The primary goals of the Animal Protection Party are pretty much what it says on the tin: Their platform calls for the ethical treatment of animals, with ongoing campaigns to ban shark finning in Canadian waters and prevent cosmetic testing on animals. They stand apart from the Green Party because, according to their website, the Greens have “become much more of a mainstream party and the closer a party gets to power, the farther away they get from promoting change.”

WYATT SCOTT

The political equivalent of a one-man band, Wyatt Scott made headlines in 2015 when he posted a video to YouTube announcing his run for parliament. It featured him riding a giant Canada Goose, slaying a dragon, fist-bumping an extraterrestrial, and shooting laser beams out of his eyes—all for Canada. Later that year, Scott posted another video called “Let’s Get Serious,” which included a guitar-playing sasquatch and a fistfight between a giant salmon and an equally giant bear. (The bear won. And proceeded to shoot lasers out of its eyes, which seems to be an important thematic element for Scott.) He came away with 881 votes in 2015.

THE PIRATE PARTY

Curiously, the members of this party are not actual pirates. The name, according to the party’s website, was selected “because we were called ‘Pirates.’” The party’s website goes on to explain that, “If we were the Humanist Party, we would still hold the same values, and so we keep our funny name but use it to get the attention to spread to our very important causes.” (So they’re pirates but not pirate-pirates.) Their platform is the most accessible and exhaustive of the bunch, addressing issues like basic income, limits to digital rights management, and the abolishment of university tuition fees. In all honesty, they should probably leverage the appeal of being a pirate. Who doesn’t want to be a pirate?

THE RHINOCEROS PARTY

Once defunct, the Rhinoceros Party has risen again with a promise to break not one, but all of their campaign promises. Some of the past vows from this satirical party include renaming the country Nantucket, nationalizing Tim Hortons, and abolishing the law of gravity. They also offered Eve Adams “the riding of her choice,” promising to “rig the nomination race in her favor [sic]” after she lost a Liberal nomination contest.

“Working people did not cause this crisis … and we won’t pay for it!”

These words were printed in bright red letters on a flyer recently published by the Communist Party of Canada as part of its effort to raise public awareness about the root causes of the global economic crisis. The flyer sat atop a pile of documents at the entrance to the Communist Party’s central office in Toronto, where, for 17 years, Miguel Figueroa has been busily engaged in resisting mass capitalism. The room isn’t big, but it is filled with desks, documents, books and other mementoes. The walls are lined with pictures of Lenin and other legendary communist leaders.

Not far from the CPC’s headquarters, I met a gregarious Figueroa at a Greek restaurant on Danforth Avenue in Greektown, just east of Toronto’s downtown. He’s stepped out for a few seconds when the waitress approaches me and asks if I want something. “No thanks, I’m just waiting for someone,” I reply.

She knows who I’m waiting for: “I think it’s Miguel, yes?” When he returns inside and sits down, another woman coming around to clean the tables recognizes him. “Hi Miguel! How are you?” she asks cheerfully. He’s a regular.

It’s not just his neighbourhood restaurant: Figueroa is also a regular in Canadian left-wing politics. He has been leader of the Communist party for 17 years. Since 1992, in fact—which makes him the longest-standing active federal party leader in Canada. None of the leaders for the four parties represented in Parliament even come close to that; Michael Ignatieff has been leading the Liberals since 2008, Stephen Harper the Conservatives since 2004, Jack Layton the NDP since 2003. Even Gilles Duceppe, who seems to have been at the helm of the Bloc Québécois for an eternity, has only been in charge since 1997. To put things in perspective, the Conservative party has had eight different leaders since 1992, and the Liberal party five.

Figueroa says he’s held on for all this time mostly because the hectic job requires it, and because, well, somebody has to do it. “We have many people in our party who are much more capable than I am, but who aren’t in a position to work for the party full-time,” he says.

His term as leader only represents the second half of Figueroa’s career as a member of the CPC. Before being elected head of the party, he spent some 15 years working for the Communists in various capacities at both ends of the country. He became a party organizer in Vancouver in 1978 and moved to Halifax in 1986, where he led the Atlantic branch of the party. In total, the 57-year-old Figueroa has devoted more than 30 years of his life to further build a party in which— despite public support for communism and socialism that is weak at the best of times—he still believes.

