The federal NDP leadership race is heading into the home stretch. The convention takes place this weekend and, so far, the silence has been deafening. Despite the dogged efforts of the six candidates and their supporters, they are all losing the race to a competitor who hasn’t even declared: apathy.

The campaign has generated little media coverage — and most of that has been negative, highlighting the obvious lack of energy and enthusiasm in the race. The party claims that the candidates have signed up a combined total of something like 24,000 new members, but whether this translates into any real upsurge in party activism, with new members participating actively in the party or with the party itself being more active, is very much in question.

For a federal party that has been on life-support for the better part of a decade, this is not a good sign. And to understand the failure of the current contest to generate the excitement and energy usually associated with leadership races, it helps to look back to the NDP’s aborted effort to renew itself at a special convention in Winnipeg just over a year ago.

During the run-up to that convention, the New Politics Initiative (NPI), which I helped to found, proposed that the NDP join with other left-wing groups in a process to form a new, broader and more movement-connected progressive party. We argued that the NDP needed more than a tame “renewal.” It needed more than a new leader. And it still does. The left party needs a far-reaching reinvention, to re-inspire and recruit progressive activists, and to achieve better balances and connections between electoral politics and street politics.

Our proposal was voted down by NDP delegates, by a 63-37 margin. Instead of a true re-haul, the convention adopted a lofty but vague revamp in the form of a declaration of “renewal principles.” As progressive and sincere as this declaration sounded on paper, however, it was a dead duck five minutes after the NPI resolution was defeated. No serious attention or effort has been given to implementing the renewal package, and the party went quickly back to business as usual — with electing a new leader the first item on the agenda.

Ironically, when it was founded, the NPI was accused by party insiders of constituting a disguised challenge to Alexa McDonough’s leadership, since one of our co-founders — MP Svend Robinson — was a rumoured leadership candidate. We argued at the time, however, that the NDP’s problems ran far deeper than leadership. We were genuine in visioning a whole new vehicle, not just a new driver.

And as it turned out, it was the party hierarchy that has been masquerading leadership for renewal. Indeed, the only concrete outcome of the whole renewal process was the adoption of a new method for electing the party’s leader: a modified one-member, one-vote system in which union delegates, strangely, still wield disproportionate block voting power. This mongrelized approach hasn’t democratized the party. And logistical problems associated with its complicated workings threaten to make the leadership vote itself an organizational disaster (it is possible that no winner will be known until well into Sunday morning).

Can a new leader renew a party that is structurally and politically static? MPs Bill Blaikie and Lorne Nystrom are closely associated with the party’s status-quo. Don’t expect any big changes under their leadership.

Even if an “outsider” like Jack Layton or Joe Comartin were to triumph, they’d be heading an apparatus that has yet to face the facts of its potential extinction. This is all the more worrisome since neither Comartin nor Layton are seeking a mandate for fundamental organizational change within the NDP itself; both have emphasized policy and personality, which alone won’t be nearly enough to lead the party out of the political wilderness.

So from the long-run historical perspective of the Canadian left, the NDP’s current leadership campaign is pretty much a non-event. The day after the new leader has been elected, the party’s need for a much deeper reinvention will be as pressing and obvious as it was at the Winnipeg convention. The unfinished business of party renewal will have to be the new leader’s first priority. If that leader is Blaikie or Nystrom, we know what to expect. If it is Comartin or Layton, there will be some new political space for party members to consider truly new directions. Exactly how much space, has yet to be determined.

Explicitly or implicitly, most Canadian progressives understand that this leadership race is a sideshow to the real issues facing the left. This is precisely why we’ve had such a hard time getting excited about it. The constituencies whose passion and hope is essential to the survival of any left-wing party — rank-and-file unionists, youth, greens, anti-globalization activists — remain unengaged and distant from the NDP, and from this leadership race. Most of the new energy and creativity on the left continues to operate outside of the party. The NDP, and the left more generally, need a top-to-bottom rethink about how we practice politics, finding new ways to reach poor and working Canadians, in their own neighbourhoods and on their own issues. The potential for building a movement to challenge the perverted nature of our democracy in Canada also remains largely untapped.

What new structures and practices would inspire and mobilize concerned Canadians to once again push the envelope of social change, both at the ballot box and in the streets? If the NDP’s new leader doesn’t have a good answer to this question, then it won’t matter a hoot who wins the convention. We’ll simply be changing captains on the bridge of the Titanic.

Jim Stanford

Jim Stanford is economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, and divides his time between Vancouver and Sydney. He has a PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research in New York,...