When the federal Parliament meets once again next week it will be lacking a strong voice from the Left, from the progressive side of the political spectrum.
With only seven MPs, Canada’s New Democrats – who have, for decades, advocated for social and environmental justice and for measures to combat inequality – will have no official status.
They will have little opportunity to intervene in parliamentary debates, committees, or question period.
Mind you, that group of seven, which has members from the North, Quebec, the Prairies and the West Coast, has the talent and political know-how to punch above its weight.
Indeed, since he was named last spring, the interim NDP leader, Vancouver MP Don Davies, has done an admirable job of critiquing a Liberal government that seems to have moved further and faster to the Right than most observers would have expected.
But there are limits to what a politician keeping a seat warm for a new leader to be selected months in the future can reasonably expect to accomplish.
And so, the NDP is banking on a leadership race that just got underway to generate interest and excitement.
Two leading candidates – so far
There are no officially recognized leadership candidates yet.
Aside from activist Yves Engler, the two names most prominently mentioned are filmmaker and broadcaster Avi Lewis and the current Member of Parliament for Edmonton Strathcona, Heather McPherson.
Lewis, who now lives in British Columbia with his wife, writer and activist Naomi Klein, has run for Parliament twice but lost on both occasions.
The first time, Lewis chose a seat on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast the NDP had never won. In the best of times, it would have been a longshot for any NDP candidate.
In last April’s election, Lewis ran in a Vancouver seat where the NDP might, in normal times, have a good chance. But there was nothing normal about the April 2025 election.
Lewis is the son of a former Ontario NDP leader, Stephen Lewis, and grandson of the federal leader in the 1970s, David Lewis. But Lewis would bring a lot more than genetics to the leadership race, were he to enter it.
Avi Lewis would be a formidable candidate. He’s smart, deeply committed to environmental and social justice, and a skilled communicator.
As for Heather McPherson, since she won her seat in 2019, she has earned a reputation as a hard-working MP.
McPherson has done an exemplary job as the NDP’s critic for foreign affairs. She has earned respect not only from fellow NDP MPs but also from MPs from other parties for her indefatigable and fearless pursuit of fairness and justice for the Palestinian people.
McPherson persistently prodded the governing Liberals to recognize Palestinian statehood. The persistence seems to have, belatedly, succeeded.
Recently, McPherson has made a point of commenting on bread-and-butter issues, such as the big grocery chains’ tendency to price gouge Canadians.
She obviously realizes an aspirant to party leadership has to be able to talk credibly not only about global matters but about Canadians’ economic hopes and fears.
Both Lewis and McPherson look like strong candidates. But both share one potentially fatal flaw. Neither is anywhere near fluently bilingual.
McPherson has been working on her French for years. She actively supports the Alberta francophone community and its institutions. And she once posted on social media that her daughter was helping her learn French.
She has not spoken French much in public during her time in public life but has, starting a few weeks ago, posted a number of short prepared policy statements on social media which she delivers in both English and French.
This writer cannot find any recorded instance where McPherson answers questions spontaneously in French, let alone takes part in a French language debate.
But McPherson’s French, however limited, is likely better than Avi Lewis’s. It appears there is no publicly recorded evidence of Lewis speaking French.
Does Carney set a low bar for bilingualism?
Some say Mark Carney’s electoral success, especially in Quebec, despite his less-than-perfect-French, has lowered the bar on the need for a national party leader to be bilingual.
There were some raised eyebrows when, last winter, Carney launched his leadership campaign. His French definitely seemed rusty. But he has assiduously and diligently worked on it since then, and is now much more comfortable when answering questions or making speeches in French.
If Carney’s French-language fluency establishes the bilingualism bar it is highly doubtful either McPherson or Lewis reaches it.
There will be many NDPers in parts of the country where French has little presence who say their party does not have the luxury of rejecting good leadership candidates solely on the basis of their bilingual status.
One Saskatchewan NDP supporter told this writer that he hears more Tagalog, Hindi and Chinese where he lives than French.
That might be true. But there are over eight million Canadians whose first language is French. That’s one out of five Canadians.
There was a time when francophone Canadians accepted (and voted for) unilingual federal leaders. Quebec voted massively for non-French speaking William Lyon Mackenzie King and Lester Pearson.
But that time has long passed.
The Liberals have not had a unilingual anglophone leader since Pearson retired in 1968.
The Conservatives were a bit later to that party. Their last English-only leader was Bob Stanfield, who stepped aside in 1976. At that point the party selected Joe Clark, an Albertan who had worked hard on his French for more than a decade.
The Tories have not turned back since. When the old Progressive Conservative party merged with the upstart, populist Reform / Canadian Alliance party it chose Stephen Harper in part because of his ability in French.
The NDP has not been as assiduous as the other two national parties on the bilingualism issue. None of the leaders of the NDP’s predecessor party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), spoke French.