And he might have reason to. After all of the hardships his party has endured through the years, the Communist Party of Canada is still alive, which is an achievement in itself. It was formed in 1921 in a barn near Guelph, Ontario. It didn’t take long for the RCMP to target the party and start harassing it, even arresting its leaders in 1931. Nonetheless, several members of the CPC were elected to municipal and provincial offices in the following years. But in 1940, the party was banned because it opposed the country’s participation in the Second World War, and hundreds of its members were imprisoned.

Ironically, the subsequent years were those during which the Communists’ popularity peaked. The party resurfaced as the “Labour-Progressive Party” and, according to former party leader George Hewison, had about 25,000 members after the war. One of them, Fred Rose, was even elected to the House of Commons when he represented the party in the Montreal riding of Cartier in the 1943 federal by-election. But after Soviet Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev exposed the cruelty of Joseph Stalin and his regime in 1956 in the USSR, disenchanted communists around the world left their respective parties. The Communist party was no different, and its membership dwindled until the fall of communism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991.

Then all hell broke loose.

It was December, 1992. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CPC held a watershed convention. The year before, the party had split along ideological lines: one group, led by General Secretary George Hewison, sought to shift the party’s philosophy from Marxism-Leninism to social democracy, while a faction led by Figueroa opposed the change. Eleven opponents were expelled from the party with Figueroa resigning in sympathy. Figueroa and his group subsequently threatened court action against Hewison and his colleagues to challenge the dismissal. The two sides reached an out-of-court settlement, and at the 1992 convention, a new central committee was elected, with Figueroa at the head of a fractured party in need of serious repair.

Figueroa’s political ascent was unlikely: The Montrealborn Figueroa was not a part of a political family such as the Trudeaus or Martins. He spent a few years in the United States as a child and, after his parents separated, he and his mother moved back to Quebec when he was beginning Grade 9. “We were on welfare,” he says. “The bailiffs actually came to our apartment. They broke down the door with a sledgehammer, came in and confiscated all of our belongings because my mother couldn’t pay some of the bills. They left us with our clothes, our books, and our beds. It was very humiliating for my mother, devastating for her.” This was in 1969 or 1970, he says, an era when an officer could simply show up at a nonpayer’s home and “clean up the house.” “It wasn’t as if it was a decision of the court or she was called to court and didn’t show up. It was draconian.” It was his political awakening.

The incident drove him to get involved in Montreal’s antipoverty movement, where he met lefties, went to meetings, and read the classics of Marxist literature and theory. After leaving Quebec, he joined the National Union of Students (now known as the Canadian Federation of Students) and became interested in the Communist Party. He liked its approach, the fact that it was trying to build unity, working with unions and community organizations, rather than just shouting slogans. But the CPC was also pro-Soviet at the time, a position that placed it in the political wilderness as American rhetoric about the “Evil Empire” was in the ascent. In American schools, says Figueroa, pupils were taught “in Russia, the KGB can come in at three in the morning and take your toys! And there’s nothing scarier to a kid than having their toys taken. It’s dramatic!” But he agreed with most of the party’s program and, defying the anti-communist fog, decided to take out a membership. He hasn’t looked back since.

Even those who once disagreed with Figueroa acknowledge he is an impressive organizer. George Hewison—once Figueroa’s courtroom opponent over the party split— tells me that Figueroa is “very talented, very intelligent.” Johan Boyden, General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Canada, says that Figueroa is “very dedicated.” I started to understand why Figueroa commands such respect when he elaborated on socialist theories and history. To most people, and even by its very nature, communism is associated with working-class struggle and the uprising of the proletariat. Although Figueroa was never an aristocrat, his political education didn’t exactly happen at the bottom of a coal mine: After completing his pre-university studies in arts and science at Dawson College in Montreal and taking courses in urban studies and economics at McGill and Concordia universities, he spent six months studying political economy at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1985-86, where Hewison was one of his classmates. Figueroa then returned to the classroom in the early 1990s to start his graduate studies in international development at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He never completed his thesis though, because, among other things, he was elected Communist Party Leader.

The first order of business was whipping the party into shape for an election, and, in the process, Figueroa ended up reshaping Canadian elections themselves. The Communists were struggling to register the minimum of 50 candidates required under the Canada Elections Act to get official party status and participate in the 1993 federal election. This meant that the Communist Party would not be on the ballots, and that Elections Canada would also deregister the party and seize its assets. Figueroa challenged the provision on the basis it discriminated against smaller political parties. He pursued the suit for six years, and in 1999, Justice Anne Molloy of the Ontario Court ruled that the 50-candidate threshold was, according to official documents, “inconsistent with the right of each citizen to run for office” and ordered that it be reduced to two candidates.

