Stand Up for Sarah Jama

by Tom Baker, President, Hamilton Centre ONDP Constituency Association

Over the past two years I have been part of a grassroots activist and labour campaign in the Hamilton Centre Ontario New Democratic Party Riding Association that led to a young, disabled, Black, social justice fighter, Sarah Jama, winning the nomination to be the ONDP candidate in November 2022.  Close to 600 new members joined the party at that time: defenders of Palestinian human rights, trade union leaders and militants, anti-war activists, LGBTQI+ folks, environmentalists, antipoverty activists, and more.  This massive grassroots mobilization led to Sarah’s overwhelming victory as the new MPP for Hamilton Centre in the March 2023 provincial by-election, attracting nearly 10,000 votes.

She was an enthusiastic new addition to a rather moribund ONDP caucus. She brought with her new methods of resistance against a stacked system.  From the first day she rolled into Queen’s Park, she sought to give a voice to the broad working class and oppressed communities. She openly criticized “the political system that continues to oppress, deflect and ignore the needs of people”.  Sarah represents a new kind of politics that is rooted in truth, and fighting the power of those who have called the shots for so long. She is a brilliant organizer who listens to people’s ideas and works with them to push back and win.

The party leadership would not tolerate this independent-thinking young radical. Tensions mounted.  In October 2023 when the Palestinian resistance surged, Sarah stood alone in the Legislature denouncing Israeli apartheid, the occupation of Palestinian lands, and calling for a ceasefire.  Within a few days, this led to her being expelled from her own NDP caucus of MPPs, without any appeal process and while being censured by the Ford government, and thus blocked from speaking in the legislature. Despite a motion passed by the ONDP Provincial Council to fight the censure, the ban remains in place and Hamilton Centre constituents are without a voice in the Legislature.

The party brass and Zionist lobbyists like CIJA are correct to fear Sarah’s example. She and her mobilized supporters are a beacon of hope for those in struggle for basic rights and survival.  Unlike Bernie Saunders, she doesn’t drag social justice warriors back into dead-end, neo-liberal fantasies. She strives to unite the oppressed on the basis of concrete demands and to challenge a genocidal and exploitative system.

She denounces this system that continues to oppress, to deflect, and to ignore the needs of people. She sees no contradiction between fighting for meaningful reforms inside Queen’s Park and mobilizing in mass action.

After her expulsion from the ONDP Caucus, hundreds of new members and disappointed NDP veterans resigned across the province.  Activity levels and local fund raising crashed. A motion to reinstate Sarah Jama received the support of 33 per cent of the party’s Provincial Council in November 2023.

While hoping again to be part of her ONDP Caucus, Sarah realized this might be a long fight and that she should not desert her constituents.  Sarah and her followers created an Independent Constituency Association that has built a strong financial base, with an active membership that is rooted in the community.  It carries out active year-round canvassing. At a recent large Independent Association nomination meeting, endorsers included federal NDP MPs, local trade union leaders and a broad range of community leaders and elected municipal officials.

It seems that the majority of Hamilton Centre NDP activists, labour and community leaders want to see Sarah re-elected, if not as an ONDP candidate, then as an Independent.   If necessary, the defense of Sarah Jama will be taken to the January ONDP Convention.  Hamilton Centre will stay ‘orange’ only by having MPP Sarah Jama as the ONDP candidate. Failure of the party to rectify the damage done may lead to significant defeats in the next provincial election.

Her supporters hope that a democratic process of ONDP candidate selection will be respected by the leadership.  If the party leadership remains intransigent and imposes an NDP candidate on the riding to run against MPP Sarah Jama, the left vote would be split, most likely resulting in the election of a Conservative or Liberal in Hamilton Centre along with the loss of several other NDP strongholds.

If party leaders fail to reverse their undemocratic course, we can expect most NDPers, trade unionists and community activists to focus their efforts on re-electing Sarah as the leader of the Hamilton Centre Independent Constituency Association.

A successful campaign will demonstrate that to survive, the NDP must turn sharply to the left to become a real union-based, working class party. The fight to build a new NDP that takes on the capitalists cannot be restricted to work inside the party. It requires a new consistently militant trade union leadership that educates, empowers and mobilizes its members to transform society and unite with all the oppressed and exploited to storm the halls of political power.

Sarah Jama’s campaign can serve as a laboratory to test new ways of organizing working people and other oppressed sectors in a struggle for political power.  Her success demonstrates the value of actually listening to those in struggle, providing direct support to them, creating independent working class political institutions that will fight the bosses, the big landlords’ parties, and win government.  All socialists should embrace and support Sarah’s re-election campaign.   

This is a pivot point that prompts us to re-examine what independent working class political action means today in Canada.   Is the NDP serving the purposes and meeting the needs of working people and farmers who established the NDP in 1961. Given the numerous failed attempts to reform the NDP, what is a winning strategy? Clearly the shift to the right within social democracy over the past century-plus has not been successful in taking power from the exploiting class. The capitalists and their two major parties are not able or willing to offer reforms, support human rights, fight for peace or even make life liveable.

We need more than a handful of standout politicians or better sound bites and social media hits.  We’re facing a poly-crisis:  war, genocide, climate disaster, crumbling infrastructure, poverty, and the rise of Bonapartist leaders with a tolerance for neo-fascism. The answer cannot be more of the political status quo. We need ultimately to reshape the workers’ movement.

Opinion polls show that NDP support is stagnant and membership that is shrinking as its base evaporates and potential new supporters are repelled. Young people are growing up in an increasingly radicalized environment; more trade unionists are seeing that the old methods don’t work anymore.

Our riding association has been treated as an interloper by the very party we were rallying around.  This is similar to the situation in British Columbia where the NDP establishment was so suspicious of the grassroots support for Anjali Appadurai’s leadership bid that they rejected new NDP supporters rather than welcome them in and risk their leader’s shot at becoming BC premier.

The “moderate progressives” are imbued with a lack of confidence and even disdain for the workers they claim to lead. They are ignorant of, or fear the independently mobilized power of the working class fighting for its needs. They are overawed with respect for the bourgeois state and its institutions, and for the legal, orderly, parliamentary path. They see progress not via independent working class mobilization, but through class collaboration – occurring in the electoral arena, through capture of the government and relying on the capitalist state to improve the lot of workers. From this notion flows their reformist parliamentary dogma.

The structure and organization of the NDP are social democratic to the core. The NDP is an all-inclusive party, whose membership has an extremely low level of political activity. Its membership bodies are designed not to intervene in the class struggle or to determine party policy, but as parts of a vote-getting apparatus. The superficially democratic structure of the NDP masks a bureaucratic reality: the party leadership frees itself from membership control; the parliamentary caucus establishes its independence from the party convention; when the NDP is in office, the NDP ministries establish their independence of any democratic party control.

The reformist program of the NDP stands in constant contradiction to the fundamental needs of the class, which demand mass anti-capitalist action, guided by a class struggle perspective and a socialist program, aimed not at the reform of capitalism, but at its overthrow.

At the same time we need to advocate for an Ontario NDP government while criticizing its inadequate program and its misleadership. We call on the leaders of the working class to take the power and carry out measures in the interests of the working class. We support any measures they take in this direction. But when they betray the working class, we oppose that betrayal.

Out of battles like the one to defend MPP Sarah Jama, we see the emergence of a new vanguard of militants who understand that political structures that support the capitalist system itself must be replaced by a genuine workers party, a revolutionary workers’ party.