The Waffle's Impact on the New Democratic Party

The 20th Anniversary of the Waffle

The Waffle's Impacton the New

Democratic PartyJOHN SMART

In March, 1971 the Security Service of the RCMP, ina brief on the Waffle submitted to the Solicitor Generalof Canada, Jean-Pierre Goyer, noted:

The prime aim of the Waffle Group within the NDP is the es-tablishment of an independent socialist Canada to be achievedthrough the existing structure of the New Democratic Party.The Waffle Group hope to change the NDP from within andradicalize the NDP socialist policies. Considering the Wafflegroup as a whole, it is felt that they will be a viable politicalforce within the NDP.1

It is, perhaps, surprising that the RCMP has supplied uswith a definition of the Waffle's aims which is both conciseand accurate. It is regrettable, however, that they werewrong about the Waffle's viability within the NDP.

For myself, active in the CCF and the NDP since age18, the Waffle represents the NDP's lost opportunity to be-come the party Canada needs and that NDP members de-serve. Rather than changing the NDP, the Waffle gave usa brief glimpse of what a New Democratic Party with guts,brains and a soul could have been like and what it couldhave done for Canada. The NDP retreated from the oppor-tunity and has been a regular disappointment to its bestfriends since it kicked the Waffle out in 1972. In one cycleafter another since then, the Canadian people have shown

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more interest in the NDP than the party has shown in them.Come election time (both provincial and federal), most wor-king people in this country have decided, a little sadly, thatthere is something fundamentally wrong with the NDP. Inthe three years that the Waffle existed as part of the party,however, its impact was profound. For those of us directlyinvolved in it at the time, the Waffle was an intense politicalexperience, albeit a brief and unsuccessful one. AlthoughI've continued to work in the NDP, I do so in the knowledgethat it is neither a socialist party nor a nationalist party andthat it is not likely to change in either of those directionsin the near future.

The story begins with the Waffle Manifesto, written bya group of political activists and academics, brought to-gether in late 1968 and early 1969 by Mel Watkins, JimLaxer, and Gerry Caplan. Basically, it said that Canadacould not remain an independent country unless it was alsoa socialist country, and that the New Democratic Party wasthe instrument through which the transformation must bemade. Political change certainly seemed to be on the Canadi-an agenda. In the twelve months before the Waffle Manifestowas written, Rene Levesque split with the Liberal party inQuebec and founded the Parti Quebecois. Pierre Trudeaubecome Prime Minister. Mel Watkins' federal task force re-port for Walter Gordon on foreign ownership awakenedlarge numbers of Canadians to the facts and dangers ofAmerican economic penetration. Ed Schreyer formed anNDP government in Manitoba (with Cy Gonick as an MLA).Looking south to the United States, we saw the studentmovement, the anti-war movement, Eugene McCarthy, andthe retirement of Lyndon Johnson, and wondered about thepotential for political change in that country.

When the Waffle Manifesto was circulated in the NDPin the summer of 1969, it met with a positive responsefrom party members and organizations well beyond whatthose of us who had drafted it had expected. Between 400to 500 party members signed it publicly, while more than20 constituency associations passed the Manifesto and itsassociated resolutions and asked that they be debated at thefederal convention. The Provincial Council of the Saskat-

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chewan NDP passed it for debate at the convention, wherethe Saskatchewan NDP leader, Woodrow Lloyd, voted forit. The signatories of the Manifesto included NDP MLAsin Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia (includingDave Barrett) as well as the leader of the Nova Scotia NDP,Jeremy Akerman.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Waffle signatoriesincluded most of the people in the party who could havebeen expected to provide leadership in the NDP after Cold-well and Douglas. People like Jim Laxer and Mel Watkins,who were, in my opinion, the most creative political thinkersEnglish Canada produced in the 1960s and 1970s, wrotethe crucial drafts of the Manifesto. But there were hundredsof other people, less gifted, perhaps, who took courage fromthe collective strength shown by the Waffle. They cameforward to playa role in politics in 1969 and after, in theNDP, in their union, in the women's movement, or in thenationalist movement.

At the 1969 Winnipeg Convention itself, thirty-five per-cent of the delegates voted for the Waffle Manifesto andnine Wafflers were elected to the federal executive orFederal Council of the party. Waffle resolutions and policypositions developed for the convention by Wafflers on for-eign ownership, NATO, women in the party, and extra-par-liamentary activity received significant support. In somecases, they formed the basis of compromise or co-optingresolutions drafted by the party leadership. The conventiondebate on the Waffle Manifesto was televised and the CBCran a TV documentary by film maker Ralph Thomas called"What's Left" in the days before the convention.