The Attorney General’s office appealed the decision, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the threshold was indeed constitutional, although parties that could field at least 12 candidates for an election would be able to have their party’s name on the ballot next to the candidate’s name. Not content with the halfway measure, Figueroa appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, claiming the rule violated Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The hearing started in November 2002, and in June 2003, the historic Figueroa v. Canada (Attorney General) decision determined that “the 50-candidate threshold is inconsistent with the right of each citizen to play a meaningful role in the electoral process.” Ten years after his party was deregistered, Figueroa had successfully forced Elections Canada to overturn its rule and the Communist Party of Canada was back on the ballot.

Being on the ballot is one thing; winning is another, and the Communist Party remains a distant also-ran when it comes to actually delivering votes. During the CPC’s decade of oblivion, Figueroa remained active on the political scene by running twice as an independent candidate in the Canadian federal election. In 1993, in the riding of Parkdale-High Park, he finished ninth out of 11 candidates; in 1997 in Toronto’s Davenport riding, he finished seventh out of eight.

Though it still barely registers on the electoral scale, the Communist Party’s Supreme Court fight remains a historic win, and not just for Figueroa and the party.

“It established new grounds in evaluating election law,” says Peter Rosenthal, the CPC’s lawyer at the time. Rosenthal has worked on a number of cases related to electoral law, but believes this one spawned several others and had positive consequences for small parties. Nelson Wiseman, associate professor with the department of political science at the University of Toronto, had originally predicted there would be a proliferation of parties following the Supreme Court’s decision. “But the government has tightened up the requirements for registering a party,” he says, noting the number of registered federal parties is not much higher today than it was in 2003: among other things, the number of members required for party registration was increased from 100 to 250, and each party must have three other officers in addition to its leader.

But while new parties haven’t exactly mushroomed since Figueroa v. Canada, some existing ones have been able to survive. “My hero!” exclaims Blair T. Longley upon hearing Figueroa’s name. The Marijuana Party of Canada leader, whose party has been decimated in recent years due to several of its members joining more prominent parties, admits “We wouldn’t exist without Miguel Figueroa and Peter Rosenthal’s work. None of the small parties would exist.” Indeed, several of those parties rallied behind Figueroa during the court challenge, and the case made for strange bedfellows: in addition to the Marijuana Party, the right-wing Christian Heritage Party—which couldn’t meet the 50-candidate threshold for the 2000 election—joined in. Pastors associated with the party even asked their congregations at Sunday church services to pray for Figueroa while the case was being debated.

“This is a landmark case in the status of small parties,” says Boyden. “It’s a great advancement for democracy in Canada because it recognized that there was a role for those parties…. The Green Party, which is now much larger than it was back then, was right there at the table in the Figueroa case,” he says.

In addition to his work as party leader, Figueroa is an editorial board member of the People’s Voice, the nationally distributed bi-monthly newspaper published by the CPC. But in spite of the party’s rebirth, publications and political involvement, Figueroa is still leading a small party that only represents half of the Communist left in Canada, the other being the similarly (perhaps confusingly) named, but ideologically different, Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). Moreover, the Communist Party currently has approximately 500 members coast to coast. Nevertheless, Figueroa’s party is a bit like one of those inflatable bop bags that always get back up after being knocked down; it simply refuses to give up and go away. No matter how hard the government, the RCMP or Elections Canada has tried to kick it off the political scene, the Communists have always found a way to return. Figueroa is simply the architect of the latest rebuilding, which, even after 17 years, hardly threatens to overturn the decades-long status quo of Liberal or Conservative rule. But like its leader, the Communist Party of Canada is a regular, a fixture on the scene, not the flashiest customer but a reliable one. And like Figueroa, it intends to stay that way.

What to choose? Proportional representation

Canada, in deciding to adopt the British system of responsible parliamentary government, instead imported SMP elections. The supposed strength of SMP was that it encouraged two-party contests, which would lead to clear mandates for the elected MP and strong majorities in the parliament so these MPs could enact legislation with the broadest appeal. PR, on the other hand, inevitably leads to multiple parties being elected to a legislature, which in a parliamentary system means a divided legislature and coalition governments.

If we had adopted PR in 1867 when it was the dominant democratic idea, many of Canada’s current political problems would have been eliminated. At the very least, Canadians would see that parliamentary government and coalition governments are actually synonymous — they are predicated on identical democratic principles.

