Politics encroaches on all aspects of our lives. Powers that be is a column written by External Politics Columnist Maya Tommasi about the ways in which political power — corporate, federal, provincial, Indigenous and municipal — affects the lives of those who call themselves part of the UBC community.
Maya Tommasi (she/her) is a third-year political science student and The Ubyssey’s external politics columnist. She is a trans woman and latine immigrant, and holds a previous degree in psychology with multiple years of research experience. You can find her on Bluesky or reach her by email at m.tommasi@ubyssey.ca.
At the heart of the federal NDP leadership race is a conversation about the party’s values. Should the NDP be seeking electability? To be ‘the conscience of parliament’? Should they veer to the left, or attempt to capture Liberal voters dissatisfied by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s right-wing shift?
The most important question the party is confronting is whether they should "return to their working class and trade unionist roots."
Recently, Interim Leader Don Davies said on a podcast that the NDP needs to be asking whether they have “veered too much from our class-based analysis to identity politics.” In his view, they have.
Davies’ question can be read as framing a choice between the values of urban progressives and those of working class voters. It represents a sentiment held by more people than just him, but it’s a false dichotomy with a number of false assumptions built into it.
In the modern lexicon, “identity politics” is near-impossible to define. It is a label often used to discredit identity-based movements, like Black liberationist movements, feminist movements, Indigenous movements and queer movements. The term implicitly primes one to think about the specific movement they are least sympathetic to. Today, that is often the trans liberation movement.
Critiques of identity politics often come from the right, implying there is a "woke" takeover created by identity-based movements that are somehow oppressive to the everyday person. Though less common, similar critiques are also levied from the left, deeming identity politics a distraction from “real,” class-based politics, as Davies’s comments imply. This critique, in my view, falls short by multiple standards.
What even are these so-called class-based politics? Don Davies is probably not suggesting a return to a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation-style, explicitly anti-capitalist-based political analysis, and even if he were — he isn’t — the critique that traditional Marxist-based politics can be functionally achieved through the rejection of identity politics is misguided and ahistorical, especially in a North American context. The assumption that identity politics doesn’t exist within broader Marxist scholarship ignores Marxist feminist thinkers like Silvia Federici or Alexandra Kollontai, or the prominence of Black Marxism within all North American Marxist struggles, from Malcolm X to Angela Davis and the Black Panther movement. Marxism has a long history of including broader analysis alongside the traditional class-based approach. (That said, even if that was Davies’s suggested shift, it most likely would not take hold given the NDP’s historical base.)
Is there a dichotomy between economic issues and identity-based ones? I don’t think so; most political movements blend economic and social policy. Could the NDP not do so by focusing on reducing economic inequality as well as identity-based discrimination (or identity politics)?
Has the NDP recently spent a lot of time talking about identity politics? Well, that’s hard to say and will end up being an issue that different political interlocutors feel differently about. When we look at recent NDP campaigns, however, their focus has been primarily on issues of economic inequality and not identity. Of the nine priorities it campaigned on in the federal election, only one — “putting reconciliation into action” — was explicitly related to identity. While the NDP talked about taxing the rich and their parliamentary achievements — like the creation of a dental care program — there seemed to be less focus on identity politics.
Despite the party’s actual campaigning strategy, this association of the NDP (and broadly left-of-centre politics) with identity politics seems to come from outside the party. This isn’t happening exclusively with the NDP — there is a noticeable trend where the intentions and positions of a political party are attributed to them from some amorphous, vibes-based politics that exists completely separately from actual party politics. Which is to say, because there is a cultural perception — often seemingly constructed by right-wing figures for political gain — that the left is broadly focused on identity, it sticks.
The NDP can only control its own destiny and not the conversations that independent members of the left have. The identity politics label will not fade because the NDP abdicates on identity politics. Unless the NDP outright opposes or reneges on any identity-based politics, their political opponents will continue to label them as that, regardless of their actual positions. This, to me, seems to be what occurred in recent elections.
