1971 New Democratic Party leadership election

The Waffle–Unity Group floor battle

The Waffle was a group of mostly young, university students and intellectuals.

Gender equity motion

The first test for the Waffle, on the convention floor, occurred on opening day, Wednesday, April 21. That afternoon, the constitution committee tabled a motion to ensure at least 12 of the approximately 100 members of the ruling Federal Council were women. | author-link = John Zaritsky

Natural resources nationalization debate

On Friday, April 23, the most complex and thorny issues were debated. The first contentious issue on the agenda dealt with natural resources industries, such as the oil, gas, and mines, as it became the centre of a major showdown between the Waffle and the labour movement forces.

The Quebec issue

No other issue at the convention caused more worry for the NDP than what its policy should be with regards to Quebec self-determination.

The next day, while giving his final leader's report, T. C. "Tommy" Douglas launched the party establishment's opening salvo against the Waffle and their Quebec resolution. He told the almost 2000 convention attendees that he rejected the principle that Quebec has the right to self-determination through unilateral separation from Canada. He further rejected the notion that non-Quebecers could not partake in that province's internal debates and stated that he would "do everything I can to better the conditions of those people in Quebec who have been betrayed by successive governments." He reiterated the intent of the compromise motion by stating that if "the overwhelming majority of the people of Quebec want out of Confederation, it will be time enough to call in the lawyers." To further support Douglas' call for dialogue between English and French-speaking Canadians, towards an equal partnership based on common goals, Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis (David Lewis's son) announced his section's support for national unity.

The Quebec wing, led by Raymond Laliberté, a former head of Quebec's activist teachers' union, Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CEQ), was making noises that they might secede from the party if it adopted the federalist resolution.

On Friday, the debate and vote on the Quebec issue lasted about an hour and a half.

Party officer elections

NDP Now and the Waffle fought for control of the party's bureaucracy, by trying to get as many people elected as party officers of the Federal Executive and Council. The major battles were for the party's executive positions, especially the President and Vice-President positions. NDP Now, and its trade union backers, nominated the Ontario NDP's former leader, Donald C. MacDonald as its candidate for party President.{{Cite news

Gudmundson then ran for one of the seven Vice-President positions, as did fellow Waffler Mel Watkins. She managed to get elected, but Watkins failed to keep his seat on the executive, and had to run for a general council seat instead. David Lewis' campaign manager, McGill University professor Charles Taylor easily won re-election as a Vice-President.

The whole Federal Council, including the executive, had 124 members, on which the Waffle held 20 positions going into the elections. After April 23, they held only Gudmundson and Watkins' seats.{{Cite news

Leadership contenders

David Lewis

David Lewis was seen as the front runner by the media. He had worked for either the NDP and its forerunner, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, for almost 36 years. He was the National Secretary from 1936 until 1950, when he moved from Ottawa to Toronto to set up a labour law practice.{{Cite news

Ed Broadbent

Ed Broadbent was a newly elected Member of Parliament, for the Oshawa–Whitby electoral district, and was the first candidate to declare candidacy for the leadership when he did so in June 1970. He had been one of the founders of the Waffle, but backed away from them before the 1969 convention. He ran partially to bridge the gulf between the Waffle and the Establishment in the party. When Lewis and Frank Howard attacked the Waffle, Broadbent warned that they were setting up the convention to be divided along Waffle/Establishment lines, which is what happened. Before getting into politics, Broadbent was a professor at York University, teaching political theory. He was educated at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics. His performance on the Quebec issue the day before the leadership vote cost him much of his support as his amendments were rejected outright on the convention floor.

John Harney

John Harney was born in Quebec and was fluently bilingual. Entering the race in November 1970, he turned forty years old during the campaign, and like the other candidates, was essentially a generation younger than David Lewis. Like Broadbent, he was a university professor, and later at York University, teaching English literature. He was the Provincial Secretary for the Ontario New Democratic Party from 1966 to 1970. In that time, he was also the campaign manager for that party's breakthrough campaign in the 1967 general election. However, he had a major disadvantage compared to some of the other candidates: at the time of the leadership campaign, he did not hold elected office, and had been defeated in four previous attempts to get elected to the House of Commons. The Quebec issue, and much of the fall-out from weeks of debating it before the convention, pulled Harney away from the issues that he was trying to get debated, notably regulating financial institutions to use their wealth to promote programs that had social benefits for all, and following the Ontario NDP's plan for nationalizing resource industries.