Furthermore, Canada has been — and continues to be — the exception to the SMP rule. Open any textbook on electoral systems and there will likely be a footnote next to Canada explaining how our large land mass and ethno-linguistically diverse population resulted in “third parties” (and, eventually, four-, five- and six-party contests).

The reason for this is that SMP rewards regional parties. Canadian political parties need only focus their policies and resources on local interests and, as is often the case in Canada, can pit one region against another for electoral gain. This is the reason the Bloc Québécois won 49 seats in the current Parliament, running candidates in only one province. The Bloc Québécois received 12 more seats in the Commons than the NDP, which won eight percent more of the popular vote across Canada.

The skewed electoral system is also the reason most people believe that all Albertans oppose the Liberals and why in the last federal election, 27 of Alberta’s 28 seats went to the Conservatives, even though more than a third of the province voted against them (with 11 percent of Albertans actually voting Liberal).

The exaggerated success of regional parties under SMP in Canada fuels regional discontent. PR would alleviate this because it would ensure that those 11 percent of Albertans who voted Liberal, and the 12 percent of Quebecers who voted NDP, received representation in the House. Regional parties would still have some advantages under PR due to the geographic and demographic quirks unique to Canada, but PR would rebalance the electoral system so it did not disenfranchise pan-Canadian political parties.

Yes, PR ensures more ideological and divergent parties get elected, but SMP is already doing that in Canada. However, since it is rare for any party to hold a majority in a PR system, it forces political parties to form coalition governments. These governments are, based on the mounting evidence from other countries, centrist and not ideological in their policies. The same cannot be said for recent Canadian governments.

Canada’s minority governments for the past five years have increasingly used the threat of confi dence votes and early election calls to ram through ideological legislation in the pursuit of a public policy agenda that was not supported by the public or the majority of elected MPs. Proportional representation would change Canada’s electoral dynamics. Parties would be forced to leave the door open to the possibility of coalitions, and the electorate could consider these possibilities when casting their ballots. It would also force politicians to work together once elected, since the illusion of a majority just being around the corner would disappear.

If PR had been in place, Stephen Harper would not have triggered an early election in 2008. Jack Layton and the NDP would not have wasted the last two years, and the last two election campaigns, running against the Liberals instead of focusing on keeping an ideological right-wing Conservative party out of government. And Michael Ignatieff would not have had an excuse to seize the leadership of the Liberal party without a leadership convention and then spend a month considering whether his own electoral future was most advantaged by keeping the Conservative government in power, forcing a new election, trying to form a Liberal government, or forming a coalition with the NDP.

PR would have ensured that following the last election, all political parties worked together to decide how to form a stable government whose policies were supported by the majority of the Commons and thus the Canadian people. This is how responsible parliamentary government is supposed to work — and that, not the wonky electoral system, is what Canadians thought they had imported from Britain in 1867.

In a marketing campaign based largely on deception, the Progressive Canadian Party ran in 16 ridings, using the PC Party banner on election signs and ballot boxes.

In Richmond Hill, Ontario, Conservative candidate Pete Merrifield took issue with the PC’s Tory-blue signs and its use of the phrase “progressive conservative” instead of Progressive Canadian. He even suggested the rival PC camp was stealing his signs.

Conservative Party spokesperson Carolyn Stewart Olsen, on the other hand, maintains that while individual candidates may have had problems with the PC Party, the Conservatives as a whole did not. “We didn’t have time to pay much attention to fringe parties,” she says.

But Joe Hueglin, national coordinator for the PC Party, thinks Harper’s Conservatives should indeed be worried by the new Tories on the block. And while he acknowledges that Conservative candidates complained about his party’s tactics, he’s making no apologies. “We’re operating within the law,” Hueglin says. Did it cause confusion? “Quite possibly. But many people didn’t know they were voting for Stephen Harper [by voting for the Conservative Party], because they don’t follow politics.”

With only 100 official members, the new PC Party isn’t exactly a force to be reckoned with, but it’s got more than a familiar name on its side. One of its star candidates, Rev. Dorian Baxter (a.k.a. Elvis Priestley), is an Elvis-impersonating Anglican priest who ran against Conservative wonderwoman Belinda Stronach in the Ontario riding of Newmarket-Aurora.

Stronach won. Elvis took 2.11 percent. But according to Hueglin, “the Conservatives are blaming [the PC Party] for Belinda’s poor performance.”

Watch out, Stephen Harper. You could be next.

