Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Five, part two.

Statistics and Politics: Or Why I Left the N.D.P. by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.




     I spent about 25 years in the New Democratic Party of British Columbia. I was just one of tens of thousands of anonymous envelope stuffers, envelope licker and telephone canvassers. (The first two tasks are now done by machines.) In the 1990's I finally realized how the percentages I've mentioned remain fixed  for long periods of time. So no matter how hard I and other low ranked canvassers worked or toiled for the N.D.P., the N.D.P. would rarely win an election. Still ,the B.C. N.D.P. did win some elections in 1972 and afterwards. Of course they won no federal elections.
   In fact in t he early 1990's the really right wing Reform Party came on the scene and decimated the federal N.D.P. and the Conservative party. So Canadian politics did change as did the voting percentages for the various political parties. Yet for me this was a bad change since the rise of the Reform Party just swung Canadian politics even further to the right.
     "This politics is so boring,"  a woman said who went to an N.D.P. convention in the mid-1970's. About 20 years later I came around to her way of thinking and left the N.D.P. By this time the various voting percentages had become fixed in my mind. Also I was now in mid-fifties and realized that I had left in my life only 25 years or so. I didn't want to spend the last third of my life worrying  about or working in the political scene. Lastly, with greater self-understanding I also grasped that I had caused many problems in my journey through the N.D.P. I talked too much, asked too many questions and panicked on key occasions.
    "It's time to leave the political scene," I told myself in about 1995. Six months or so later I had left not only the N.D.P. but also the anti-poverty work I had been in and my involvement in the housing co-op I live in. "You left the N.D.P.," one N.D.P.'er commented when he saw me in the street in 1997. "It's not for me anymore," I replied. "I've left politics and it's all good."
    Statistics, advancing age and self understanding pushed me out of  politics. Yet statistics played the biggest role. They gave me the way to understanding Canadian and B.C. politics. I shall always be grateful to them.