Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 16 - Twenty Five Years in the N.D.P.

    25 Years in the N.D.P. - Part One


     A 29 year old man wandered into a church basement in Vancouver's West End one week night in the fall of 1971. This short stocky young man was going to his first New Democratic Party meeting. Yet it didn't turn out as he thought it would.
    A s soon as he sat down on one of the many wooden chairs arrange in rows, a 20ish woman came towards him. "What do you think of our new leader?" she asked him right away. "I think Dave Barrett is doing a good job," Edward 'Ted' Jasper replied. "He's getting out to the burbs , into the interior and on the Island to send out an N.D.P. message. I like him.
     "I don't think he's doing much at all," the woman said. Suddenly an older man came forward. "This man Barrett shouldn't be leading our party at all," he just about shouted. "He didn't win the leader's role in an open contest." Jasper was amazed. Is this how N.D.P. members talk about their leader, he wondered. "You people are out of it," he said. "I could be a reporter for a local paper and tomorrow the paper would have a headline on its front page saying something like 'Disunity plagues the N.D.P.'"
   The two dissenters faded into the background when Dave Barrett showed up. Along with him came the now retired B.C. Lions football player and N.D.P. candidate Emery Barnes. Ted Jasper could never recall what either of these two politicians said. Yet when he left the N.D.P. 25 years later he remembered the two dissenters who didn't like Barrett. Somehow, he thought that exchange he had with them, typified the B.C. N.D.P.
     Edward Jasper had never been in a political party before. He joined the N.D.P. because a friend of his, who was active in the party asked him to join. Then he heard Dave Barrett speak a few months later at a meeting in downtown Vancouver. Barrett was a great orator and his speech turned Jasper on. That speech convinced him to take part in the next election campaign of 1972. Yet this was quite a stretch for a man who a few years before, used to go around McGill University where he went to school, saying "I'm apolitical. I don't care about politics."
    After he left the N.D.P. Jasper realized that the should have stayed away from the political scene. He got too involved in the N.D.P. he realized and he also thought that he didn't have the right personality for politics. "Politics bought out the worst side of my character," Jasper told someone after he left the political scene. "But that was my fault. It was not the fault of politics."