Axe me no questions, I'll tell you no lies

My friend and occasional colleague Bill Tieleman is back beating the “Axe the Tax” drum, arguing that the anti-carbon tax campaign was a success for the NDP in the last election because the party won 1 percent more votes in 2009 than 2005. (To be precise, 0.6 percent more votes.)

Uhm, that was the election the NDP just lost, right? And we’re still arguing about a strategy that was front and centre in an election campaign that increased the NDP's vote by less than 1 percent? If that’s how we define success in the NDP today, it’s no wonder we don’t talk about the economy.

Hey! Here’s an idea—not just for Bill, but for everyone who cares about the future of the NDP and BC. When we’re arguing about whether or not the NDP should drop the “axe the tax” campaign, let’s try to remember that 50 per cent of eligible voters stayed home on election day.

By restricting our post mortem analysis to looking only at whether the strategy won or lost votes and ignoring the much more important issue of how political positioning contributes to low voter turnout, we are perpetuating an approach to politics and governing that is fundamentally broken.

Whether you think “axe the tax” was a “brilliant strategy” (as Mark Jaccard called it post-election), a colossal blunder, or somewhere in between, it’s frankly too much inside baseball to only focus on the issue as a vote-winner or -loser. And that’s especially so when both main parties’ approaches to the issue failed to engage new voters.

Public policy developed by focusing on the electoral efficacy of “wedge issue” politics is one of the leading causes of the well-documented decline in voter turnout, and the increase in voter apathy. It may have seemed new and exciting when Republican political consultant Dick Morris brought triangulation to the Clinton White House, but this kind of politics has got to go. Triangulation can be focus-grouped and market-researched to find out the best way to move vote, but it doesn’t make it any less cynical.

Throughout his political career, Gordon Campbell has shown that he doesn’t “get religion” on any issue unless there’s a clear political upside to doing so. His change of tune on climate change is no exception, but frankly you could see the proverbial conversion coming well before he introduced the carbon tax. The New Democrats were caught off guard and never properly regained their footing.

There were three serious flaws in the Axe the Tax strategy.

First, by falling for Campbell’s political bait and switch and attacking an initiative supported by progressives and scientists around the world, the NDP allowed the Liberals to frame the debate as being a choice between their “painful-but-necessary” action to fight climate change (endorsed by Al Gore, back when that still mattered) versus no action and, fatally, no new ideas from the NDP. Many New Democrats were appalled that the axe-the-tax campaign left the NDP sounding more like Bush-era conservatives than Obama-era progressives.

Second, “Axe the Tax” had a significant impact on the NDP’s ability to develop a progressive alternative for the province. The commitment to eliminate the carbon tax was paired with a pledge to retain Campbell’s offsetting personal income tax cuts, effectively blowing a $1.8 billion hole in projected revenues, which could have been deployed in a more ambitious and visionary election platform.

Finally, the purely oppositional approach was not backed up by a clear, positive alternative. To me, this is the most critical flaw: too much emphasis on the negative attacks on the carbon tax and not enough, if any, emphasis on a positive alternative. Sometimes, maybe what people like Mark Jaccard call brilliant political strategy just makes no common sense.

On an issue like climate change, when so many citizens have made themselves informed, it’s fatal to insult their intelligence by making out like only big corporations and the rich will have to make sacrifices. More than ever, in tough times we all need to come together, and the old-school divide and conquer politics that have made half of us observers rather than participants is well past its due date.