EDITORIAL NDP may lose labor’s support

It is interesting to watch the NDP as it drifts away from labor for its sole power base and tries to appeal to more voters through populist issues such as those dealing with the environment. With the NDP already forming the government in Ontario, the country’s richest province, there is a growing sense that it will win elections this year in both Saskatchewan and British Columbia and that power at the federal level is within its grasp.

But to seize that opportunity, the NDP cannot continue to rely solely on its appeal to labor. To win at the federal level, the NDP has to broaden its appeal. With the environment, it has latched onto an issue that neither of the other two major parties have been able to grasp. The Conservatives’ last best effort came under the auspices of Lucien Bouchard, and what a disaster that turned out to be. The Liberals, on the other hand, under new leader Jean Chretien have simply failed to surface with a coherent policy position on any issue. The environment, the most populist issue of the day, has been handed to the NDP by default.

As the NDP moves to capitalize on its good fortune, however, some ironic twists are becoming evident. The crisis currently being suffered by Elliot Lake is an example.

A strong element in the Ontario NDP’s rise to power was its environmental position and that included its anti-nuclear policy. That gained enough votes in Toronto to put the NDP into power, regardless of how impractical a position it is.

Once in power, the anti-nuclear policy became fuzzy. For example, the NDP decided not to halt construction of the Darlington nuclear power plant as it had earlier vowed to do.

Elliot Lake, the source of Ontario Hydro’s nuclear fuel for decades, has not been able to supply uranium to the government agency at competitive prices for some time. In 1992, the current pricing arrangement between the utility and Denison Mines, which mines its uranium at Elliot Lake, come up for renewal and Ontario Hydro has the opportunity get a better deal for the fuel it needs. If the NDP wants to fulfil its obligations as a labor party, it must feel a duty to continue paying inflated prices for uranium from Elliot Lake as a means of investing in Ontario, saving jobs and providing a secure supply for the provincial utility.

But the NDP is now the keeper of the Ontario taxpayers’ purse. It cannot justify paying five times the market price for its uranium. A socialist party might have difficulty justifying a decision based on market forces, but taxpayers are increasingly demanding that politicians be more frugal.

Backing up the NDP’s unwillingness to subsidize Elliot Lake mines any further is its anti-nuclear bias. When environmental populism combines with anti-nuclear hysteria, the question of whether the people of Ontario are getting fair value is conveniently shuffled into the background.

Ironically, the rush to make political decisions based on how well they fit in with environmental opportunism is starting to make organized labor — the NDP’s traditional power base — a bit uneasy. The United Steelworkers of America haven’t supported the NDP for the past 30 years to watch it shut down mines where its members earn their livelihood.

The same phenomenon is happening in British Columbia where an NDP government looks more certain as Premier William Vander Zalm slips deeper and deeper into the Fantasy Gardens quagmire. It is labor that is likely to provide the greatest counterbalance to environmentalists’ and preservationists more unreasonable demands.

No one can argue against the need to treat environmental issues in a responsible manner, but unreasonable environmental demands that prevent development and cost jobs are not likely to be tolerated by those who want to be seen on the side of the working people.