Remembering Ed, one year later
A personal remembrance of Ed Broadbent on the anniversary of his state funeral
My friend Ed Broadbent died on January 11, 2024 — just three months after the publication of Seeking Social Democracy, the quasi memoir he coauthored with myself and our colleagues Jonathan Sas and Frances Abele. Exactly one year ago today, he was laid to rest in the first state funeral ever held in Canada for a politician who was neither a former prime minister nor a leader of the opposition.
I had the tremendous honour of giving one of the eulogies, and in the few minutes I had I spoke not only about the radical vision of equality that animated Ed’s life but also of the remarkable way he was able to bridge the abstract worlds of theory and philosophy with the real world of democracy. Among other things, he was an incredibly rare example of an intellectually-oriented person who was effective in politics and could speak to virtually any person or audience with authenticity and ease.
As leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, he achieved a level of electoral success that had eluded his predecessors for decades — and played a significant role in making Canada’s constitution a more egalitarian document than it otherwise would have been (compelling a reluctant Pierre Trudeau, among other things, to agree to clauses recognizing the rights of women and Indigenous peoples). The 20th century produced many exceptional left wing politicians, and — though he regrettably never achieved his aspiration of leading Canada’s first socialist government — Ed Broadbent deserves to be counted alongside the very best of them.
My own immersion in Ed’s ideas and career began several years before I actually knew him. In the introduction I wrote for Seeking Social Democracy, I recounted having discovered his 80ish page book The Liberal Ripoff: Trudeauism versus the Politics of Equality at a now defunct second hand bookstore in downtown Toronto. I already knew of Ed’s reputation, and by then had seen him speak at least once. But I was bowled over by The Liberal Ripoff (which sold no more than a few thousand copies in the early 1970s and has been basically impossible to find since). It was decades old, published nearly twenty years before I was born, and its vision of socialism leaped off the page like nothing my young mind had ever encountered.
Since high school, I had intuitively identified with the left. But, as a child of the 1990s, it had often seemed marginal, intellectually insecure, and animated mainly by a defensive desire to preserve the past gains of a more heroic and less conservative age. This, however, was something quite different: a message in a bottle from a socialist past that was swaggering, self-confident, and unapologetically radical in its ambitions. Stylistically, The Liberal Ripoff was also like no other book by a politician I’d read: swinging effortlessly from theory and philosophy to the practicalities of taxation or inflation policy and back again. Through its polemical attack on Trudeauism, it articulated the socialist critique of liberalism compellingly and persuasively, and in doing so played a more than negligible role in directing the course of my own writing and thinking since.
It was quite by chance, however, that I came to know Ed Broadbent as I did. We first met in Ottawa in 2014, having been introduced by a mutual friend and media veteran I was then helping with some research. The purpose of the meeting was, in fact, to discuss the book project that would eventually come together nearly a decade later — though work on it soon halted when Ed’s wife (the brilliant Marxist theorist and intellectual Ellen Meiksins Wood) fell ill with the cancer that would eventually end her life. In 2015, I was hired by the Broadbent Institute and so had periodic contact with Ed, occasionally working with him on the likes of speeches and op-eds. Still, the collaboration that might have been hung on my mind for years as a point of permanent regret.
The story of how Seeking Social Democracy improbably came to be is detailed in its introduction, and I won’t recount it here. Needless to say, when the project got going in 2021 Ed took up the work with an energy that was simply incredible for a man in his mid-80s. His memory was extraordinary, and the four of us spoke for hours at a time about everything from his childhood in 1930s Oshawa to the 1979 federal election and the seminar he once took at the London School of Economics taught by Michael Oakeshott. On an intellectual level, these conversations were more exhilarating than even the very best moments of my university days — dizzying excursions into the past that never failed to churn up new recollections or provoke interesting debates.
The intensity of this collaboration — the conversations and research that formed the backbone of Seeking Social Democracy spanned about 18 months; the actual drafting of the manuscript consisted of roughly 6 straight months of more or less daily work — left a profound mark on me, in the best sense. Ed’s voice, his prose style, his favourite turns of phrase, the writers, books, and people that formed him: all of them are now thoroughly etched in my mind.
Without exaggerating the parallels, I was also struck by the things we had in common. I was born in 1989 and he in 1936, but each of us had moved to Toronto for university (in my case from rural Oxford country, in his from an Oshawa whose population numbered in only the tens of thousands), worked at the same student newspaper, and cut our academic teeth in the same political science department (in remembering his university days, in fact, Ed’s formative haunts both on and off campus very often turned out to be the same as my own). Though generations apart, we also shared many of the same intellectual reference points thanks to a common grounding in the socialist tradition. Given how disorienting and dislocating politics often feel in the 21st century, there is something profoundly comforting in that.
In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll have much more to say and write about Ed, his legacy, and the second book I’m happy to announce is now on the way. For now, on the one-year anniversary of his state funeral, I’m thinking with both warmth and sorrow about an extraordinary man I was incredibly fortunate to call a friend.