When, in 1961, the CCF joined forces with organized labour to form the NDP, the new party selected Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas as leader. He was also, in essence, unilingual.
The NDP’s second leader, Avi Lewis’s grandfather, David Lewis, was bilingual, as was his successor, Ed Broadbent.
But then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the party chose two unilingual leaders in a row: Audrey Mclaughlin and Alexa McDonough.
McDonough’s French was so limited that to take part in French-language televised leaders’ debates she insisted on wearing a headset and listening to the questions translated to English.
The result was predictably awkward.
I asked the NDP’s communications director of the time, Hugh Blakeney, why the party even bothered to take part in such French-language events. His answer was instructive.
The NDP has to make an effort in French, he said, not necessarily to win seats in Quebec, but to maintain the support of “Canadian nationalists in Ontario.”
When New Democrats selected Jack Layton in 2003, they, for the first time, had a leader who more than merely managed in French. Layton spoke with a colloquial fluency that endeared him to French-speaking voters.
Jagmeet Singh also spoke high quality French, but could not overcome Quebeckers’ deep distrust of a political leader who wears a turban.
Despite Singh’s failure to break through in Quebec in the 2019 and 2021 elections, in 2024, with the Liberals tanking in public opinion polls, the New Democrats had high hopes for a number of seats in the city of Montreal.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House and the Liberals’ replacement of Justin Trudeau by Mark Carney dashed those hopes.
Some bilingual leadership options
Now that the New Democrats have to pick themselves up off the floor with a new leader, some potential candidates have written themselves off because of their lack of French. Among those is former Hamilton MP Matthew Green. If he could speak French as well as he does English, Green would be an excellent option.
Former northern Ontario MP Charlie Angus, one of the best known and widely admired NDP political figures, has also said he will not run. Angus came second to Jagmeet Singh in 2017. In that race, many were surprised at his weak French, given that he represented a riding with a large francophone population.
Two well-liked French-speaking NDPers have said they will not run: the current deputy leader, Alexandre Boulerice, who represents a central Montreal riding, and former MP and leadership candidate Guy Caron. The latter is now mayor of the city of Rimouski in eastern Quebec and says he wants to devote himself to that job.
Last spring there was a flurry of speculation about the progressive Montreal mayor Valerie Plante. She is not running for mayor again this fall and did not immediately squelch the leadership talk. Subsequently, she said she will not run.
It would be unseemly, however, for Plante to actively seek another major job while still holding the position of mayor of a big city. Her term ends on November 2, and she could still decide to run as NDP leader at that time.
The New Democrats’ central office opted for a long, seven-month run-up to the leadership convention in March 2026. Is that because they wanted to give as many potential candidates – such as Plante – as much time as possible to get into the race?
One former Quebec NDP MP who has expressed an interest in the leadership is Ruth-Ellen Brosseau.
Brosseau has had a career that is, in many ways, stranger than fiction. She was a paper candidate in a rural Quebec riding in the 2011 election, when the party thought it had zero chance of winning in that part of the country.
Brosseau, who had been working as a bartender in Ottawa and was not fluently bilingual, famously took a vacation in Las Vegas during the campaign, and did not even visit her riding during the campaign.
When she won as part of the Orange Wave, Brosseau did not let the widespread mockery get to her. She moved to the riding, got to know the people and their issues, made herself bilingual, and worked hard to become an effective MP and NDP front bencher.
The people of Berthier-Maskinongé rewarded her efforts in 2015 when they elected her a second time.
Brosseau did not win in her two subsequent tries, but came closer than most Quebec NDP candidates in 2019. She now lives and works her farm in the riding. Her French, which was hesitant in 2011, is now fluent.
Other bilingual NDP MPs from the recent past include Megan Leslie, who once represented Halifax in Parliament but now lives in Ottawa. She is currently CEO of the Canadian division of the World Wildlife Fund. Could she be tempted to get back into politics?
B.C.’s Nathan Cullen ran for the federal leadership in 2012, and came in a surprise third. His French is better than average, and he has tons of political experience. After serving several terms in the federal parliament he was a cabinet minister in B.C.’s provincial NDP government. He lives and works as a consultant in B.C.’s interior now.
Brian Topp came in second to Tom Mulcair in 2012. He was Ed Broadbent’s choice at the time and is still mentioned as a possible leadership candidate in 2025. He is a fluently bilingual Montrealer who spent most of his political career in western Canada. He was a senior advisor to Saskatchewan NDP premier Roy Romanow and Alberta’s only NDP premier Rachel Notley.
And so, there you have it. When it comes to bilingual leadership candidates the NDP is not without options.
The party owes it not only to itself, but to all Canadians who believe the progressive voice must be heard loud and clear everywhere in the country, to choose a new leader who can embody that voice in both official languages.
To do otherwise would be political malpractice.
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