NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY

(NDP) French Nouveau Parti Dmocratique Canadian political party with a democratic socialist position, favouring a mixed public-private economy, broadened social benefits, and an internationalist foreign policy. The party grew out of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), founded in 1933 as Canada's first political party representing small farmers and workers. By the time the CCF came to power in Saskatchewan in 1944, it had a national organization, ran candidates in all sections of the country, and polled an appreciable popular vote; but it was never large enough to become the official opposition, nor did it hold the balance of power between the two major parties, the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. In 1956 most of Canada's labour groups united in the Canadian Labour Congress, which in August 1961 formed the New Democratic Party, incorporating the CCF but welding a stronger working arrangement with organized labour. (The provincial party in Saskatchewan retained the CCF name until 1967.) The NDP's longtime base has been among the farmers of Manitoba and Saskatchewan and the urban workers of British Columbia and Ontario. It was able to form governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia intermittently from the 1940s to the 1990s, in the Yukon Territory from the 1980s, and in Ontario, Canada's largest and richest province, in the 1990s.