Debate is at https://www.ndp.ca/debate
More info on debate and candidates:
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-leadership-candidates-debate-preview-9.7096023
- https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/02/19/ndp-leadership-candidates-face-off-aim-for-breakaway-in-key-debate/
Candidate sites:
- Heather McPherson - https://www.heathermcpherson.ca/
- Avi Lewis https://lewisforleader.ca/
- Tanille Johnston - https://www.tanille.ca/
- Rob Ashton - https://robashton.ca/
- Tony McQuail - https://tonymcquailgreenprogressive.ca/
I wish Alexendre boulrice was in the race.
Listening to what everyone had to say, I most liked Tony McQuail and least liked Rob Ashton. Worst of all was whoever was in charge of handling sound for the voiceover translations, because that was horrendous. The rest were all fine, but nobody I found inspiring. All pretty likeable though, except for Ashton who came across as kind of caustic and a bit fake. I liked Tanille Johnston’s positive energy.
One thing that struck me watching it: I wish the NDP would speak the language of finance, tech, and economics with much more sophistication. It’s no good just talking about big business, billionaires, or the 99% in cartoonish ways. If you’re going to take on these huge challenges, you need to show you actually understand them at a really sophisticated level, otherwise you end up sounding like your ideas are all pie in the sky. Talk to NDP voters like they’re adults who understand economics, business, and tech, and who want a different way of dealing with them. If you’ve got a sophisticated plan, lay it out and educate us on it like adults, not undergrads who just read Graeber for the first time. It’s the working class you need to win back, and they’re not idiots. At the end of the debate, because they didn’t speak to these topics with sophistication, I was left feeling nobody on stage was really plugged in to a number of the most pressing challenges the party needs to be ahead of.
I gotta say, Avi is doing a great job even if I’m still debating between him and Rob.
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Good point. Still important who’s first. How do you feel about the candidates?
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That’s a pretty good assesment. I’m tired so I can’t write in kind but here’s something to your effort.
Going through with reforming the party as a bottom-up movement is extremely importantfor the long term success. Both Rob and Avi understand this from slightly diff perspective. Rob understands this from union organizing which is similar, where locals have a similar function. Avi on the other hand has the ideology - he’s a democratic socialist. The principles, the why and the how of organizing real, bottom up democratic structures is baked into it. So I think both would be able to do the work but Avi probably has a more encompassing understanding of the domain. He also knows the socialist history of the NDP - he cites the CCF and Tommy Douglas explicitly. He never said “I” when referring to his leadership effort, he always said we and our. All of which speak to his commitment to the bottom-up approach.
Tony made a critical related point about this - that mass media is never going to convey the message we need conveyed to our members. The CBC might try but will fail. Corporate media would actively mislead as the NDP doesn’t further its interest. So we need our party to convey the messages to its members through the EDAs, so then the members can tell it to their neighbours as they understand it best. Just one of the extremely coherent points from the 74-year-old geezer on the stage.
Why we haven’t explored public options for groceries and such? Cause we got on the Thatcherite-Reaganite neolib ideological train. We sold off a shit ton of important pub corporations and we decided we ain’t using that economic model to do new things. But that’s just me ranting, I’m sure you knew that. 😊
They deleted their account or a moderator did so idk what the context was but this is a good bit of synopsis anyways lol, thanks! Probably have time to watch properly tonight.
It’s weird. Not sure why they were deleted. The comments were not controversial or offensive or anything.
Oh right, the account got deleted wholesale.
I think piefed erroneously marked it as a mod action, your home instance said creator yeah.
Which one wants to reign in immigration and rezone housing for density?
I was hopeful for Rob at first but starting his candidacy with an AI AMA on Reddit was a bad look. They even hit him on that point at the end of the debate.
He also didn’t much charisma on the stage. I guess I understand why he had his helpers do the AMA with AI, because he had to keep looking at his notes last night, and it makes me wonder how much he believes and how much he’s just parroting.
Yeah, I was initially leaning towards Rob as first pick and Avi second but I might swap.
“Gives workers real power — migrant workers will have clean path to permanency, open work permits, they can join unions and organize without fear, which means stronger unions and better wages for everyone;”
This sounds kind of worrying.
If you’re worried about giving workers real power, the NDP is not for you.
I don’t want more citizens when we have no housing and we have double digit youth unemployment. The NDP aren’t progressive if they do.
These problems aren’t caused by immigrants no matter what the frothing-in-the-mouth Right wants you to believe.
Little Quebec data point: the vast majority of immigrants move to Montreal. Guess where the housing crisis is more acute: the regions. Immigrants are not causing the housing shortage. Stupid car-centric city planning, NIMBY zoning, and the financialization of housing is what causes it. Read the CCPA report.
Youth unemployment? At the same time when our healthcare system is buckling from chronic under-staffing? And at the same time when we are missing teachers, early childhood educators? At the same time when we are faced with a climate resilience crisis, a housing crisis, sectors that require actual trained labour? Gee I wonder if there are some solutions to that. Maybe some kind of, oh I don’t know Green New Deal, funded by the ridiculous wealth hoarded by parasites like Galen Weston over the past few decades of neoliberal orthodoxy?
Immigrants are a rhetorical scapegoat, sold to you by demagogues who dream of bringing Trump style authoritarianism to Canada. We know exactly where that leads. No thanks.
https://economics.bmo.com/en/publications/detail/fb3ff12e-3054-4c6b-befb-fe9d2fac77af/
Is BMO far right?