By the end of 1969 the Waffle had given the NDP astrong left wing and had made it respectable to talk aboutsocialism, nationalism, and Quebec inside the NDP (andoutside it as well). More important, it had restored to peoplein the NDP a belief in the possibility of changing the partyand creating a better politics in Canada. As the TorontoStar noted:

The Canadian people have been provided with a more distinctpolitical alternative and, of even more importance, an alternative

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that is more strongly nationalist. A convention that can makea claim like that can't have been a complete bust.2

The Waffle did not, of course, invent the desire forsocialism or nationalism on the part of Canadians, nor thedeep concerns Canadians had about foreign ownership andour relationship with the United States. But we did articulatethose positions inside the NDP and provide an organizingcentre for others who shared such concerns and wanted towork with us there. The reason why so many people wholived through that era have such positive memories of theWaffle (though they may never have gone to one of it meet-ings at the time) is that the Waffle gave them somethingto hope for and occasionally something to vote for. Peoplethought it appropriate and necessary that there be a leftwing in a left wing party.

There was also a good deal about our political practicewithin the NDP that was different and that had an impact.We kept going as a political caucus after the convention.There had been left caucuses in the CCF and the NDP beforebut they had been single shot efforts aimed at one conven-tion and had always disbanded afterwards. The Waffle didnot. We took work in the NDP as our primary focus andurged others to do so as well. We wrote about our ideas inCanadian Dimension, Canadian Forum, Last Post, ThisMagazine Is About Schools or in the local papers. We wenton television and radio. We held public meetings and rallieson the issues we cared about. We had a newsletter and even-tually a small newspaper. There were Waffle groups meetingacross the country. The meetings were open to any NewDemocrat, and only New Democrats could take steeringcommittee positions in the Waffle. We ran for office in theparty at all levels and we did constituency work in a con-scientious way. When we could, we got our riding associa-tions to sponsor or co-sponsor the rallies, panels and lectureswe staged.

In March of 1970 the Waffle held a major teach-in onthe "Americanization of Canada" at the University of Toron-to. A number of people from outside the Waffle spoke, in-cluding Liberal nationalist and former Finance Minister

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Walter Gordon. and Michel Chartrand. president of the Con-seil central des syndicats nationaux in Montreal. In Aprilthe Ontario Waffle held its own convention to plan for theprovincial party's fall convention. In the same month. theToronto Waffle organized a massive campaign against theclosure of the Dunlop Canada plant in east Toronto.3

In August 1970 the first national conference of Wafflerswas held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.Resolutions were planned for the next federal convention.as was strategy for a Waffle campaign for the federal leader-ship of the NDP in 1971. In the fall of 1970. the Saskat-chewan Waffle (which had been organized for months) ranDon Mitchell of Moose Jaw for the leadership of the provin-cial party. as a successor to Woodrow Lloyd (who had an-gered his party's right wing by supporting the Waffle). InSeptember 1970 the national Waffle held a series of suc-cessful rallies across Canada protesting energy exports tothe United States. The same month Jim Laxer's influentialbook. The Energy Poker Game. was published. TommyDouglas told the Ontario NDP convention that every NewDemocrat should read it.

A key chapter in the story of the Waffle's impact on theNDP was written at the Ontario Convention of the NDP inOctober 1970. This was the convention at which StephenLewis was selected to replace Donald MacDonald as OntarioNDP leader. The Waffle showed remarkable organizationaland policy strength at the Convention. riding a wave ofdesire for reform in the party and reaping the rewards ofa year of its own political work. The Ontario Waffle Mani-festo nearly passed the Convention as a policy resolution.Waffle policy resolutions on energy. on housing and wo-men's rights were accepted by the convention and a thirdof the newly elected provincial executive were Wafflers.Wafflers also ran. on a program of internal party reform.for President and Provincial Secretary of the Ontario Party.and received about one-third of the vote. But it was onething to cause the federal party a little disturbance. Tothreaten control of the party in Ontario. the home of theLewis family and the site of the union base of such peopleas Lynn Williams of the Steelworkers. and Dennis McDer-

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mott of the Canadian Autoworkers, was very different. Thetraditional leadership of the party began to realize that itwould have to put an end to the Waffle in the NDP. Weknow now from documents available in the CCF/NDPPapers and elsewhere that the party leadership planned verycarefully its response to the Waffle during the fall and winterof 1970-1971 and that the leadership convention was care-fully orchestrated.4 It was to prove a successful strategy.

