Shortly before the first NDP leadership debate started, in Montreal on Thursday November 27, the federal Canadian Identity & Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault resigned from cabinet.
Guilbeault could not stomach Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal, announced that day, with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, which could see a revival of the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Such a pipeline would run through environmentally sensitive territories in British Columbia. B.C. coastal First Nations have long opposed any project of the sort.
In losing Guilbeault, Carney also loses his Quebec lieutenant.
Can the NDP seize the day?
Some politics watchers have noted that Carney’s deal with Alberta – achieved without B.C. government or First Nation participation, coupled with a high-profile Quebec minister’s resignation – should be great news for the New Democrats.
On CBC’s The National, Chantal Hébert commented on an interview she had heard with Peter Julian on French-language radio in Montreal. Julian was, until the 2025 election, a B.C. MP for the New Democrats.
To mix metaphors, Hébert said she detected an upbeat and hopeful spring in Julian’s step for the first time since last April’s election – an election that was catastrophic for the New Democrats.
But Hébert might have been jumping to conclusions too quickly. One could see evidence of that in Thursday evening’s debate.
One of the leading NDP leadership candidates is Heather McPherson, an MP from Edmonton, the only sitting elected politician in the race.
Among McPherson’s most prominent supporters is former Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley.
In 2018, then-Premier Notley applauded long and hard when the Trudeau Liberal government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline.
At the time, that purchase created a deep rift in the NDP.
The B.C. provincial New Democratic government and B.C. federal New Democratic MPs were firmly opposed.
Notley was equally firmly in support, while McPherson, who only took a seat in Parliament in 2019, was caught in the middle. She quietly sided with Notley, with the emphasis on quietly.
The dramatic political events in Ottawa and Calgary that preceded the NDP leadership debate were not officially on the agenda in Montreal, but candidate Avi Lewis kept bringing them up.
At one point Lewis said, with obvious exasperation: “We’re not talking enough about what happened today!”
To that, McPherson said nothing, but one could sense her squirming uncomfortably.
Alberta’s former NDP premier Notley is unlikely to take the current Smith government to task for its deal with Ottawa. And about two weeks ago current Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi told an interviewer: “We need more pipelines”.
Nenshi’s only beef with Danielle Smith was that she hadn’t succeeded in getting an agreement with Ottawa by Grey Cup weekend, as she had promised.
“The New Democrats,” he said, “know how to get pipelines built.”
It will be extremely difficult for Edmonton MP McPherson to swim against the pro-pipeline tide of public opinion in her province.
As for the other five leadership candidates, Lewis was the most adamantly critical of the Carney-Smith deal.
The filmmaker and journalist – and scion of a long line of leading figures in the NDP – referred to his own support of the Indigenous people who fought tooth and nail against the Northern Gateway pipeline when it was on the national agenda.
Lewis pledged to join the struggle against any new version of that project.
Environmentalist Tony McQuail and Campbell River B.C.’s Tanille Johnston, the only Indigenous candidate, were equally unambiguous in their opposition to a new pipeline through British Columbia.
But another candidate, Rob Asthon, a B.C. longshore workers’ union leader, stayed away from the topic of a potential pipeline through northern B.C., and understandably so.
Ashton is on the record as being at least open to ending the current ban on oil tanker traffic on the northern B.C. coast.
In an interview late in October he said: “If a province says we’re going to block all tankers, but there’s a project that everybody wants, let’s find a safe way to move those tankers up.”
A debate that was dull, and, from the French-language perspective, a train wreck
The Montreal debate did not afford an opportunity for the candidates to engage in serious discussion of pipelines or anything else.
Moderator Karl Bélanger chose to ask questions that were soft-ball and general in the extreme, such as “What have you learned from successful NDP provincial governments?” and “Why do you want to be prime minister?”
Bélanger did not raise such hot current topics as Gaza and the Carney government’s military-spending-and-austerity budget.
With the exception of Avi Lewis, the candidates chose, for the most part, not to refer to current events and controversies.
As is her wont, Heather McPherson almost completely avoided mention of any policy she might champion. Her sole message was about her personal qualities for the leadership job.
She will be sure-footed, competent, and inclusive, McPherson promised NDP members, even if she stands for nothing in particular.
