When Jagmeet Singh told Canadaland earlier this year that there was no “plan B” if he didn’t become Prime Minister in the recent election, I assumed he was just being a politician and dodging the question. But he meant it. Turns out there was really no plan for what came next, and now they’re living with the consequences.
The NDP is in the fight of its life. They’re down to seven seats, and even those seven feel like they’re held together with duct tape and a group chat no one reads. They fought over who should be the interim leader. They fought over so-called “purity tests.” And they just could not get it together and vote together on budget day.
This is the state of the party that someone now has to inherit. A party with no clear direction, no united front, and no recent wins to point to. Oh, and they’re in debt. And yet… five (delusional? brave? your pick) people still want the job. Five people who have looked at this mess and said, “I’ll take it from here folks.”
Here’s who they are, and how each of them thinks they can actually pull that off:
Heather McPherson
McPherson is the only candidate who has actually won a federal seat – twice – and she did it in deep-blue Conservative Alberta.
She says rebuilding the NDP isn’t guesswork; they’ve done it before with year-round organizers, shared resources, early candidate recruitment, and volunteers country-wide.
It’s that strategy that she credits for helping elect Blake Dejarlais in 2021.
McPherson’s core message is about opening up the party. She’s the MP who warned against “purity tests,” a phrase that pissed off some of her caucus colleagues. But in our interview, she was unapologetic about what she meant.
“There have been folks who don’t feel welcome because they don’t have all the words,” she says.
“We’re a party that started with farmers and urban workers coming together. And if you talk to farmers and urban workers in this country right now, they maybe don’t feel welcome at our party.”
She positions herself as a unifier, someone who can bring climate activists and oil workers into the same room without treating either like the enemy.
“Those conversations are tough, but there’s not a single New Democrat in Alberta that I’ve met that doesn’t believe there’s a climate crisis, that doesn’t believe that we have to deal with the climate. And there isn’t a single person in Quebec or British Columbia who I think doesn’t worry about whether or not they have a family-sustaining job,” she said.
McPherson also argues that the NDP needs to stop trying to be a fix-everything-for-everyone party. With Canadians drowning in affordability and housing crises, she says the party needs to focus its message and stay there.
“Affordability and housing. We need some discipline on that.”
Avi Lewis
Lewis doesn’t think the NDP is anywhere near ready to govern.
“We’re certainly not forming government anytime soon,” he says. “One of the things that really pisses people off about politics is when people pretend they’re going to be prime minister in a minute, and I think it’s a time for straight talk from the NDP.”
Instead, Lewis frames the job ahead as a multi-cycle rebuild. Right now, he’s focused on regaining party status and is hopeful the NDP will win up to 50 seats next election.
Central to Lewis’ rebuild is a “clearer, sharper offer,” one he says is rooted in moral clarity rather than message-tested consultant-approved politics.
He’s especially critical of the party’s overreliance on technocratic communications. He says, “If we just get the right words that have been tested and have been proven to work on people, and we say them over and over and over and over again in the same order, that’s how we have our breakthrough. And I don’t think that’s what works in politics today.
Another central component to his rebuild, he argues, is reconnecting with two groups of voters in particular that he thinks the party left behind: the working class in the suburbs and voters in rural Canada.
“The suburbs are where the multiracial, multigenerational working class lives,” he says. “Rural Canada is absolutely key to a climate-safe food economy…I actually think it’s a mistake to abandon the rural parts of every province just because they’ve gone blue in election after election.”
Rob Ashton
Ashton is a longshoreman turned union president who has never held political office and wears that as a badge of honour.
“I’m not a politician type,” he says. “ If you look at me, if you listen to the way I speak. I swear. I used to swear a lot more than I do now, but I swear. I like whiskey. I like beer.”
Rob says he never grew up with money or power. He promises to wear his work boots in the House of Commons, and pitches himself as someone who won’t break faith with the people he comes from – workers.
“Never going to turn my back on it [the working class]. Because if I ever do, I know the members of my union will kick my ass.”
He believes the NDP’s future hinges on whether working-class Canadians can trust them again. Right now, he says, they don’t.
“We have to earn the trust of Canadians,” he says, “the NDP has got to stop wanting to be like the other parties.”
He thinks the party has become too careful to say what it actually believes. Instead, he wants an “unapologetically loud” labour-anchored NDP that stops ceding class politics to the Conservatives.
“We have to be screaming at the top of our lungs that we’re not going to take the liberals and the conservatives pretending to be for workers, or pretending that they got the best interests of Canadians when actual fact, they just want to hold our heads under a bucket of water and wait until we’re begging for breath.”
Tony McQuail
McQuail is a Quaker, a lifelong anti-war activist, and has run five times federally to no avail.
His message is about serious systemic change.
People, he argues, have lost faith in a system that doesn’t represent them. “Over half the people don’t vote, and half the people who do vote have their votes thrown out on election night because they don’t get any representation because of our first-past-the-post system,” he says.
McQuail wants a united coalition between the Green Party and the NDP, and believes Canada needs to stop growing, and that “we are growing ourselves off the planet.”
On the topic of the military, he proposes a non-violent, citizen-led national defence that disengages from US militarism.
McQuail also wants the party to stop sending “vacuous emails” and start educating its members on real solutions. “Sending out information that helps us know how we could actually solve these problems [homelessness] and how other countries are doing it, and actually start building an informed membership.”
Tanille Johnston
Johnston says becoming Prime Minister isn’t the point, at least not right now.
“I’m not focused on being Prime Minister,” she says. “I think it’s an unrealistic goal.”
For Johnston, the real job is “rising [the party] from the ashes,” and to do that, she wants to start by apologizing.
“A lot of time in community, a lot of time listening to where folks felt left behind, where previous candidates felt like they were ignored and just kind of left in the dust by the party and apologizing for those missteps, apologizing for those faults that we need to take and own.”
She says people drifted away from the party because of how long the NDP held onto the supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals.
“It’s probably going to be decades before we live that [supply and confidence agreement] down, to be honest.”
Johnston argues the NDP needs to stop running candidates in ridings where they can only split the vote, and instead wants to cooperate with the Greens.
She believes her background gives her an edge: “I understand why rural ridings feel like they’ve been left behind. I bring a vastly different lens to this work as an indigenous candidate, as a much younger candidate… And I’m from a rural riding, like born and raised rural.”
Top graphic by max collins
