Another Liberal majority government. With about 6 in 10 registered voters actually voting - the lowest turnout in 75 years - the Liberals took just under 41% of the popular vote (up almost 3% from the 1997 federal election). While many people breathed a sigh of relief that the Canadian Alliance failed to make the major breakthrough heralded by its fans at the NATIONAL POST, the fact remains that such a hard right-wing party did take 25.5% of the vote (6% more than the Reform Party in 1997).

The specter of the Alliance was one of the reasons that the New Democratic Party's vote was a pathetic 8.5% (down from the feeble 11% in 1997). Some who might have voted NDP accepted the idea that the way to stop Stockwell Day's crusade was to vote Liberal, a road paved by earlier calls on the Left for "tactical voting" (for instance, voting Liberal to unseat Harris's Tories in Ontario in 1999). But many working-class and young people just didn't vote at all.

Bad jobs, growing poverty, less access to Employment Insurance and welfare, declining health care, higher university and college tuition fees, stricter immigration controls and other inhumane developments of recent years didn't lead to more votes for the NDP. Instead, the NDP's decline continued. Why?

The decline of the NDP has been fueled by its drift into neo-liberalism, the right-wing ideology of global free markets and "fiscal responsibility." As a result, the NDP is hard to distinguish from the masks of moderation worn by the federal Liberals and Tories in the recent election. Much post-election discussion on the Left about the fate of the NDP, including the call by Buzz Hargrove of the Canadian Auto Workers for a task force on the party's future, recognizes this rather obvious fact.

Is the solution for activists and radicals to join the NDP and push it to adopt anti-corporate policies? We at NEW SOCIALIST don't think so. We think the NDP's decline has deeper roots than its adoption of neo-liberal policies and the implementation of them by NDP provincial governments. Regardless of the policies it has held at any particular time, the NDP's social democratic politics have always been about getting people to vote for its candidates, not helping people to organize and educate themselves to fight for their needs. For the NDP, time outside election campaigns is, in the words of NDP MP Bill Blaikie, "the off season." Those of us who look to action on the job and in the streets to win changes from capitalists and the state can't afford such complacency.

Because the NDP understands the world in much the same way as the other political parties and is organized as an election machine, it can do little to resist capital's drive to lower people's expectations and convince workers to identify their interests with those of their bosses (although some NDP members are active in resisting the onslaught). As a result, the NDP is simply not effective at challenging the Liberals, the Alliance and the Tories, let alone advancing the new politics of solidarity and struggle that are so badly needed.

There are many ways to develop these new politics. No new Left will be successful without innovative workplace and community organizing that builds working-class power. But without political organizations that can help activists from different sectors to clarify their ideas and promote anti-capitalist politics in society, the NDP will retain its monopoly by default. For this reason, NEW SOCIALIST supports the fledgling Rebuilding the Left initiatives that began last year in several cities in English Canada.

The mass protests in Quebec City in April against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will rightly be the focus of much attention in early 2001. This will be an important event for the global justice movement that has captured the attention and imagination of many since the "Battle of Seattle." We urge our readers to not only participate in whatever way you can, but to make sure that an opportunity to build a larger and better-organized anti-capitalist Left is not wasted.