The New Democratic Party’s leadership candidates – or, at least, most of them – will meet and debate for the first time on Wednesday, October 22, in Ottawa.
Technically this will not, in fact, be a debate. It is to be a leadership forum, organized by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).
A number of the candidates have been talking a great deal of late about the need for the NDP to renew its bond with working-class Canadians.
In that light, it seems appropriate for a national labour organization to be providing something of a launch pad for the leadership contest.
This campaign will be a long one. The party will not formally choose the new leader until March of 2026.
The Ottawa event will merely be the opening of the first act. Nominations do not even officially close until the end of January 2026.
Five very different candidates will participate, but not the sixth
The five candidates taking part in the forum are: Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson, Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, and Tony McQuail.
One active, though as-yet non-official candidate is missing: Yves Engler.
The Montreal-based writer and activist is conducting a vigorous campaign. He has garnered thousands of signatures and raised lots of money. And he has put forward many tangible and concrete policies.
However, party officials say Engler might not be following NDP rules – by raising money before formally declaring his candidacy. They add that, ultimately, Engler might not qualify as a candidate.
As for the others –
Avi Lewis is not only the son and grandson of Ontario and federal NDP leaders, he is one of the architects of the 2015 LEAP manifesto, “a call for a Canada based on caring for the earth and one another”.
British Columbia-based Lewis is well-known as a broadcast journalist and filmmaker. He ran twice unsuccessfully for the NDP federally and is married to celebrity progressive intellectual and polemicist (and bestselling author) Naomi Klein.
Heather McPherson has been elected to Parliament three times, for the riding of Edmonton Strathcona. In the House of Commons, she distinguished herself as the party’s foreign affairs critic. In that capacity, she has been a tireless voice for the rights of the Palestinian people.
Among McPherson’s more prominent supporters are former New Democratic premier of Alberta Rachel Notley. Some say the Edmonton Strathcona MP is the candidate favoured by the party establishment. Others say, given his bloodlines, Lewis is, de facto, NDP insiders’ preferred new leader.
Rob Ashton is a longshore worker by trade and has been president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) since 2016.
That British Columbia union has had a turbulent recent history. In July 2023, ILWU members walked out in a bitter strike, which halted $500 million of Canadian trade activity per day, for two weeks. It took federal mediation to get a contract ILWU members would agree too.
The next year, Ashton faced a challenge to his leadership. He won in a squeaker of a vote, by barely more than 50 per cent.
Since announcing his candidacy, Ashton has attracted considerable interest. Many see him as a refreshing, authentic, blue-collar, working-class voice.
Pollster David Coletto wrote that an NDP led by Ashton would be Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney’s “worst nightmare”.
In Coletto’s words, Ashton “embodies the working-class resentment Poilievre performs. When he says he wears steel-toed boots every day, it’s not a line; it’s a life. And when he rails against corporations earning ‘trillions in profit while workers are called greedy,’ he gives voice to the same frustration Poilievre amplifies but directs it at different targets: capital, not government.”
Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail are less well-known than the first three.
Johnston is a social worker and member of the We Wai Kai First Nation in B.C. She is director of community programs for a First Nation health authority and a city councillor for Campbell River on the east coast of Vancouver Island.
Johnston is the first Indigenous woman to seek the NDP’s federal leadership.
McQuail is an organic farmer and environmentalist, who advocates for a merger between the New Democrats and the Greens. He has run for the NDP eight times since 1980, and has been farming in Ontario’s Huronia region since the 1970s.
In his campaign videos and in interviews McQuail wears a traditional farmer’s straw hat. His environmental creed is based on regeneration of the earth’s natural system. Mere stability or sustainability is not sufficient, he says
McQuail has a name for the new merged party he would like to see: the Green Democratic Progressives.
What are ‘purity tests’ ?
The leadership contest might be young, but it is not, even at this early stage, without its share of bitter controversy.
McPherson put the cat among the pigeons at her very first campaign event. There, before a cheering hometown crowd, she said the party had to become more welcoming and inclusive, and, most important, avoid “purity tests”.
She did not define what she meant by purity, but one of McPherson’s six federal colleagues, Leah Gazan, MP for Winnipeg Centre, took an attack to be an attack on the NDP’s diversity and inclusion efforts.
Gazan wrote that McPherson’s “framing is frequently used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities — especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, and immigrant workers — who now make up a major part of the labour movement and the working class.”
Rejecting so-called ‘purity tests’, Gazan argued, “isn’t about broadening the movement — it’s about narrowing it back to those who have always held power within it.”
The tiny NDP federal caucus is obviously deeply divided on this core issue.
