an attempt to stall investigation into the alleged abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan.
Since the beginning of the new year, Layton has been hitting the pavement across Canada, travelling from Vancouver to Regina in one week. He is apparently hoping to parlay Canadians’ discontent with the prime minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament into more votes for his party. In the wake of a widespread mobilization against Harper’s action, including Facebook groups and protests, this seems a distinctly achievable goal for Layton.
“We’re continuing to build a movement of opposition to the policies of Stephen Harper,” Layton said during his Jan. 14 visit to Saskatoon. “You can’t really trust Stephen Harper to respect the basic institutions that are here to serve Canadians and are, really, their institutions.”
“We have the capacity to represent the whole country, and in particular, the working people, the students, the seniors of the country.”
-Jack Layton
Federal NDP Leader
Layton said he was in town to discuss election strategy with Saskatoon NDP Member of Parliament hopefuls, including Nettie Wiebe. While he said he knows Canadians are reluctant to move into their fourth election in six years, Layton feels confident that “they want Harper’s feet held to the fire.” He also took time to meet with University of Saskatchewan students over lunch.
The media habitually discount the idea that any NDP leader will ever be prime minister, as do large sections of the public. But Layton brushed off the idea that he is unlikely to occupy the Prime Minister’s Office with a dismissive chuckle, saying people who share that opinion either have no vision or want that to be the case.
He has spent much of his seven years at the helm of the NDP building the party’s national presence. It now holds 37 of Parliament’s 308 seats, the highest number held by the party since it captured 43 in the 1988 election.
Conversely, the Liberal Party has lost almost 100 seats between the 2000 general election, when they last earned a majority of seats in Parliament, and the 2008 general election. The Conservative Party has been steadily increasing its holdings, though it has been unable to form a majority government since taking power in 2006. It is also facing increasing backlash for the prorogation and for its lax stance on climate change, as seen at the recent conference in Copenhagen.
The 2000s thus proved profoundly disappointing for the Liberals and of mixed success for the Conservatives. The NDP has survived the turbulent decade with relatively few scratches as the third most successful national party.
This moderate success is something Layton says he has worked hard for.
“People would say to me all the time, ”˜You’re a party of the West,’” Layton recalls of his early days as party leader. “So there was a question about whether or not we could be a national presence”¦. I said, ”˜I’m going to set out on a project to help us build across the country.’ And now, we’ve had our first (provincial) NDP government elected in Atlantic Canada, in Nova Scotia. We have now elected twice a Member of Parliament in Quebec.”
But Layton sounded especially proud of the fact that the only opposition MP in Alberta is a New Democrat. Long a Conservative bastion, the fact that the NDP were able to win a seat there, when even the Liberals could not, speaks to the party’s growing viability.
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