Immediately following the Ontario NDP convention, thefight for the federal leadership began. The Waffle's successin 1969 had already had some important effects on theleadership of the NDP. David Lewis only decided to runfor the federal leadership as a successor to Tommy Douglasafter observing how poorly the younger leadership candi-dates fared against the Waffle in Winnipeg. He had beenintending to retire as deputy leader of the federal NDP, butdecided that types like Ed Broadbent and John Harneywouldn't be able to deal with the Waffle and that he wouldhave to perform one more service for the party. Jim Laxer,then a 28 year-old sessional lecturer in Canadian Historyat Queen's University, had emerged as the Waffle's can-didate, after a process of consultation, during the fall of1969.

Much of the federal NDP leadership campaign turned onthe issue of Quebec and was fought during the FLQ crisisand in the aftermath of the imposition of the War MeasuresAct. Jim Laxer came second to David Lewis on the finalballot of the April 1971 convention with 612 votes toLewis's 1046. Waffle resolutions were almost all defeatedat the convention and fewer Wafflers were elected to partypositions, though all who ran received strong support. CarolGudmundson, a founder of the Saskatchewan Waffle, forexample, received 39 percent of the votes cast for partypresident.

The leadership contest and the convention did establishthe Waffle as the official opposition inside the federal NDP,and it did draw the lines clearly between a radical platformfor the NDP and the more cautious program on which theparty usually ran. The existence of the Waffle on a solidbasis inside the NDP was deeply frightening to the leader-

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ship. If Waffle leaders became Members of Parliament inan NDP caucus, it was unlikely that traditional NDP leadersand their ideas could continue to dominate the party. IfLaxer, an academic who had never run for office before,could come that close to defeating David Lewis, what mighthe not be able to do as an elected MP?

David Lewis said in his post-convention press conferencethat, although he planned to meet with each leadership can-didate in the following weeks, he would make no conces-sions to the Waffle. "No prizes for coming second," wasthe way he put it. Despite this attitude, NDP leaders inOttawa and elsewhere could not ignore the issues the Wafflehad raised, and NDP rhetoric reflected this. During theperiod of minority government from 1972-1974 when theNDP held the balance of power in Ottawa, the party wascertainly influenced, in the demands it made on the Liberals,by the existence of the Waffle, even though the Waffle hadleft the NDP by then. The creation of Petro-Canada, theForeign Investment Review Agency, the Canadian Develop-ment Corporation, and the "Corporate Welfare Bums" NDPcampaign theme of 1972 all show this influence.S

Within 14 months of the 1971 federal convention, how-ever, the Waffle had been kicked out of the NDP. It wasthe Ontario NDP where the action was taken, during thespring and summer of 1972. The ostensible grounds chosenwere that the Waffle was operating as a 'party within aparty', that is as an independent organization within theNDP, and that this situation was creating damaging con-fusion both within and outside the NDP. To the Waffle, itseemed rather more correct to say that a process of changeand renewal had been launched inside the party in a leftwarddirection and that action was taken to bring that process toan end. For two years after the expulsion, the Waffle, atleast in Ontario, tried to operate outside the NDP as anindependent organization and, finally, as a political party.It failed.6

It was very significant to us at the time that the NDPleadership outlawed caucuses in the party (at least effectiveones) and that the rank and file of the NDP in the unionsand the riding associations couldn't save us. Other very

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distinct steps were taken at the same time in 1972 as partof the Waffle purge. The New Democratic Youth wing wasdismantled too, and the Ontario party passed a by-law (stillin effect) that resolutions to conventions must not exceed250 words in length. It certainly raised questions for usabout the limits of social democracy in Canada. But, asmany of us discovered, if the NDP is gone, what else isthere? I think now that we should probably have tried harderto stay in the NDP (though I certainly didn't think so then).

Organized dissent on major issues is still not welcomewithin the NDP. It is part of the present weakness of theparty that it failed to encourage internal debate over the1982 Constitution and over Meech Lake and NATO at its1987 convention. The leadership claimed on those occasionsthat such disputes would hurt the party in the opinion polls;the delegates largely accepted this. At the 1989 convention,the NDP should have had a full debate as to what wentwrong for it in the 1988 federal election. Why did Ed Broad-bent let go of the free trade issue? Why did the campaigndevelop in isolation from the ideas and tactical suggestionsof labour leaders like Bob White? None of the leadershipcandidates opened these questions up. Parties on the leftwhich do not, as a matter of principle, engage in fundamen-tal debate from time to time become irrelevant to an im-portant fraction of their adherents and this is happening tothe NDP. Audrey McLaughlin ostensibly stood for a moreopen party in her successful leadership campaign. It is tooearly to tell whether she will have any beneficial effect inthis direction or on the other problems faced by the party.

