The Waffle - Legacy

Legacy

The Waffle also had its own leftist wing the Red Circle, which was composed of Marxists and Trotskyists, and these groups became the inheritors of what was left of the Waffle. They relaunched themselves as the Independent Socialists in 1975, and then one year later, renamed the organization the International Socialists. Other key participants, grouped around Leo Panitch, formed an Ottawa based group called the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action.

The Waffle was also the progenitor of the NDP Socialist Caucus and the New Politics Initiative (NPI). The NPI were seen as a major force in the federal NDP during the period after the 2000 federal election. Like the Waffle, they too wanted the party to move left, and were aiming to do this by closing down the NDP and forming a new party. The NPI's attempts at reforming the party were crushed, similar to the Waffle, at the 2001 Winnipeg convention. However, it seems that the party did learn a lesson from how it dealt with the Waffle, because there was not the kind of acrimony that occurred after the 1971 federal leadership convention. Unlike the Waffle, the NPI was not seen as a party within the party, and the establishment did not try to disband it. Many of the NPI supporters ended up in Jack Layton's 2003 leadership campaign, though they were outnumbered by the forces that opposed the NPI, like NDProgress, which was a moderate reform group comparable to the Waffle's old foe: NDPNow. After he won the leadership, Layton was able to unite the many factions within party, and that facilitated the NPI choosing to dissolve itself in 2004, again without any of the same bitterness that infused the Waffle's dissolution.

The Waffle can be seen as the NDP's first reform movement, that ultimately did produce changes, such as: gender equality in its governance and the selection of federal candidates for the House of Commons. Although many of these changes occurred after the Waffle was ejected from the NDP, it can lay claim to proposing and attempting to get these policies entrenched in the party's internal policies. Many of its leaders eventually came back into the party and held important positions within it, which also shaped many of the NDP's policies in the 1980s through to the early 21st century.