New Democratic Party
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The New Democratic Party (NDP) is a Canadian social democratic political party. The NDP supports gender equality and equal rights for gays, lesbians, and minorities, but it wasn't much more than a bridesmaid for much of its history, with occasional bouts of kingmaker status when they got lucky.
Under the advent of Jack Layton, the NDP won the most seats ever in its history during the 2011 general election, becoming the official opposition for the first time.
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[edit] Relation with the Christian left
The party enjoys good relations with Canada's Christian left and many other liberal religious groups.
[edit] Issue in Quebec
In 1989, the Quebec branch of the party voted to disaffiliate from the federal NDP as a result of policy differencesm such as the provincial party's opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, its support for Quebec's language policy, differences with the federal party over the Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement and its more favourable position towards Quebec nationalism. This last is a bit ironic, considering that 22 years later the federal NDP virtually swept Quebec, due in large part to the support of "soft nationalists" within the province.
[edit] History
The NDP was founded in 1961 by Tommy Douglas, the Premier of Saskatchewan out of a partnership between the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. The party's platform is a mix of populism, agrarianism and democratic socialism. Since its inception, it has formed governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia. It also has a habit of holding the balance of power in federal minority governments, and various key aspects of Canada's social safety net (i.e universal healthcare) can be traced back to its influence.
For decades, it was the perennial third (or fourth; or fifth) party in Canada's House of Commons, until 2011, when the NDP displaced the Liberal Party of Canada as the official opposition to the Conservative Party of Canada. Jack Layton, after leading the NDP for nearly a decade, lost his life to cancer, and has since been replaced as party and opposition leader by Thomas Mulcair. In an attempt to move the NDP into a more centrist stance for the 2015 election, Mulcair is trying to omit references of socialism from the party platform, to the ire of party traditionalists.[1]
[edit] Criticism
As a party of the left, the NDP is often criticized by the more extreme conservatives as being dangerous, terrorist-loving, Bible-burning, free enterprise-destroying anarcho-commie-fascists. More coherent criticisms of the party, from both the right and centre, maintain that its policies are fiscally untenable. In practice, NDP governments in the provinces have had a mixed record on the economy, with the branches in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia thought to be quite prudent, the branch in British Columbia thought to be "okay," and the branch in Ontario thought to be abysmal. With the party's recent massive breakthrough in Quebec, it has also been subjected to another criticism, this one issuing mainly from Liberals who would otherwise be sympathetic to the party's platform: namely, that the NDP is "soft" on Canadian Federalism, and willing to make far too many concessions to Quebec nationalists in a bid to win their votes. Additionally, they are often criticized by Communists, Marxist-Leninists, and others on the extreme left for being too bourgeois.
[edit] Lulz
In a 2005 Ontario youth model parliament, the NDP caucus proposed a motion to ban any and all forms of Comic Sans.[2]