Canada looks leftward.

Canada Looks Leftward

IT'S TIME to think of Canada again. That great land mass which stands between the U.S. and the USSR once again enters day-to-day American thinking as TV weather forecasters report on frigid air masses heading south.

Since the end of the War of 1812, those seasonal blasts have been the only big chills out of Canada. But a power vacuum in Ottawa could trigger something more sustained--and more dangerous. For the first time in Canadian history, the fall of a major federal party from strength to marginality has moved a minority hard-left party to the verge of power.

Although Canadians have experimented with other parties at the provincial level, they have stuck with either the Liberals or the Tories as the ruling party at the national level. The socialist party, called the New Democratic Party, has nevertheless been influential in pushing other major parties to the left, enjoying ideological purity because it has never been taken seriously in a federal election.

No more.

For months, the NDP, led by the genial, attractive Ed Broadbent, has been leading in the polls. What was once dismissed by commentators as a psephological aberration is consistently affirmed: if an election were held today, the NDP would achieve at least minority ruling status, ahead of the fading Liberals, with the Tories running a distant last.

That would not just be bad news for Canada: it would be a major blow to the interests of free people everywhere. As moderate as Mr. Broadbent strives to appear, he leads a doctrinaire left-wing party whose foreign policy is more extreme than that of any major European socialist party. Among other firm articles of its faith are pledges to pull Canada out of both NATO and NORAD. So intense is the party's anti-Americanism --a stance that appeals to many Canadians' sense of jealousy, fueled by their country's lack of influence in international affairs--that it swears to abrogate any free-trade deal with the U.S. that the Tories negotiate.

Canadian willingness to embrace the North American equivalent of the left wing of the British Labour Party doesn't come out of economic despair: during the Tories' three years in office, Canada has had the fastest economic growth of any OECD nation. The NDP's popularity comes from disillusionment with Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who has been consistent only in projecting an image of arrogance, cronyism, and sleaze. His government's many positive accomplishments are ignored, and his many competent cabinet ministers struggle for national respect. Nor have the Liberals been able to capitalize on the anti-Mulroney tide. Their leader, John Turner, failed to sell himself in the party's natural stronghold, Quebec, and therefore has not achieved the kind of strength in the national polls that would make him the natural beneficiary of Mulroney's collapse.

Now, Mulroney doesn't need to call an election until 1989, which may give traditional Canadian common sense a chance to reassert itself. And, even based on today's polling lead, Broadbent would only win a minority government position, not enough to pull Canada out of the Alliance. But that is cold comfort: his veteran parliamentarians --who would be frontbenechers in an NDP government--are such that the portfolios of Defense and External Affairs would go to Canadian equivalents of Ron Delums and Jane Fonda.

Meanwhile, across the Pole . . .