In March, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) will elect a new leader. This April, the federal party suffered its worst election showing ever, winning a mere seven seats. Leader Jagmeet Singh promptly resigned. Five candidates have registered in the race to replace him, including current member of parliament (MP) Heather McPherson, activist and filmmaker Avi Lewis, union leader Rob Ashton, social worker and town councilor Tanille Johnston, and Tony McQuail, a farmer and former party candidate. Montreal activist Yves Engler is running but has yet to register with the party.
To get a sense of the state of the race to date and where it might be headed, Jacobin writers David Moscrop and Edgardo Sepulveda examine four aspects of the party and the leadership competition. They take up the historical context, how candidates are addressing environmental, economic, and industrial policy, the class and cultural dynamics at play, and the state of party democracy.
ES: As someone who works with numbers, I compiled data from 1962, the year after the NDP’s founding, to track its electoral success as a percentage of seats in parliament. Figure 1 shows that its current seven seats represent only 2 percent of MPs in Ottawa.
Figure 1 also highlights two metrics that point to ongoing structural potential for social democracy in Canada. Across all provinces and territories, NDP caucuses account for 25 percent of legislative seats. Meanwhile, union membership remains robust by current standards at 28 percent, well above the 10 percent rate in the United States. The union connection is foundational; the NDP was cofounded by the national federation of unions and the NDP retains formal affiliation with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and other labor organizations.
Yet figure 1 shows that since 1993 the federal NDP has generally fallen short of these two benchmarks, with the exception of the 2011–14 electoral surge. The core challenge for the federal party and those seeking to…
Auteur: David Moscrop