Last year, Bill C-24 placed new spending limits on nomination races and new reporting requirements on donations. It also introduced new limits on donations, including a ban on corporate donations to parties, a $1,000 limit on corporate donations to candidates and a $5,000 limit on individuals donating to parties or candidates. But donors are still finding ways to get around the rules.

Re-elected Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish, for example, was offered a cheque for $5,000 from a company in her riding. Knowing this was above the $1,000 limit for businesses, she politely returned the cheque. But almost immediately after she did so, three new $1,000 cheques came in: one from the company that wrote the first cheque, one from the owner of the company and one from another company the owner was involved in. A few weeks later, she got a $2,000 cheque from the owner’s brother. “The first guy would have liked to have given me $5,000, but he couldn’t,” she says.

In the Ottawa Centre race, Liberal Richard Mahoney’s campaign called voters on election day—when campaigning is illegal—leaving an automated message propagating a false rumour that his main opponent, the NDP’s Ed Broadbent, was willing to give up his seat if Jack Layton lost his own election and needed somewhere to run. “The people of Ottawa Centre can elect someone who’s committed for the long term, Richard Mahoney, and prevent Stephen Harper from becoming prime minister,” the message urged.

Mahoney lost by a wide margin, but the incident illustrates how election laws are failing to deal with desperate candidates who pull out the dirty tricks in the dying days of a campaign, confident in the knowledge that an Elections Canada investigation will not be able to stop them until after the election, when the damage is done. Nobody knows when the next election will be, but with any luck, MPs will address ways to prevent these shenanigans before another writ is dropped.

Clearly, it was not what Martin had hoped for. But for the rest of us, it might not be a bad thing. Although Canada has seen its share of difficulties with minority governments (think of Joe Clark’s short-lived Tory government in 1979), a lot of progressive legislation has come out of a centrist government forced to lean on the left for a little support.

Below, we’ve compared the legacies of Lester B. Pearson’s minority government, which sat for two terms from 1963 to 1968, with Jean Chrétien’s majority reign of power from 1993 to 2003.

Education Pearson created the Canada Student Loans Program in 1964 to make post-secondary education possible for lower-income families, providing eligible students with low-interest loans.

Chrétien cut $4 billion from federal funding for social services, including education. Thanks to Chrétien’s changes, the National Student Loan Service Centre, banks and even the government itself will now report delinquent grads to private debt collectors and take legal action if they default on their loans.

Medicare Pearson introduced universal medicare in 1968, due in no small part to the urging of Tommy Douglas and the New Democratic Party.

Chrétien was soft on two-tier health care, allowing private MRI, CT, orthopedic and ophthalmology clinics to grow across Canada.

Military Pearson resisted US pressure to participate in the Vietnam War and spoke out against the bombing campaign, angering then-president Lyndon Johnson.

Chrétien ordered troops to join the coalition to fight in Afghanistan immediately after September 11. Operation Apollo brought soldiers, patrols, frigates and other military equipment to the war against terrorism in the Middle East.

It’s a week before election day, and the York Event Theatre in Toronto is filled with middle-aged New Democrats waxing nostalgic and rocking out to protest songs from the ’60s. The theatre is a sea of orange and green signs, carried by candidates and campaigners. There’s a contagious air of excitement as the crowd anxiously awaits the arrival of Jack Layton, the man who in a little more than a year has pulled the New Democratic Party from oblivion. A Toronto Star poll released the day before showed NDP public support at 20 percent nationally and 26 percent in Ontario—highs not seen since the party’s glory days in the late ’80s.

In a nod to the past, Ed Broadbent, 68, who led the NDP from 1975 to 1989, takes the stage to introduce Layton: “It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest political leader of our time: Jack Layton!” That’s quite the compliment coming from a man who claimed in an online spoof during the campaign that he was once more popular than Pierre Trudeau. Layton is the first Ontario-based NDP leader since Broadbent, and both share a love of academia: before sliding onto the political scene, Broadbent taught at York University, and Layton taught at three universities, including the University of Toronto. The crowd erupts into thunderous applause as Layton winds his way to the stage surrounded by camera crews and reporters, energized by the upbeat rhythm of the party’s theme song “Bring All the People Together,” a remix of the Parachute Club’s gay rights anthem “Rise Up.” Layton takes the stage with his wife and fellow federal candidate, Olivia Chow, on one side, Broadbent on the other, and dozens of the party’s Toronto-area candidates behind him, and declares: “We’re going to paint the town orange!”

