The NDP now has two officially-recognized leadership candidates, and one who has garnered lots of support, but is not (yet) official.
The not-yet-official candidate is Yves Engler, whose supporters appreciate his unwavering support of Palestine and his pledge to renew the NDP’s (long-ago-lapsed) commitment to socialism.
The first official candidate was Avi Lewis, who was one of the leaders of the 2015 Leap Manifesto group.
The Leap sought to connect the NDP to environmental, community and Indigenous movements, and define economic and social policy in environmental terms.
The second official aspirant, MP Heather McPherson, declared her candidacy on Sunday, September 28, in her Edmonton home riding. She had former Alberta NDP leader and premier, Rachel Notley, by her side.
McPherson is one of seven NDP MPs. She is the only one of those MPs in the race. To many, she looks like the NDP establishment’s favoured candidate.
An old-school launch before a live audience
Federally, Alberta has not been fertile ground for the NDP.
But McPherson’s urban riding of Edmonton-Strathcona is a notable and significant exception to the rule. Environmentalist Linda Duncan won the riding for the New Democrats in 2008, and it has remained solidly orange since then.
McPherson, who has a background in international development, has represented her riding since 2019.
When she got to Ottawa, the NDP leadership entrusted foreign affairs to McPherson. In that capacity, she can claim a measure of success in moving Liberal government policy.
McPherson long advocated that Canada must recognize Palestinian statehood – which the Carney government just did.
While Avi Lewis chose to get his campaign off the ground with a polished video, where he walks through a gritty big city landscape and talks to the camera Rick-Mercer style, McPherson did an old-school event, live, before an enthusiastic group of supporters.
(Lewis did do a well-attended live event in downtown Toronto, a few days after releasing the video.)
McPherson’s launch included warm-up speeches by Notley and by the leadership candidate’s two teen-age children.
When she spoke, the Edmonton Strathcona MP made a point of saying her own parents were not “terribly political.”
She told her audience she does not “come from a long line of New Democrats.”
For the Alberta-based candidate, evoking her own “just-folks” background was a thinly-disguised attempt to contrast herself with Avi Lewis, who is, famously, scion of a New Democratic dynasty.
Lewis’s father, Stephen Lewis, was Ontario NDP leader from 1970 to 1978, and, later, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. Following that he had an illustrious career fighting AIDs on the world stage.
Avi Lewis’s grandfather, David Lewis, was federal NDP leader from 1971 to 1975. David Lewis was the NDP’s second leader. He succeeded Tommy Douglas.
In his video, 2025 leadership candidate Lewis evokes his grandfather’s battles against corporate greed.
Ironically, Avi Lewis’s true forebears in the party were not his father and grandfather but rather the members of the 1960’s and 1970’s Waffle Movement, whose slogan was: “For an independent, socialist Canada.”
One of the Waffle’s leaders, the late James Laxer, came second to David Lewis at the 1971 leadership convention.
David and Stephen Lewis considered the Waffle to be too-radical-by-half. Worse, they described it as a “party-within-the-party.” Both worked hard, and successfully, to have the Waffle disbanded.
As for Heather McPherson, her father owned a small trucking company, while her mother, she said, “stayed home with us.” McPherson talked about her family’s typical middle-class life – with ski trips and memorable summers at the cottage.
While her parents were not political, McPherson emphasized that they did transmit “prairie values” of sharing, inclusiveness, and fairness to her and her siblings.
“Everyone was welcome to the table in our house,” McPherson said.
She then drew an analogy with the challenge currently facing the NDP.
The party has to become, the Edmonton candidate said, more like her family. It must become more open and welcoming.
“We need to stop pushing people away,” McPherson told her audience. “We must stop shrinking into some sort of purity test. We need to invite people in.”
McPherson was passionate on this point.
“We need to have more people at the table and we must listen to them. The NDP was built by farmers and urban workers coming together, and we need to reconnect with both.”
McPherson talked a lot about party unity, and about the NDP being relevant in all parts of the country.
She said the Liberals are, mostly, an urban party, while the Conservatives are mostly rural. The NDP, she argued, should be the party of all Canadians.
The leadership race, so far, does not emphasize policy
Curiously, neither Lewis nor McPherson have had much to say, so far, about the Mark Carney Liberals government’s lurch to the Right.
McPherson name-checked Alberta United Conservative premier Danielle Smith and federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in her speech. But she did not even mention the current prime minister.
Nor did she have much to say about the looming and threatening figure of the U.S. president and his rapacious regime. Avi Lewis did mention that threat in his video.
Many New Democrats appear to have decided that the overarching issue of last April’s election campaign is no longer relevant. In media interviews, some NDP strategists have said as much.
Instead of dwelling on threats to Canada’s very existence, both Lewis and McPherson make a big point of telling Canadians they care deeply about the economic hardship many are suffering.
They both say that too many Canadians cannot afford decent homes or adequate nutritious food.
So far, the leadership campaigns have not had much to say about alternatives they would favour to current Liberal government policies – although there are some echoes of the Leap Manifesto, tailored to different times, in Lewis’s pitch.
In his video, Lewis made a point, for instance, of proposing a wealth tax. That’s still a radical idea to mainstream Liberals and most economic commentators.
By contrast, in her campaign launch speech, McPherson had, quite literally, not a word to say about which concrete policies she wants the NDP propose to Canadians.
Her emphasis was entirely on preparedness to lead, organization, and connecting with the grass roots.
Some political professionals argue coherent policies do not matter much in this day and age. Politics, they say, is a shallow affair, all about image and impression, not substance.
Maybe they’re right.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has managed to attract a lot of support simply by expressing concern for rank-and-file Canadians without saying much about what he’d do about their hardships.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford owes his success almost entirely to his well-cultivated straight-talking, Everyman persona. He changes his positions so often you could get whiplash trying to figure out where he stands on policy.
But the New Democrats, unlike the other parties, have been, historically, highly policy-driven. Jack Layton used to say he was more interested in proposition than opposition.
The current leadership campaign will be a long one.
The deadline for declaring officially-sanctioned candidates is four months away, on January 31, 2026.
There will be plenty of time for other candidates to emerge, and for the current candidates to present new and creative policy options.
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