NDP insiders are trying to fix the leadership race for an establishment candidate
The race for the next leader of the New Democrats hasn’t even started, but the party’s establishment already appears to be trying to stack the deck in its own favour.
You might think that after the NDP’s implosion in the recent election, the high-level operatives that have been running the party for the last two decades would take a beat. Maybe do some soul-searching. Perhaps even canvass the opinions of the party’s disappointed members—not to mention the nearly two million NDP voters whose e-day pencils drifted over to other parties in last month’s vote.
But the party’s class of professional consultants with whom power is concentrated do not recognize a fundamental problem with their approach. These are operatives who cycle between senior staff positions in the federal and provincial parties and financially-lucrative, post-partisan corporate firms, and who have shaped the NDP in their image: more moderate, suspicious of the party’s members as well as social movements, and out of touch with working class realities.
Far from seeing this as a moment for a much-needed reset, they are trying to ensure the leadership race will be hostile to any candidate who might want to lead the NDP in a new direction.
_The Globe and Mail_ did them a favour last week, publishing a story about how the race should unfold based exclusively on the views of four insiders—three consultants and the federal party’s chief-of-staff and director since 2019. (The newspaper started its headline with “New Democrats say,” as if the party is a handful of lobbyists in an orange trench coat.)
The article was clearly a trial balloon launched by the party brass: an attempt to float their preferred terms to gauge public reaction and lend them credibility with the NDP’s membership.
All of their preferences—especially an excessively-short timeline and a dramatic shift in how votes are weighted—would undermine the prospects of a candidate who might want to do things differently. While the terms of a leadership race might seem like mere technical details, they’re in fact at the heart of a battle over the future of the party.
First, having a race that lasts just four to six months, as the party insiders appear to hope for, would squash any hope of a real rebuild. Members and supporters need time to properly dissect the hollowing out of the party that has happened under the tightly-controlled and ideologically-timid reign of the consultants. Many riding associations are neglected shells of their former selves. Activists have left in droves. Social movements feel sidelined. The public doesn’t have a clear sense of the NDP’s vision.
A short race would not make a dent in these problems. But a longer run—say, nine to twelve months—could create opportunities to grab the attention of the public. Imagine live-streamed town halls, themed discussions, rallies, and debates about big ideas to fight Donald Trump’s attacks on the country as well as the extreme corporate control of our economic system. They could all be geared to exposing the elite agenda of both the Liberals and Conservatives.
This is political education of a sort the party has not tried to do in decades. It wouldn’t just replenish the membership of the NDP, but begin enlarging a base of energized voters across the country—the start of forging a movement culture around the party that would be more deeply connected to the working class.
And as important as the date of the leadership contest itself is the deadline for selling new memberships. These insiders very likely want a race that grants voting rights only to people who have been members for 90 days (as it was in a recent leadership contest for British Columbia’s NDP). If that’s the rule, a December leadership convention—which sounds like a good distance away—actually means a rushed membership drive over summer months when even active left-leaning Canadians might want a little break from politics.
The insiders also want to give regional weight to votes—the surest sign the establishment is trying to cook the race. They are trying to abandon a democratic system of one member/one vote, which has been in place for 20 years and was adopted after heated internal party debate. It is the process dictated by the party’s constitution and would require a convention to change—not something that party insiders should do on the fly.
In its place, they want a new system that would grant each riding an equal point total. These would be allocated to candidates based on the voting in each riding, regardless of whether it is inactive or a thriving hub of thousands of members. There are legitimate concerns about the NDP under-prioritizing certain regions (like Quebec), but those should be addressed without undemocratically skewing a leadership race.
The overall result would be perverse: you could have a candidate who signs up tens of thousands of members lose to someone who signs up only a fraction of that. It would turn a race that should test which candidate can generate national enthusiasm into one that tests which can most effectively micro-target 343 ridings—an obvious advantage for leadership candidates who have the aid of those who control the party levers.
Don’t put dirty tricks past the party establishment. In a race in which detailed riding-level knowledge is a premium, insiders could supply preferred candidates with lapsed riding members or previous leadership campaign lists, proprietary resources only they would have access to.
Such sabotage was the order of the day back when eco-socialist activist Anjali Appadurai challenged David Eby for the leadership of the BC NDP in 2022. The NDP’s insiders made manipulative rule changes midway through the race, and used their access to the membership rolls to aggressively vet and disqualify people—and then eventually Appadurai herself.
The same network of consultants who rigged that race are now attempting to cling to control over the party. Ironically, with an electoral collapse leading to massive layoffs among senior staff, the NDP is left with only its federal director Lucy Watson (now a single consultant experiencing a sudden roominess in the trench coat).
She holds all the power to propose leadership race rules to the party’s executive and council, the governing bodies of the NDP. This group of activists is routinely treated like a rubber stamp, kept in the dark about decision-making until hours before key meetings. They will need to buck that pattern this time.
The stakes are existential: an uninspiring, moderate, and establishment-friendly leader could cement the party’s long-term irrelevance. The NDP needs someone with a political vision markedly different from the Liberals, a commitment to democratizing the party, and the ability to connect with Canada’s social movements and a multi-racial working class.
For the NDP’s once and future base to have a fighting chance, the leadership race will need to be everything the party’s consultants are not: bold, transparent, accessible, and democratic.
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