An ambitious goal; some said too ambitious after the votes had been tallied just seven days later—the predicted “orange wave” across Toronto having dwindled to a lone orange island (Layton) in a sea of red. Layton had predicted 43 seats and an influential role in Parliament. In the weeks after the election, NDP officials claimed victory for doubling their popular vote, but to go from forecasting a role as the official opposition to winning just a few more seats than required for official party status has left many asking what happened. Layton’s charisma and mass appeal pulled the NDP out of oblivion, but ultimately Jack Fever, coupled with one of the slickest campaigns the party has ever delivered, just wasn’t enough to lure centrists, and even some scared lefties, away from the scandal-ridden Liberals and edge out the status quo.

Of course, it started out great. The NDP went into election mode soon after Layton, 54, was named leader in January 2003. Though he didn’t have a seat in the house, New Democrats knew they had a jewel in Layton; strategists now had to decide how to market him. “There’s no question that Jack Layton’s leadership was paramount to the momentum of the campaign,” says Brad Lavigne, the party’s director of communications. “We have more money because Jack is an exciting leader who people want to donate to. Everything flows from Jack.”

Thanks largely to donations generated from excitement about Layton, the NDP was able to spend twice as much on advertising in 2004 as it did in the 2000 federal election. The party was determined to increase its popular vote, which had slipped to 8.5 percent, and, more importantly, to increase its seat count, which, at the time, stood at 14. “Sitting in the corner being the conscience of Parliament was no longer an adequate goal,” Lavigne says. “We wanted a larger role and greater influence.”

In August 2003, the NDP hired Vancouver-based ad firm NOW Communications to handle the looming 2004 campaign. NOW is a progressive company that specializes in public-advocacy marketing. Paul Degenstein, the firm’s vice-president, managed the NDP file. Degenstein is no stranger to the party—he was a speechwriter for former NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin. (In 1992, a cartoon in Saturday Night magazine depicted him as the ventriloquist to McLaughlin’s dummy. He responded in the media by calling the cartoon “stupid and unethical.”) The firm has handled several provincial NDP campaigns, including recent runs in Nova Scotia and Manitoba. The Nova Scotia election saw the NDP gain five seats and retain its position as the official opposition. In Manitoba, NOW helped the party increase its majority and carry Premier Gary Doer to an easy re-election. Lavigne says the federal NDP watched the firm closely during the provincial campaigns: “They have a fantastic track record.”

Soon, NDP television spots began popping up where you least expected them: on prime time television. Once relegated to late, late night TV, NDP ads now played during the Academy Awards and Stanley Cup play-offs. The ads also infiltrated various community papers and radio stations, in multiple languages.

Despite the high-profile TV spots, marketing experts say the message was soft. Early ads touched briefly on issues like health care, cities, pensions and the environment, but didn’t focus on one point in particular. “If they’d given [voters] something to latch on to, they may have done better,” says Richard D. Johnson, chair of the department of marketing, business economics and law at the University of Alberta. Marketing specialist Martin Wales agrees. “They didn’t give me enough reason to vote for them—they didn’t present anything unique.”

However, the NDP was getting valuable screen time outside of the ads, as Layton began regularly making the evening news. “Layton has a skill for good soundbites—even without a seat he was in the national media for a year,” Wales observes.

The NDP hired a professional fundraiser and, in January, began mailing promotional packages to gear up for the expected spring election. The party targeted 100,000 NDP members and donors, and 200,000 addresses gleaned from progressive Canadian organizations. “The response was unprecedented for the NDP…. I would say we tripled our predictions,” marvels Diane Alexopoulos, the party’s fundraising coordinator. “We’ve surpassed our goals twice already—we have to keep drafting new plans.” She, too, attributes the sharp rise in support to excitement about Layton.

Coupling the NDP’s grassroots history with the growing power of the internet, the party borrowed a fundraising tactic from the American Democrats. Personal e-campaigns recruited NDP supporters—young, tech-savvy ones in particular—to run their own electronic fundraising campaigns on behalf of the party. Campaigners used their personal address books, and set fundraising goals for themselves. The average goal was $1,000. The initiative attracted 500 personal e-campaigners and raised almost $10,000. “The NDP did a good job of using the internet,” Wales remarks. He credits the party with innovative initiatives to lure people to their sites, pointing to Broadbent’s satirical online video in particular. “I think [the video] did do a number of good things, primarily introducing the internet to the election process,” he says.

