This brings us to the NDP, the only mass labour-based political party in North America.

this has always been a myth, at best.

the ndp were a labour-based party for maybe five years in the 80s, or something; it's more accurate to argue that broadbent inherited a very different type of party and tried to turn it into a labour party, but then the fuckers brought in nafta and pulled the rug out from under him.

the ndp were actually rooted in a christian religious movement, not in a labour movement. they come not from factories and cities, but from farms and rural regions; it's more puritan in origin, in truth, than it is derived from sinclair or dickens. these people were not fighting for the rights of wage workers to organize into industrial unions, but for the rights of farmers to control and manipulate the market. they didn't pass minimum wage laws, or regulations to improve working conditions and these sorts of things, so much as they fought to prevent anarchy in the production of corn, to set fixed prices for grain and things of the sort that are strictly important to rural farmers.

they were a party of the middle class, not of the proletariat, and they reflected the values of the middle class, in their embrace of the centrality of religion and the bigotry that follows from religion.

the healthcare system they brought in came from their history managing grain production and was really a form of supply management that was closer to obamacare than the single payer system that the liberals preferred, and brought in by modeling the system after the nhs; it was about leveraging insurance companies by pooling resources. tommy douglas was important in bringing this in, but he didn't design it and he never had the support to do it by himself. the liberals were always the senior partner, writer and organizer of the existing healthcare system, not douglas or the ndp, and for better or worse - douglas would not have supported single-payer on his own, but the liberals thought pharmacare was a step too far in distorting the market.

douglas, a clear social conservative, was eventually pushed out as old and out of touch with the boomers, who were....the boomers, i.e. not very socially conservative. it was only at this point that the ndp starts to look more like a workers party, and it was more successful for a short period, but then they brought in nafta...

so, let's stop pretending the ndp were ever a worker's party. they weren't, really. they were really a utopian christian party run by propertied farmers that were trying to avoid getting swallowed and eaten by another depression, and who applied some of the supply management techniques they were using to health care - an innovative solution that eventually transcended their other policies, and came to define them almost in total, despite being just a minimal example of a larger approach to farming, rather than to  proletariat workmanship.