In the wake of the New Democrats’ more-than-disappointing result in the last federal election two former NDP MPs have launched a renewal process for the party.
On Thursday, September 25, Peter Julian, who represented a Burnaby B.C. riding for two decades, and Matthew Green, who was MP for Hamilton Centre for nearly six years, joined forces with B.C. party activist Doris Mah to announce the initiative in Ottawa.
The two former MPs are well aware there is a leadership race under way.
They say their process will engage the grassroots and will complement the leadership campaigns.
Their party renewal exercise will also work cooperatively with a more narrowly-focused effort the NDP central office entrusted, last July, to lawyer and former candidate Emily Taman: To look into what went wrong in the last campaign.
Green, Julian and Mah expect their renewal effort to culminate at the Winnipeg convention which will name the new leader, in March 2026.
Learning lessons from past experience
At their Parliament Hill news conference, Peter Julian spoke about the way the NDP and its predecessor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), dealt with two earlier devastating elections.
Those happened in 1958 and 1993.
In 1958, the CCF fell victim to a massive mood for change, which followed decades of nearly uninterrupted Liberal rule.
After testing the waters by giving him a narrow minority in 1957, Canadian voters decided to award a huge mandate to John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives the next year.
The CCF got squeezed in the process. They had a result very similar to 2025’s – a handful of MPs and no official status (and all the money and influence that goes with it).
The social democratic party’s response was to lay the groundwork for a merger with the Canadian Labour Congress and the formation of a new party.
Thus, in 1961, the NDP was born.
By the time of the 1962 election, the New Democrats had regained parliamentary status and significant influence.
The 1962 election was to usher in in the first of a series of minority parliaments, which would not end until Pierre Trudeau’s majority victory in 1968.
Decades later, in the 1993 election, a good many voters were fed up with the Conservative Mulroney government, which had been in power for nearly a decade.
Few thought the new Conservative leader and prime minister, Kim Campbell, represented meaningful change.
At that time, a large proportion of erstwhile NDP voters saw in Jean Chrétien’s Liberals a hopeful shift away from the wanton privatizations and excessively pro-corporate policies of the Mulroney years.
But by the time the next election rolled around, in 1997, many disillusioned Canadians turned once again to the New Democrats.
The Chrétien Liberals, like the current Carney Liberals, had talked a progressive game when it sought NDPers’ votes 1993.
Once in power, however, Chrétien, and his finance minister Paul Martin, instituted severe fiscal austerity.
They savaged federal contributions to health care and other provincially-run social services, got the federal government out of the social housing business completely, and made deep cuts to federal employment insurance.
In 1997, those latter cuts – coupled with the first NDP leader from Atlantic Canada, Alexa McDonough – helped the New Democrats make previously-unheard-of inroads in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
The need to reach out to grassroots
Former MPs Peter Julian and Matthew Green point out that in those earlier, 20th Century examples the re-birth of the party depended as much on engagement with local riding associations, and with NDP members and supporters across the country, as on the national leadership.
The three who spoke have dubbed their movement Rebuild Canada’s Progressive Future.
They say the “heart of the initiative”, for now, is a nationwide survey aimed at gathering honest feedback from current and past members, labour and community activists, and other “progressive allies”.
Their process, at this stage, looks well organized, almost slick.
Their web site www.ndprenewal.ca is clear, user friendly and fully bilingual. Some journalists noted the professional quality of this undertaking and wondered where its funding comes from.
Peter Julian assured them it was entirely a voluntary effort. He paid his own plane ticket from B.C. to get to the Ottawa event, he said.
For her part, Doris Mah said she made her way to Ottawa via a grueling, overnight, red-eye flight from the West Coast.
Mah’s voice broke as she described the devastation of seeing long-serving New Democratic MPs such as Julian and Green suffer defeat in last April’s Carney-sweep election.
Matthew Green encapsulated the goal of Rebuild when he evoked the “lived experience” of working people. He said: “We don’t just need a reset. We need renewal from the ground up.”
All three founders of this initiative pledge to stay neutral in the current leadership race.
Past renewal exercises took place against the backdrop of newly elected majority governments, and could afford to take their time, more than two years in both cases.
That is not the case this time, with a Liberal minority in power.
New Democrats will have to find a way to avoid precipitating an election over the next six to eight months, while not appearing to be lapdogs for the rightward-leaning Carney government.
That promises to be a difficult balancing act.
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