LE3 .A278 2004

2004

Stewart, Ian

Acadia University

Master of Arts

Masters

Political Science

Politics

Canada's New Democratic Party (NDP) was founded in 1961 after the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) repeatedly failed to achieve its political ambitions in the 1940s and 50s. What appeared to be rising political fortunes for the political Left came to a sudden halt following the 1988 general election when the party's support collapsed at the polls and has not yet since fully recovered. Our analysis of this phenomenon is enlightened by Giddens's structuration theory. Giddens argues that structure and agency mutually reinforce each other through the exercise of recurring social practices, which in turn influence future agency through their unacknowledged and unintended consequences. We argue, therefore, that the NDP's electoral collapse was significantly the result of mutating economic transnational structures that penetrated and became embedded in the Canadian electorate's collective consciousness before the party was able (or willing) to adapt its policies accordingly. We first examine the structural principles that led to the formation of Canadian social democracy throughout the 20th century, and then analyse two alternative responses (New Labour and the New Social Movements) to the emergence of globalisation before coming back to the NDP's own response to these structural changes. We find that the NDP has little chance of achieving greater electoral success unless it embraces the forces of the market in the way New Labour has, or of countering the invasion of the public sphere by the private interests of transnational capital unless it successfully re-defines politics in the way the New Social Movements have attempted.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:2750