Rob Ashton has some serious policy ideas on his website, but he barely mentioned them in the debate. His go-to mode is sloganeering in a loud voice.
Tanille Johnston hit a responsive chord with this listener on the subject of Indigenous reconciliation.
Johnston asked why the larger society always requires Indigenous communities to make way for the economic (usually resource extraction) projects it wants, but never asks what sort of economic development Indigenous people want.
The 1990s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, a too-ignored landmark document, recommended such a from-the-grassroots-up strategy for economic development on Indigenous lands. But no government has since taken up the suggestion.
Tony McQuail usually talks a lot about his four Rs package of policies. In this debate, however, he kept going back to one idea: the pressing need for electoral reform.
Avi Lewis’ main policy proposals are centred on taxing the wealthiest among us and using the power of the state, through publicly owned entities in fields such as wholesale food and housing, to take back control of the economy.
Lewis, as he has in the past, emphasized that the current crisis should not invite us to be timid. It requires bold solutions.
The NDP promised this would be a mostly-in-French debate, but it did not turn out that way.
Four of the candidates made utterances that were theoretically in French. To this bilingual journalist’s ears, they were, for most part, barely comprehensible.
I am not sure how those tasked with simultaneous translation managed. Charity prevents me from saying more.
If there were only four candidates – and given that this was supposed to be the NDP’s official “French” debate – we would have to qualify this debate as a disaster on par with Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. election campaign.
It was Avi Lewis who saved the day.
He alone spoke in a French that was not only comprehensible, but even sounded, at times, natural. Lewis even managed to put some humour and emotion into his French language interventions.
But even Lewis was, overall, a disappointment.
The format required the candidates to answer questions Bélanger posed to them in French in that language, but only in the first round. In exchanges that followed they could switch to English.
It is understandable that the four totally-non-bilingual candidates would immediately switch to English. But Lewis, mostly, did the same. He would say a few words in French and then quickly jump to his comfort zone.
At one point, Lewis said something about not having a mustache, as did the late NDP leader Jack Layton, but that he hopes, nonetheless, he might one day speak good enough French to appear on the hugely popular CBC French network TV show “Tout le monde en parle”.
Layton famously made a favourable impression on the more than a million viewers when he appeared on that show during the 2011 campaign – the Orange Wave campaign.
Lewis is self-aware enough to know he is not ready for that kind of prime time yet.
Time to recruit truly bilingual leadership candidates?
Steven Guilbeault’s resignation from cabinet will not create an immediate opening in Quebec. The now-ex-minister will remain in the House as a Liberal MP.
Mark Carney made a point of issuing a press release praising Guilbeault and, in a sense, welcoming him to his new role.
There is little chance, however, that Guilbeault will run again in the next election.
The former minister’s current Montreal riding, Laurier-Sainte-Marie, is one of the best prospects for the New Democrats in Quebec. The party won it twice in a row, starting in 2011, and came second in the three subsequent elections.
With the right leader, one who could campaign and give interviews in French, an NDP candidate would have a great shot at winning Laurier-Sainte-Marie next time.
None of the five current NDP leadership candidates fill that bill, though.
Indeed, some NDP activists were so horrified at the train-wreck of a debate on Thursday, November 27, that they are now actively calling for other, truly bilingual candidates to enter the race.
One name mentioned is that of current B.C. cabinet minister Adrian Dix.
Another is that of former Ontario member of the provincial parliament Joel Harden.
Others are former B.C. MP Peter Julian, former Ontario MP Peggy Nash, and former federal MP and B.C. cabinet minister Nathan Cullen.
Even the name of the now-former mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, is still out there.
The bottom line for the NDP is that in 2025 bilingualism is not merely “good-to-have” for a national party leader. It is an absolute necessity.
The last non-bilingual Liberal leader was Lester Pearson, who left office way back in 1968.
The last unilingual Conservative leader, Bob Stanfield, retired in 1976. All Conservative leaders since then, starting with Joe Clark, have been bilingual.
A slew of right-wing politicians from western Canada have made a point of learning French. They speak it far better than any of the current NDP candidates. Among those are Jason Kenney, Stephen Harper, and James Moore.
With his unabashed move to the centre right, Mark Carney has created huge space for the NDP on the centre left.
Will the party rise to the challenge?
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