Interim leader Don Davies has sided with McPherson
“We have to ask ourselves,” he commented, “have we veered too much from our class-based analysis to identity politics? My own view is that we have.”
Davies made specific reference to “drag queens reading in libraries” a phenomenon which has been a lightning rod for far-right bigots who claim they want to “protect our children”.
The NDP’s interim leader thinks the party should be more concerned with the bread-and-butter, kitchen-table concerns of working families than that sort of niche issue.
There is a good chance this deep difference will show up during the leadership forum.
More important, the CLC event will afford an opportunity for all candidates (except Engler) to showcase the kind of policies they want the NDP to champion.
Policy has not been front-and-centre, so far
At this early stage, the various leadership campaigns have not put out much, publicly, about policy.
Avi Lewis talks intriguingly about some innovative policy ideas, in interviews and campaign videos. Notably, he has proposed a wealth tax and what he calls a “public option” for wholesale food.
Mainstream media commentators and economists quickly reacted to the latter idea with skeptical, raised eyebrows.
Some scoffingly asked: Why should we expect federal public servants to efficiently run a grocery business when they have proven to be inept at much of what they now do?
Others characterized the idea as “socialism”. They seemed to have the impression Lewis wants to nationalize the entire retail and wholesale food industry, which is not at all the case.
Lewis’ modest proposal is for the federal government to create a publicly-owned, non-profit wholesale food enterprise that would, potentially, supply other, perhaps municipally-owned, non-profit retail stores, and operate within the existing marketplace.
Avi Lewis’ campaign is not suggesting a federal government takeover over Loblaws or Sobeys, or any corporation in the food business. Lewis merely wants to help bring excessive prices down by offering retailers and consumers another source of food.
As interesting as these (and other) policy ideas are, you will not find a word about them on the Lewis campaign website https://lewisforleader.ca/. It is entirely dedicated to cheerleading and fundraising.
The same is true for the McPherson campaign’s official online presence https://www.heathermcpherson.ca/.
Rob Ashton quite unabashedly tells folks he is not yet ready to engage on serious policy conversations. He wants to hear from the rank-and-file first. For now, the BC longshore worker is selling himself, his life experience and his leadership skills. His campaign is all about who he is, not what he would do https://robashton.ca/ .
Tanille Johnston’s web presence, unlike the others, does list eight policy priorities, to wit: diverse and affordable housing, equitable access to health care, protecting the environment, free and accessible post-secondary education, increasing childcare spaces, electoral reform, better public transit, and increasing the representation of Indigenous persons in government https://tanille.ca/ .
Aside from making post-secondary education (an area of provincial jurisdiction) free, what Johnston proposes is non-specific in the extreme. But at least she makes the effort.
McQuail has a lot to say about what he wants to accomplish for this country via videos and a few interviews. His campaign does not otherwise appear, at this stage, to have any presence on the Web.
The most thorough candidate as far as publicly-available policy is concerned is the one excluded from the CLC forum: Yves Engler.
Engler’s website is chock-a-block with policy statements on everything from Ottawa’s role in U.S. efforts to undermine the government of Venezuela, to military spending to the Israel-Gaza war, to a proposal that Canada withdraw from the free trade agreement with the U.S. and Mexico.
There is, admittedly, an overheated, rhetorical tone to what Engler puts in the window. If his campaign were a sports team one could say of it that it is exclusively about offence. His tone is one of unrelenting attack.
Judge for yourself Yvesforndpleader.ca
rabble.ca reached out to Engler to inquire as to his plans for the candidates forum in Ottawa, but did not hear back as of time of publication.
The leadership forum will take place at Ottawa’s downtown Westin Hotel, and will also be accessible via YouTube https://canadianlabour.ca/workers-first-the-clc-hosts-a-forum-with-ndp-leadership-candidates/ .
Editor’s Note: 2025/10/17: Engler provided the following statement to rabble on his exclusion from the candidates forum:
My campaign has asked the CLC to include me in the forum. It would be unfortunate to exclude a campaign with a comprehensive pro-worker platform, that has far surpassed the nomination signatures, has raised $85 000 and has a 1000 volunteers. After Rob Ashton I likely have the second strongest union credentials. I worked in the research department of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union/Unifor for three years. My father was elected vice-president of CEP Local 2000 and my mother was vice-president of the BC Nurses’ Union. An uncle, Terry Engler, was president of ILWU local 400 and another uncle, Al Engler, was also president of that local. My aunt, Jean Rands, was central in establishing the feminist Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) in the 1970s.
If the CLC doesn’t reverse course I will do a live streamed discussion of the forum with my father Gary Engler focused on economic democracy.
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