Frank Howard

Of all of Lewis' challengers, Frank Howard was the oldest at 45, still considerably younger than Lewis' 61 years, and the only one not from Ontario. He entered the leadership campaign in January 1971, attacking the Waffle for what he perceived to be their political naiveté. At the time, he had served in the Commons for 14 years, one of the last CCF MPs left from the 1957 federal election, representing the Skeena electoral district. He was known for his caustic, no-nonsense approach to politics, and was frequently in trouble with the Speaker of the House of Commons. He also had a criminal record for armed robbery, committed when he was 18. This naturally led him to espousing penal reform as one of his main platform items. His other platform plank included support for native-Canadian issues, or in the parlance of the time, Indian Affairs. He did not spend much time campaigning before the convention, and even went on a two-week parliamentary trip to Australia and New Zealand in March. His strategy was to win delegate support at the convention in the days leading up to the Saturday vote.

James (Jim) Laxer

James Laxer was the youngest candidate, at 29 years old. He was the Waffle's candidate for leader, and he espoused their ultra-nationalistic left-wing views. He came from a family that had been keen supporters of the Communist Party of Canada, until 1956, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made public Josef Stalin's reign of terror. In the mid-1960s, he was the president of Canadian University Press, and was a lecturer at Queen's University during the campaign. He was married to Krista Maeots, who ran unsuccessfully for the NDP's presidency at the 1969 policy convention. She was also a leading figure in the Waffle movement. He did not hold elected office, but because all the candidates were debating the Waffle's issues he was effectively Lewis' main challenger.

Declined

• Doug Fisher, former MP for Port Arthur
• Allan O'Brien, mayor of Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Charles Taylor, philosopher at McGill University

Leadership vote

On Saturday, April 24, at the Ottawa Civic Centre, David Lewis was elected the party's new leader after four ballots. This was the first time in CCF/NDP history that the leadership wasn't won on the first ballot. Unlike the recent Progressive Conservatives and Liberal conventions, where there were problems with computerized voting machines, the NDP decided to stay with the more traditional paper ballot book and manual vote tabulation system. The party organizers divided the approximately 1,700 delegates into 20 polls, similar to a federal electoral district vote, with returning officers that carried the ballot boxes to the voters.{{cite news

Aftermath

The media attention that the Waffle, and its candidate, James Laxer, received, before and during the vote, partially explains the closest federal NDP leadership election up to that time.

In the 1972 federal election campaign, the NDP finally made a breakthrough, winning 31 seats in the House of Commons, including one for John Harney, and holding the balance of power. However, within two years, the party faced a setback when it won only 16 seats in the 1974 federal election. Lewis, Howard, and Harney lost their seats and ended their federal careers as active politicians. Lewis resigned, finally informing the public that he had been fighting cancer for the past two years. Broadbent, became the leader in the House of Commons until a new leader was elected. In the end, the real winner of 1971 convention was Ed Broadbent. Although he was unsuccessful for his run at the leadership in 1971, it was a prelude to his winning the leadership at the next convention, and without the internecine divisiveness that the Waffle introduced at this convention.

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

• {{cite thesis |access-date=September 29, 2020
• {{cite book |author-link=Desmond Morton (historian) |url-access=limited |access-date=September 29, 2020
• {{cite book |author-link=Desmond Morton (historian) |author-mask=
• {{cite book |url-access=limited
• {{cite book |url-access=limited
• {{cite book |author-link=Walter Stewart (journalist) |url-access=limited
• {{cite book |author-link=Walter Stewart (journalist) |author-mask=

References

1. [https://lop.parl.ca/sites/ParlInfo/default/en_CA/People/Profile?personId=14288 Library of Parliament of Canada], Profiles, accessed 2024-05-02