Mixing of Religion and Politics: Why I quit Canada's left wing NDP to Support Bob Rae

For more than a dozen years, I have sported a CCF-NDP* license plate on my Benz with pride and an in-your-face bravado. I had become accustomed to the reactions of passers-by and motorists - the middle finger far outnumbering the thumbs up.

But this past Canada Day, I quit the NDP after nearly 17 years - a long journey that has taken me from the trenches of electioneering, to membership on the provincial executive and federal council of the party, work as a political staffer in former premier Bob Rae’s government, and an NDP candidate in the 1995 provincial elections.

Friends and well-wishers called to express their shock, delight, dismay and bewilderment. Why would I walk away from North America's only party of the Left?

My decision was neither simple nor a rejection of social democratic principles. The seeds were planted a year ago when some well-meaning NDPers in the Ottawa area, scared by the rise of religious right in the U.S. and Canada - and what that would mean for the NDP's political fortunes - floated the idea of a faith and social justice committee to attract religious voters. Now, it appears theNDP's religion caucus is all set to be formalized at the party's forthcoming convention in Quebec City.

Religion has a huge role to play in our society. Our imams, rabbis, pundits and pastors perform a crucial and significant function in providing and taking care of the religious and spiritual needs of their congregations.

But it seems that, at this critical juncture in our history, when competing religion-based ideologies are forcing their way into the political mainstream and trying to re-establish themselves as the primary purveyors of good citizenship, the NDP is opening the way for fundamentalists to find a new home inside one of Canada's political parties.

One would have expected that many in the Left would have no problem recognizing that Bush and Bin Laden are flip sides of the same coin. But instead of confronting the misuse of faith and exposing the immorality of invoking God on in a political dispute, New Democrats don't have the stomach to stand up to those who would reduce our citizenship to one based on race or religion.

I strongly feel that New Democrats, in accepting the parameters set by the religious right, have merely validated the right's divisive agenda. Instead of a party with a focus, the NDP is fast becoming a myriad of competing factions adrift and rudderless with no vision for this country or how to make it better.

One of my first acts upon landing in Montreal in November 1987 was to search through the Yellow Pages for a list of Canadian political parties. I had just arrived in Canada after suffocating for 10 years in the political barren Saudi Arabia. Earlier, in my native Pakistan, I had been imprisoned twice as a student leader, charged with sedition by authorities and later expelled from my job as a TV journalist after yet another military coup.

Montreal on November 6, 1987 was the first day of the rest of my life - I had no intention then of ever again living one more moment with the anxiety of religious fascists determining the political agenda. And I have no intention of doing it now.

In my view, the Left in Canada, and to a certain degree in the UK has, in the words of author Kenan Malik, "shamefully swapped secular universalism for ethnic particularism."

A week before my decision to tear up my NDP card, I interviewed Liberal leadership hopeful Bob Rae for my CTS-TV Saturday night show, The Muslim Chronicle. He talked about Afghanistan, the Middle East, the trade union movement and the NDP with ease and comfort. And that working as George Bush's junior partner is not what Canadians want.
Later, on Monday, July 3, I read Rae's op-ed piece in the Toronto Star. One section caught my eye. Rae wrote "investing in and promoting the values of common citizenship in our schools and communities... is absolutely essential. We can't content ourselves with merely repeating old formulas when isolated pockets of our citizens somehow feel justified in plotting terror against fellow Canadians."

Here was a politician, not mincing his words, and challenging the status quo around multiculturalism that has contributed to the building of sometimes, prosperous ghettos and 21st century tribes in Canada.

In the early 90s, i had the opportunity to work as political staff at the premier's office. In that tumultuous era of "Rae Days"** I had come to respect bob Rae as a man of compassion, integrity, reason and above all, as an intellectual, for whom Canada mattered more than political partisanship. Today, i see him as a statesman, who towers above the many politicians i have come to respect.

That morning, after reading his op-ed, I bicycled to Rae's campaign office on Queen Street and signed up as a member of the Liberal Party with the hope that I can in some small way help chart a future in which we celebrate what is common among us rather than institutionalize what divides us.

*The CCF and the NDP are the acronyms of Canada’s left of centre political parties
**“Rae Days” was the name given to 12 days of unpaid leave government employees took druing the 1990s recession to cut costs and save the jobs of 20,000 civil servants

This article was first published in Toronto’s NOW Magazine on July 20, 2006

Tarek Fatah is host of the weekly Saturday Night TV show, The Muslim Chronicle, now in it tenth year. Born in Pakistan, Tarek was a student leader during the tumultuous days of the late 60s, twice being imprisoned by successive military governments. He started his career as a journalist in 1970 as a reporter with the Karachi SUN and then went on to be an investigative reporter with Pakistan Television until 1977, when another military coup forced him out of the country.

Tarek and his family have called Canada home since 1987 where he has been active in poltics with the left wing NDP, having run for provincial parliament and having served on the staff of the Premier of Ontario from 1991-95 and later with the Leader of the NDP from 1996-1999.

He is a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and has been published in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, Canada's National Post and TIME Magazine. Tarek is married to his university sweetheart for 32 years and they have two daughters; Natasha and Nazia.

The title of this column--Thaa!--literally means "Smack" in Urdu and Punjabi. It was the headline in a major newspaper in Lahore when the fundamentalists were wiped out in the 1970 elections (they won 4 seats out of 301).