“In the months ahead, we will work tirelessly with you to renew, rebuild, and strengthen this great party of ours”. Prior to the leadership vote, they endorsed a motion to pursue a review of the Leap Manifesto. Given that Alberta’s economy is centred on oil that didn’t exactly sit too well with Alberta’s NDP Premier Rachel Notley & called upon delegates to reject The Leap Manifesto to no avail.
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The party’s constitution stipulated that Mulcair needed a simple majority to stave off a leadership vote, and he had said he would consider a higher threshold of 70%.
“We made mistakes that cost us a victory in October, and for that I take responsibility”, Mulcair said.
Weir attended the convention, and was standing nearly directly behind Thomas Mulcair as he made a speech after the vote was announced. And while it doesn’t call for the wholesale adoption of the document per se, it does call on the party to debate the manifesto on the local level, and to bring back its core tenants at the party’s next policy convention in 2018. Some of that criticism is deserved, but in truth he was in a tough spot – he was an honest, sincere and passionate guy who had the misfortune of following the-late Jack Layton, a leader who had achieved sainthood. We can’t get distracted.
The convention exposed a deep divide within the party as New Democrats struggle to reinvent the NDP after the election debacle. “Yes, I will stay on, I’ve got very strong support in the party”, he says in a radio interview.
He thanked his wife and the delegates, and urged the party to come together around his successor, whomever that turns out to be.
April 10, 2016: Fifty-two per cent of delegates at the NDP convention vote to hold a leadership contest to replace Mulcair; just 48 per cent support his continued leadership.
When his speech came to a close, supporters converged around Mulcair, and he appeared close to tears as he moved into the crowd.
Shannon Phillips, the province’s environment minister, described support for the document as “ungenerous, short-sighted and… a betrayal of the people who voted NDP in this province a year ago”. The result galvanizes the federal NDP, which quickly vaults back into the lead in opinion polls. Report says the NDP, in part due to Mulcair’s balanced budget pledge, represented “cautious change” whereas the Liberals were perceived as “real change” by voters wanting a dramatic break from the Conservative era.
She also compared the party to its peers on the left in the United States and the United Kingdom, offering Labour Party Leader Jereym Corbyn and Democratic Party presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders as positive models.
Mulcair would then join the NDP in 2007, winning a by-election in a Montreal riding and becoming the first New Democrat to win a Quebec seat in a general election in 2008.
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Many New Democrats now find themselves struggling with the question of whether Mulcair can find a way to convey an impassioned message of his own – something many felt he failed to do during the course of the campaign.