Next, we need to ask if there is a conflict between different interest groups which compose the NDP tent, and if somehow even the meagre focus on identity-based issues is sufficient to harm a significant section of the base and jeopardize the party’s electability.
Positioning the interests of trade unions against those of identity-based groups is a common dichotomization. And it’s easy to create when, after all, it seems like the NDP has lost swaths of trade unionist votes to Poilievre’s Conservatives — a significantly more socially conservative movement villainizing trans people, immigrants and broader identity-based movements.
This dichotomy might seem compelling, but it falls apart quite quickly. In general, modern trade unions in Canada are significantly more socially progressive than the NDP itself. In recent history, all the major trade unions have taken stands on the most contentious identity-based issues. The United Steel Workers (USW) union asserts their commitment to expand the union’s commitments to intersectionality and the defence of LGBTQ+ rights on its website. The Public Servants Alliance of Canada (PSAC) and Unifor marched in Vancouver Pride this year. On trans rights specifically — one of the most politically contentious issues — both the BC General Employees Union (BCGEU) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) participated in counterprotests to the transphobic “1 Million March 4 Children.”
CUPE has also weighed in on immigration, offering to help its members with temporary immigration status obtain documentation to keep them in Canada. So has the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which has publicly declared its support for increasing paths for immigration and increasing protections for those in the Temporary Foreign Workers Program. It seems clear that the representatives of the working class, from a unionist perspective, understand politics as more nuanced than the dichotomization of struggle. Trade unionist politics align more closely with a model of collective struggle against marginalization and oppression in all forms, positing working class struggle as part of a broader equalizing push that includes other identity-based rights like those enjoyed based on race, gender and sexual orientation.
You could argue that the leadership of trade unions is not their membership. This is a variation of the thesis that the "average Canadian is concerned about the cost of living, not niche identity politics," which often comes with the insinuation that only elitist progressives and university professors care about identity politics.
This thesis is only partially right. Opinion polls do find Canadians are more concerned with economic issues than identity-based ones, as well as the US trade war — or, at least, this was the case during the election that sent the NDP soul-searching in the aftermath. To me, it seems like a fallacy to assume support for prioritizing economic policy implies disregarding equality rights.
There is also a deep elitism entrenched in calling identity politics elitist. It ignores the lived reality of working class people, many of whom are directly affected by identity-based politics, be it queer people, people of colour, Indigenous people, people with disabilities or women. Many of these people are, in fact, average Canadians. This sentiment also ignores the diversity of political opinion across the economic spectrum; just as there are middle class people of all ideological stripes, the same is true of the working class. The idea that issues of identity politics being high-minded or complex preclude them from being a concern to working class people significantly — and prejudicially — underestimates working class people’s interest or capacity for complex political topics. It paints them as exclusively socially regressive and uninterested in or incapable of nuanced conversation or debate. Somehow, it seems politically appropriate to undermine the intellectual, ideological and political diversity of the working class. We would do well to move past those biases.
To me, it’s clear that identity-based politics and economic-based politics don’t exist in opposition to each other. They have always existed in tandem and continue to do so. Parties seeking egalitarian and emancipatory politics should understand that. They can — and should — prioritize the economic crisis and the material conditions of people without abdicating a debate on so-called identity politics issues.
The NDP should not fail to make a compelling case for protecting vulnerable segments of our population out of fear. Abdicating from those debates hasn’t saved them from being labelled anyway. Engaging in them seriously and positioning identity-based issues alongside broader systems of inequality is not only possible but a good idea. And crucially, doing so doesn’t require abdicating or deprioritizing economic grievances.
This begs the question, why are so many political figures rejecting a nuanced analysis? Is it from a fear that it will alienate certain kinds of voters based on debate complexity? An assumption that large swaths of the population are impermeable when it comes to debates they class "high-minded?" A fear of seeming too ideological? Or just personal distaste for certain issues? Regardless, I suggest we allow complexity in our public debate and reject the inaccurate "workers vs. equality rights" dichotomization. We can define issues ourselves instead of accepting an anti-intellectual, conservative framing of them.
This is an opinion essay, and a part of a regular column. It reflects the columnist's views and does not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
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