Canadians today watch two political developments withfascination; the emergence of reform governments in easternEurope and the Soviet Union and the disintegration of themajor bases of their own country's national government andeconomy. In a real way, the ineffectiveness of the New De-mocratic Party proceeds from the paralysis affecting allmajor political institutions in Canada. But the NDP is muchless than it should be today because it turned its back onthe Waffle and the idea of a left nationalist opposition insidethe party. Twenty years ago the Waffle said the NDP hadto define itself in terms of the national question. This may

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have proved very true in the end. The failure of Ed Broad-bent and the NDP to articulate an effective position of fullopposition to free trade in the 1988 federal election seriouslydamaged the party. A large section of the party's activistsand many of its best friends outside the party were seriouslydismayed by the NDP's 1988 campaign. Bob White's ad-mission after the campaign that the labour leadership hadno access to Broadbent on the free trade issue during thecampaign speaks volumes. If a major union leader and partyvice-president can be ignored, what hope for the ordinaryparty member?

The Waffle was a particular initiative at a particular time.That it failed does not excuse those of us who are socialistsor nationalists from further political action in defence ofour country and its people. What occurred in 1972 doesnot really excuse us from further political struggle, thoughit makes that struggle more difficult to undertake. Peoplewho were inspired by the Waffle directly 20 years ago orwho might be encouraged by hearing about it 20 years laterhave the same tasks before them today.

It is very important that nationalists and socialists inCanada today be active politically, whether in the same or-ganization or not. We achieve nothing politically as indi-viduals. Socialist voices and ideas, nationalist voices andideas, need to be raised in this country today, even moreso than in 1969. Currently, political discussion in thiscountry is limited by the narrow concerns which arise fromcapitalist, continentalist ideas. Even the most basic ideasand traditions of Canadian naton building are ignored bygovernment, business and the media today.

It is regrettable that the Waffle failed in its major ob-jectives and that it disappeared prematurely. The NDP cutitself off from some key ideas and trends in Canadian politi-cal culture when it cut itself off from the Waffle. It damageditself severely as a democratic party on the left and hasnever made up the ground it lost in 1972. By making itselfimmune to new ideas from other sources after the Waffle,the NDP severely reduced its appeal to Canadians concernedabout progressive political change. Today the NDP is indanger of becoming a marginal party in Canada, as happenedwith the CCF in the 1950s. In the 1990s we cannot seek

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to recreate the Waffle but we should try to learn from theWaffle episode and to emulate the courage, drive and politi-cal honesty that characterized it.

Notes

1. Quoted in Report of the Commission of Inquiry Concerning CertainActivities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [McDonald Com-mission) Freedom and Security IllUkr the Law, Second Report -Volume I, August 1981, p. 483.

2. Toronto Star 3 November 1969.3. The Waffle continued to organize teach-ins, rallies and meetings

around its main issues throughout its existence, even after it leftthe NDP. A lot of work was done on energy, the Autopact, andde-industrialization, for example. Bob Laxer and others organizeda popular public lecture series in Toronto in 1973 and a similarone was staged in Ottawa. The Waffle devoted a lot of time tostrike support in strikes such as Texpack, Dare and Artistic Wood-work to take some Ontario examples. See Bob Laxer, (Canada)Ltd. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).

4. This story is told very well in John Bullen, "The Ontario Waffleand the Struggle for an Independent Socialist Canada: A Study inRadical Nationalism," M.A. thesis, History Department, Universityof Ottawa, 1981. See also his 1983 article on the Ontario Wafflein the Canadian Historical Review. Robert Hackett's work on theWaffle is also interesting. See the special issue of Canadian DilMn-sian devoted to Hackett's work, vol. IS, Numbers 1 and 2, Oc-tober-November 1980.

S. A useful study could also be done of the influence of the Waffleon Liberal policy makers during those years. There is some evidencethat this influence was more than slight. The Committee for anIndependent Canada, formed in 1970, was very definitely a responseto the Waffle and its success. It was not a Liberal front, but someprominent Liberals, such as Walter Gordon and Mel Hurtig, wereinstrumental in its creation. (It is also interesting to note that, thoughthe Waffle outside the NDP had many internal problems, it actuallydissolved in 1974 over an inability to resolve the question as towhether it should begin to cooperate with other nationalist organiza-tions like the ClC.)

6. The Waffle came to an end not because of its expulsion from theNDP, but because, once out of the party, the socialists and thenationalists in the Waffle could not work together.

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Documents

The Waffle's Impact on the New Democratic Party