In another attempt to attract younger voters, the NDP staged concerts like the Toronto event “Let’s Jack it Up,” hosted by Layton and Barenaked Ladies’ singer Steven Page. The event featured indie rock bands popular with the young folks like The Sadies and the Constantines. Lavigne says the artists themselves approached the NDP with the idea. “The artists come out and say, ‘We play for these people day in and day out and they’re hungry to hear a leader talk about how to make their country great,’” he says. “Let’s Jack it Up” played to a sellout crowd of over 2,000.

Jim Laxer, a York University political science professor and former NDP research director, attributes part of Layton’s youth appeal to his progressive platform. “It’s a very positive agenda that could actually speak to younger voters.” He notes that past NDP platforms have focused more on defending existing social programs, an appeal that targets older voters. “Let’s face it—Jack Layton is the first [NDP] leader to be able to speak at universities to a packed room in a long time,” Laxer says.

Perhaps the strangest example of the party’s cross-generational appeal came from a New Democrat with a cult celebrity status of his own. Ed Broadbent’s decision to join Layton’s team and return to politics after stepping down as leader in 1989 stirred up nostalgia among older NDP supporters. Strategists played up Broadbent’s return through traditional campaign tools like flyers and public appearances. Then, in late spring, the party received a gift of sorts. TV show This Hour Has 22 Minutes produced a mock music video featuring Broadbent rapping: “I’m the one you all should know/ Once more popular than Trudeau … Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee/ It’s time for voting NDP.” The show decided not to run it, and the NDP jumped on the chance to adopt the video as its own. “When we saw it, we realized its great potential to attract young people to the website,” Lavigne explains. “It was very successful—it went viral.” The video never ran as a television ad, but it received plenty of news coverage, drawing people to the NDP website where they could download and play the video. Its self-deprecating humour was a welcome step away from the perception that the party takes itself too seriously. “The NDP has a certain air of puritanism and self-righteousness,” Laxer notes. “Anything self-deprecating sounds good to me.”

It’s less than 60 hours before the polls open, and the waitresses at the Woolwich Arms pub in Guelph, Ontario, are saying it’s the busiest night they’ve witnessed. It’s just after midnight, and the pub is crammed beyond capacity with a crowd of 40- and 50-somethings who staked out a place at the Wooly in the early evening to ensure they’ll get to see Layton. Guelph is the final stop on today’s eight-city campaign trail. Layton’s NDP is near the height of its popularity. Today’s polls—the last before the election—place public support for the party at 17 percent, and even the most conservative pollsters are predicting 25 orange seats.

When the campaign bus arrives, two and a half hours late, more than 100 people are lining the grass outside. Layton exits the bus, again surrounded by camera crews and reporters, smiling and shaking hands. He makes his way through the cheering crowd into the pub’s small darts room. “The man, the legend,” one man remarks. “I shook his hand!” a flustered woman gasps, laughing like she’s just encountered a rock star.

Layton’s uncanny ability to draw people in, paired with tireless touring, helped give the NDP campaign a human face. Everywhere he went he spoke to packed rooms—that’s normal for larger parties, but for the NDP it was a surprising new development. The Toronto-Danforth all-candidates debate in a small community centre in Layton’s riding packed in several hundred residents, leaving at least 150 more outside in the rain, straining to catch the action on loudspeakers outside. (The all-candidates debate in Defence Minister Bill Graham’s neighboring Toronto-Centre riding drew just 40 people.) Layton’s relentless campaign schedule didn’t seem to bring him down—he always looked invigorated. “I’ve known Jack now for over 30 years, and he’s always had this tremendous energy,” says Laxer. “He’s an extra-human phenomenon.”

Even with Layton’s drive and appeal, the NDP just wasn’t equipped to fight in a new and unexpected battlefield. There are a few factors that can help explain—with the benefit of hindsight—the party’s reversal of fortune. The Liberal sponsorship scandal changed the dynamics of the campaign before it even officially started. After Christmas, the Liberals seemed untouchable. The NDP kicked off its TV campaign early in the year by taking aim at the Grits. After Adscam brought the Liberals down, and the united right suddenly became a huge player, the NDP shifted its focus to position itself as an alternative to the Conservatives. NDP TV spots began targeting both parties instead of focusing on just one, using catch phrases like “If you don’t trust the Liberals and you’re worried about the Conservatives’ hidden agenda, there is a positive choice.” Ken Wong, a marketing professor at Queen’s University, says this shift hurt the party. “I think that if they had stuck to their original message, which was anti-Liberal, instead of switching to anti-Conservative, they would have been more successful,” he says.