“or housing, this move will dampen price pressures and rents, all else equal (e.g., rate cuts and mortgage rules). That said, the sudden shift in TR inflows should clearly soften the rental market just as a torrent of supply is coming online in some regions (e.g., Toronto condos). Growth in average asking rent across Canada has slowed to just 2% y/y according to Rentals.ca, with outright declines seen in some markets. We’ve long argued that Canada has a housing demand problem. This policy change will be felt quickly, and will make other supply-side measures look almost like rounding error.”
I feel like you people must be trying to gaslight, its an absurd premise to argue that additional demand doesnt raise prices on an inelastic good like housing, I cant even believe you are arguing in good faith.
BMO is a seller of mortgages, and therefore heavily invested in the financialization of housing. About 15-20% of their assets are in residential mortgages and HELOCs alone. Of course they want to talk about anything EXCEPT the root of the problem that is literally driving their profitability. This is like bringing up a study from the oil and gas industry to argue that greenhouse emissions are not a problem. And just like Oil&Gas keep pushing an inefficient and outdated energy technology stack and standing in the way of common sense electrification, the real estate financialization industry is keeping Canadian capital in an unproductive and parasitic sector. Imagine if we instead used all that capital not to invest in inert land, but to build up the Canadian economy.
Why is housing inelastic in the current system? Because it is not treated as a universal right, but as an asset. It is being hoarded by Real Eastate Investment Trusts who quite literally profit from maintaining scarcity. The solution is breaking the back of REITs and building non-market infill development across the country. Build the missing middle and keep it the fuck out of the profit-driven market, make it coops and public housing. Oh and guess what we need to do that. That’s right, workers, of which we have a shortage, so therefore …immigrants.
Here’s what Avi Lewis’ platform has to say about housing: https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/housing-full-plan
If you call this “gaslighting” and “bad faith” argumentation, I honestly have no idea what you would consider “good faith” argumentation.
Unless you believe in zero immigration which you absolutely have the right to, the material reasons for when immigration is bad for workers are the lesser workers rights they have and the shortage of housing and transit. Workers rights because unionized workplaces mean corpos can’t pay a migrant less than a Canadian, therefore have little incentive to bring them in. And if they do so in a non-unionized workplace, the migrant worker has the economic means to switch jobs, which means the corpo has to pay them similar to Canadian labour. And housing and transit are about the only limited resources standing in the way from scaling up any Canadian town or city from its current size to virtually any size. If we get housing and transit building so that we don’t have those constraints, and new people entering the economy aren’t at permanent worker rights disadvantage, like new Canadian grownups aren’t, then the economic effects should be more or less equivalent to natural increase in the population, which tends to be economically positive. Better yet, the economy should benefit more than natural pop growth because Canada didn’t spend the resources raising and educating this new population, while we’d get the surplus it produces as it enters the workforce.
If immigrant labour does not have the same rights (including recognition of experience, education through some process, etc) as non-immigrants, then the only way to not have corpos use them to lower wages is to not let them in at all - or zero immigration. But new workers constantly enter the workforce in a growing population as kids grow up so the mere entry of new workers into the economy doesn’t appear to be bad for wages. The baby boom along with strong workers rights (much weakened later) produced a pretty great economy for working people.
Its called capital shallowing. It does degrade wages.
But the Canadian population grew from 14M to 23M between 1950 and 1975, and inflation-adjusted avg income (in 1995 $) more than doubled from 8.6K to 20K in the same period. Why do you think the increase in population did not degrade wages in that period?
Well a productive immigrant raises living standards. Tim Hortons workers who bring their elderly family lowers living standards. Easily observed by how most countries are selective on immigration, and try to limit bringing in the elderly population onto social security.
Well productivity is just GDP produced per hour per worker. An individual workers can’t change productivity significantly. Productivity can only be changed in any significant manner by capital investment. A worker from 150 years ago can never produce as much garments as worker today with the current sowing machines. The sowing machines make the current worker significantly more productive than the one 150 years ago. That sowing machine is the capital investment that makes the modern worker more productive than the old timer. Productivity is different across sectors but that’s a sectoral difference which is also unaffected by individual workers. A Tim Hortons worker would always be less productive than a plumber or a machinist, regardless of who a particular Tim Hortons worker is.
An immigrant Tim Hortons worker bringing their elderly parents would put extra strain on OAS but it wouldn’t have any material difference on Tim Hortons wages if the have the exact same workers’ rights as a Canadian, would it?
A key point here is that the economy doesn’t stay static when new people enter the workforce. Whether it’s Canadian kids or immigrants, new entrants present both extra labour as well as extra demand for goods. As long as there’s natural resources to produce the extra goods demanded by the new entrants and labour to transform those natural resources into the goods demanded, the economy expands. That’s literally how the economy grows - more hands turn more natural resources into more physical things.
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy6_gTsUH4A
“Climate [change] is a class war, because big polluters profit and their friends run away with a pocket full of money. When it’s the working class that at the end of the day that pay the ultimate price in their communities.”
Class war mentioned 20 minutes in!
Oooh, soon we’ll find out who Lucy Watson and the cabal of NDP insiders will choose to be the party leader!
Isn’t it a vote by NDP members?
It is, we’re registered and ready to vote!
A vote of the people chosen by the cabal complete with secret rules. Not sure if they have a secret handshake though.
Excluding Yves Engler was a mistake.
Yes it was. At the same time, Yves Engler trying to hijack the NDP leadership contest to carry water for Putin was also not any kind of good faith politics.
Yup. And we’d have dealt with that democratically, without appearing undemocratic.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of the (mis)understanders of democracy who thinks what we have in Canada is an effective people’s democracy. But if we’re to improve material outcomes for people while still doing democracy, I think we need radically more democratic processes not less.
Agreed on all counts.
On that account, I’ll go have a greek village salad with a warm Metaxa after work, at my local Greek restaurant. 😁
