Running On Empty, Vol. 3: Make The Next NDP Leader Earn This

The Need For A Proper Fight

Justin Trudeau became leader of the Liberal Party 22 months after the disastrous 2011 election, and went on to form a majority government at the next election. Marit Stiles was crowned a few months after Andrea Horwath stepped back from politics and lost both seats and votes.

These two facts are relevant to the decision the NDP made this week for a relatively short leadership election, which will wrap up in March of 2026. I must confess I simply don’t get the point of going that quickly, especially given the financial timebomb that Fred DeLorey outlined earlier this week for the party. But more than anything, the NDP needs to avoid the kind of toxic niceness that often comes in these races.

The Ontario and BC NDPs didn’t even bother with contests, anointing Stiles and Eby leaders by carefully killing off credible challengers (and in BC, disqualifying the outsider). The NDP’s current malaise is a direct result of the failure of them to answer their core crisis - say it with me now, them being two parties stuck together by First Past The Post - and therefore ending up in a No Man’s Land. Any leadership race has to be a sharp divide over the four - or really three - paths forward for them.

The first path would be what you might call Continuity Jagmeet-ism, or Jagmeet-ism without Jagmeet. There will presumably be a constituency for the idea the NDP’s flaws were solely Singh’s fault, or the fault of the Confidence And Supply Agreement, but that Singh did a good job and his general positioning was good. All of that said, there doesn’t really seem to be a candidate for this, at least in who’s likely running so far, and I think now that Singh’s gone people are being far more honest about him than they were before, leaving three paths.

Path one is a working class revival - a prioritization on seats like Skeena and Timmins and working class communities across the country. It’s the Charlie Angus tendency, or the Rachel Blaney one if she can be persuaded to run, and it’s one that at least has a real target seat list. Remember, the NDP are only within 20% of 3 Liberal MPs, and 10% in 2, so pivoting to the CPC gains in Windsor and London and BC makes much more sense, and makes the CPC governing harder.

Path two is a more internationalist party, one that properly views itself in conversation and solidarity with the global dispossessed, one that pitches their domestic political priorities as part of the same struggle for dignity and a fair go for all as the fight to end Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. I’m skeptical of this, but given one of the NDP’s goals has to be gaining vote share and therefore more rebates, getting above 10% in safe Liberal seats by appealing to the morality of the average Liberal voter.

The third option is a more stridently left party, leaning into the Leap Manifesto and activating on climate change as the biggest priority and attacking Carney as an austerity minded ultra Conservative. It’s a bad idea but Avi Lewis should run and the party should not treat it with kid gloves.

Heather MacPherson is trying to avoid being seen as Continuity Jagmeet, and is trying to set herself up as a moderate follower of the second path, but this race should be - needs to be - messy. Leah Gazan should run and make the full throated case for solidarity, making the moral case that we cannot claim to be about learning from our treatment of Indigenous Peoples if we tolerate and enable Israeli atrocities and arguing passionately for a real, credible climate strategy that doesn’t merely mean condemning the developing world to the consequences of rich, established countries’ emissions. Avi Lewis should make the case for significant renationalization and shutting off the oil sands or whatever dumbass nonsense he’s spouting these days. (If you can’t tell, I fucking despise Lewis.) Angus or Blaney or someone from the NDP’s more culturally conservative band of targets should run and talk about returning the NDP to a party of class solidarity and letting them be a big tent party on social values. Everyone should run.

The reason Marit Stiles never had any internal authority when she booted Sarah Jama was she never won a contest. She was acting from a position of weakness because there was no belief that the leader, when faced with a tough decision, had the moral right to make it, because she had no mandate from the membership. Allowing a coronation, or one in all but name where MacPherson gets kid glove treatment and the race protects her, will mean that when she has to make similarly hard calls she also has none.

The next NDP leader will have to handle three jobs simultaneously - Parliamentary strategy in a Hung Parliament, fundraising to pay off the debt, and rebuilding the party’s institutional strength. That's going to require a lot of decisions - the nature and utility of the union relationships, whether and when to let the BQ or CPC bail out the Liberals on the floor, who to hire and arguably more importantly fire, and a thousand other things that we don’t even know yet, as events transpire and force decisions.

The NDP need to ensure that whoever wins this race has the authority to make those decisions and not be professionally second guessed at every turn by the rest of the party. They need to be given the mandate that only victory in a real leadership race can give them. The NDP must ensure that this race is a contest, not because it’s fun for me to write about but because they need it. A tougher contest will also eat up airtime that a bunch of people mildly agreeing doesn’t, because as much as this arguably shouldn’t be true you’ll just get more airtime in Cochrane and Vassy if it’s more than just telling each other how great they are.

The NDP needs to ensure that this leadership race is a fight. They need a sharp contrast, and candidates willing to do more than go along to get along. If they do, the winner will come out with the authority to save the party. If they don’t … boy, I don’t know.