Laxer cites this “who to target” dilemma as a chronic thorn in the party’s side. “The biggest weakness of the campaign was the inability to figure out what to say to voters about the threat from the right,” Laxer says. He points to the NDP’s attempts to dismiss the Liberals as Conservatives in disguise as a huge mistake. In June, the party launched an Ontario-only TV ad that pegged Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty and Mike Harris together. “I would regard myself as someone on the left, but when they try to tell me that the Liberals and the Conservatives are the same, what’s left of my hair stands on end because I just don’t buy it.”

By June, Harper’s Conservatives had made enough public gaffes to effectively scare most moderate Canadians. As gay rights and abortion edged their way into the election spotlight, the Liberals pounced and positioned themselves as the social justice-loving, tree-hugging, progressive choice. On June 22, Paul Martin told British Columbia voters: “There are two parties that could form the next government. If you are thinking of voting NDP, I ask you to think about the implications of your vote. In a race as close as this, you may well help Stephen Harper become prime minister.” The Liberals were hijacking the NDP platform in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves. And it worked. Even when it didn’t make sense—in ridings where the Liberals stood no chance—many previous NDP supporters checked the Liberal box, ironically pushing the Conservatives ahead just enough to win in dozens of NDP/Conservative swing ridings across the country. Henry Jacek, a political science professor at McMaster University, points to Oshawa as a perfect example of counter-intuitive strategic voting. Just a few days before the election, the NDP candidate Sid Ryan was in the lead in this southern Ontario riding, followed by the Conservatives, with the Liberals a distant third. After Martin’s appeal to vote Liberal, voters pushed the Conservatives into the lead, with just enough progressives voting Liberal to put the NDP in second place. Lavigne attacks the logic behind strategic voting, claiming the randomness of the outcome takes all the strategy out of the act. “I call that voting for something bad to avoid something worse,” he says. “I don’t call that str
ategic at all. That’s the opposite of strategic.”

He says the party will keep grappling with how to address the problem of strategic voting, but he offers no insight into what exactly it will do. “Liberal scare tactics elected more Conservatives,” Lavigne contends. “We’ll continue to appeal to voters to not buy into the fear.”

The NDP also may have underestimated the Green Party threat—a party that came from obscurity to qualify for funding from Elections Canada. Jacek recommends that in the leadup to the next election the NDP attack the Greens. “I suspect Green Party voters are far to the left of the people running the Green Party. This is not a European-style Green Party,” he says. “The NDP largely ignored the Greens. In hindsight, perhaps that wasn’t wise. Even if they got half, or even one third of the Green Party votes, they’d have more seats.” Lavigne agrees. “We’d probably have another 10 to 20 seats had the Green Party vote not been at four percent nationally,” he says. “I think in the next election people will understand that the Green Party is not progressive—it’s a right-wing, regressive party…. I think with scrutiny and closer examination people will see the Green Party for what it really is.”

As the NDP prepares for the first sitting of the new government in October—just one seat away from giving the Liberals the balance of power—Layton’s role is still uncertain. But the next election may be sooner than anyone expects. And, for all Layton’s political experience, he’s still a rookie in Ottawa. Laxer notes that run-off elections, the type that occur soon after the election of a minority government, tend to treat third parties badly. But he’s optimistic that Layton will be able to buck this trend. He predicts the Parliament convening in October will be a progressive one, and if the NDP can take credit for its role in implementing popular new policies, the party just might be able to improve its showing next time around. “Jack has got to take credit for things,” Laxer says. “And—I’m saying this in the most complimentary way—Jack is pretty good at taking credit. As a political leader, you have to be.”

Lavigne says the party has no regrets. “I can’t think of any tool that we could have used that we didn’t,” he muses, noting that the NDP is already gearing up for the dropping of the writ. “The next election could be 12 to 24 months away. We’re going to take all the good things from this campaign and use them again. And, our guard is going to be up.”

Wong gives the NDP the nod for running the best marketing campaign, but he’s careful to point out that being a winner among losers is not much of a victory: “That doesn’t mean I think it’s done a good job. I think the other two parties have done a horrific job.” Johnson criticizes the Liberals and Conservatives for relying too heavily on attack ads, and credits the NDP for incorporating a positive message in its television appeal. “You don’t give people a fear message without a positive way to solve it,” Johnson says.

“When everyone looks like a loser, people tend to stick with the status quo, which looks like what happened here.”