Here's what made Ed Broadbent truly stand out

He was the prime minister we never had, though we surely had the chance. Ed Broadbent, who led Canada’s New Democrats for 14 years — but never the country — died last week at 87. He left his mark as an NDP leader and a thought leader. But what made Broadbent truly stand out was as much about personality as policy or party.

This unabashed social democrat exuded an ineffable grace and sophistication, a posh professor in tailored suits with a fondness for pipes and cigars, Bach and books, while fighting the good fight for the working class. Perhaps he embodied the quintessential Canadian campus lefty — progressive, professorial, purposeful — a worthy adversary facing off against prime ministers Pierre Trudeau, John Turner and Brian Mulroney.

Reading the accolades and obituaries, I looked back to see what I’d written about Broadbent in his political prime. As a young reporter on Parliament Hill, riding along on his chartered DC 9 campaign plane, I’d wondered if he might keep gaining altitude in the polls and land in the prime minister’s office on voting day.

Ahead of the historic free trade election of 1988, Broadbent had emerged as the most popular leader by far, with the NDP on a roll at 41 per cent support in one survey, compared to 35 per cent for the Liberals and 23 per cent for the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals were tired, the Tories tarnished and Broadbent’s NDP trusted.

“This shows a real shift in attitudes away from seeing the NDP as a protest party,” he told me at the time. “We’re the new boy in town … we have the new prominence, we’re the new presence.” But it didn’t last. In the final election day poll that counted, Broadbent’s ambition to transform both his party and his country remained unfulfilled.

While he won a record 43 seats, his New Democrats were shut out of the Quebec (where he’d long plotted a breakthrough) and the Atlantic Provinces. The NDP ended up with a mere 20 per cent of the popular vote, a single percentage point above its 19 per cent showing in 1984. The party’s slogan had been, “This time, Ed Broadbent and the New Democrats.” It was neither, and he knew it.

“Now I’m going to listen to Mozart and Bach and Billie Holiday, and I’d like to read a novel like ordinary people,” he mused. Within a year he was gone but not forgotten. He set up the Broadbent Institute that endures to this day, a progressive think tank inspired by the leader who had carried on the intellectual and ideological legacy of his NDP predecessors, David Lewis and Tommy Douglas.

Economic nationalism had been the building block of Broadbent’s early political career. Yet free trade became his electoral undoing in the end. The more the 1988 campaign turned on free trade, the more voters turned against Broadbent’s New Democrats, whom Canadians still distrusted on economic matters.

That’s politics. Growing up in Oshawa in the shadow of GM, the giant U.S. carmaker, Broadbent had always believed in repatriating economic control to Canada. A reluctant warrior, he had flirted at first with the party’s far left Waffle movement. But after winning the leadership in 1975, he privately questioned the need for widespread economic interventionism and foreign isolationism.

Broadbent was never quite able to bring New Democrats along, as the party faithful kept clinging to traditional policy orthodoxy calling for nationalization (taking over a bank, Bell and the CPR) and nationalism (withdrawing from NATO and Norad). By the late 1980s, with the party rising in the polls and Broadbent suddenly a contender, New Democrats were on the defensive over their defence policies and economic ambitions.

It would take years for the party to adapt to changing economic times. Yet Broadbent persevered, describing himself to me as “a happy warrior by disposition” thanks to “the genes I inherited.” In truth, Broadbent’s childhood had been fraught. The son of an alcoholic gambler, he disliked confrontation and took refuge in intellectual reflection and gentle persuasion.

He liked to tell the story of working in an Oshawa clothing store where the sales staff relegated the ugliest ties to a rack of leftovers and competed to see who could off load them on customers. Broadbent won the contest every time, endowed with a deceptive ability to seal the deal. But Broadbent overreached when he pitched his ultimate dream of eliminating the Liberals by transforming Canada into a two party system.

“It would be healthy for Canada to evolve … with one party that’s left of centre … like us … and a conservative party,” he mused in the 1988 campaign. “I would like to see it that way.” He quickly confided to his campaign aides that he’d blundered. Sure enough, Liberals rallied to the base, panicked by the idea of political extinction, relegating the NDP to third place once again..