Canada’s main opposition party chose heavily favored candidate Thomas Mulcair to replace the late Jack Layton, who died of cancer just three months after leading the leftist party to its strongest-ever performance in a federal election.
Mulcair, a former Quebec cabinet minister who is a relative newcomer to the New Democratic Party (NDP), took over the reigns after four rounds of voting at the leadership convention, held in downtown Toronto on Friday and Saturday.
The Montreal lawmaker, who advocated the party reach beyond its traditional base to appeal to centrist voters, led all four votes of the day, eventually trouncing runner-up Brian Topp, who campaigned to keep the party squarely left-of-center.
“Today we have the greatest human capacity, and the greatest potential to put that capacity to work than at any time in our history,” Mulcair said to the crowd of cheering delegates.
“Our future is limitless, if we get our priorities right,” he said. “The challenge that confronts us is not a failure of ability or talent, it is a failure of leadership and that is failure that we intend to reverse.”
Mulcair will now take on the tough job of building on gains made by Layton and proving to Canadians that the traditionally third-place party can defeat Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s right-wing Conservatives in the 2015 election.
That’s a tall order, partly because the unprecedented surge in NDP votes in last year’s election was based largely on the drawing power of Layton, sometimes dubbed “Smiling Jack.”
With rifts caused by the sometimes divisive leadership race threatening to destabilize the party, the official message at the weekend convention was one of unity and driving forward to form Canada’s next government.
“They told us, before the last election, that it couldn’t be done, but we rolled up our sleeves and proved them wrong,” Nycole Turmel said in her final speech as the party’s interim leader. “At every step we have proven them wrong. And today we are just as united and determined as ever.”
Dislodging the Conservatives may not require actually winning more seats in the House of Commons, but rather holding them to less than half and then trying to form a coalition with the other minority parties. Currently the Conservatives have 165 of 308 seats, or 11 more than half, and the NDP has 102.
However, with just over 62,000 members casting ballots in the third round from nearly 130,000 eligible voters across the country, the low turnout had Canadian media speculating that the NDP could be losing support.
This is a particular risk in the French-speaking province of Quebec, where voters are notoriously fickle, and have already started deserting the party and returning to the separatist Bloc Quebecois in public opinion polls.
“What the leadership absolutely needs is someone who can keep the momentum that the NDP gained in Quebec, someone that Quebecois voters can connect to on a personal and political level,” said Kris Nelson, a new party member from Quebec.
Mulcair, one of 10 children born to an Irish-Canadian father and French-Canadian mother, was a provincial environment minister for the Liberal party and in 2007 became the NDP’s second-ever member of parliament from Quebec.
The party also faces a tough challenge competing with others on the left, including the Liberal Party, the Green Party and, in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois. This has led to calls by some for the NDP and Liberals to merge, or at least cooperate in the next election, an idea Mulcair has rejected.
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