NDP insiders in Nova Scotia react to Tom Mulcair leadership vote

CBC Mainstreet Halifax host Bob Murphy asked three Nova Scotians with experience in the New Democratic Party what they make of Sunday's vote to dump federal leader Tom Mulcair.

Delegates gathered in Edmonton for the party's convention this weekend and voted 52 per cent to 48 per cent to proceed with a new leadership race. 

The party has given themselves two years to select a new leader and Mulcair will stay on until a successor is named. 

In the interim, the decisive vote has garnered a lot of attention from politicians, analysts, party members and non-party members. 

Darrell Dexter

He says Mulcair's team made mistakes in last year's federal election campaign, but he still thinks the platform Mulcair took to voters was solid.

Dexter says he also felt a kinship to Mulcair, because Dexter faced similar criticisms he'd taken the party too far into the political middle.

He says the decision to drop Mulcair was a break with the past because the NDP has not traditionally "made electoral success a benchmark by which we assess the quality of leadership." 

He was surprised by the vote, and chalks part of it up to changing times.

"The echo chamber that exists in the media out there is so much larger. The advent of social media has very much changed the way in which we talk to one another, and in some ways it's a very impatient medium," Dexter said. 

"It makes demands on political leadership which I think sometimes are very unrealistic, and I think creates a sense of hostility that just isn't productive."

Wendy Lill

She was surprised that fewer than 50 percent voted to support Mulcair's leadership. She calls Mulcair an "exquisite opposition leader, a fine man, and a fine politician" but admits if she'd been there, she would have been inclined to vote for change.

She didn't think Mulcair's speech measured up to the one former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis delivered the night before. She thinks another factor was the competing priorities of delegates from different parts of the country.

"In that room there were some really difference forces at work. They were in Alberta, and there were hundreds of members  from the Alberta NDP who really wanted him to talk about pipelines," Lill said. 

"And then there were the people from the whole Leap Manifesto group. I would say that he got caught in the crossfire there between both of those groups that were not really happy with his level of zeal for their issues. And that's a hard place to be."

Peter Puxley

Peter Puxley was a director of policy and research for Jack Layton and the NDP caucus. He lives on the South Shore.

He was a bit surprised by the vote, but even before that, "I have to say the first surprise for me was Tom's rather lacklustre speech in which I was expecting him to really make a case for his leadership."

"Simply saying 'I take full responsibility' wasn't sufficient," Puxley said.

"You know marketers take hold of every election campaign. Doesn't matter which party you're talking about. But in this case I think they betrayed a fundamental principal of social democracy, and that was to adopt the austerity fiscal frame, and promise to balance the budget in every year. 

"I didn't hear him say clearly enough that those principles were betrayed, and he was going to make sure it didn't happen again."

Even still, Puxley doesn't think dumping Mulcair was the right thing to do and he points out that while Mulcair's fate was decided by 1,800 people at the convention, almost 3.5 million people voted for the NDP last fall.

"I think this was a minority decision that will put us into a leadership campaign for two years when we should be focusing on taking on the failings of the Liberals," he said.