Good morning this crisp, autumn October 20, 2025, friends and fellow comrades across Canada, and particularly those who have publicly leapt into the NDP leadership race, and the NDP HQ. I am writing to ask for your support in what I consider to be an incredibly simple call:
Support a Transparent, Fair, and Democratic leadership contest.
Sounds simple, right? Easy? It should be, ought to be. Before the leadership race, Avi Lewis astutely observed that, over the course of the contest, 'party insiders' would be prominent. He noted, correctly, that “it was these insiders - and their expertise - that engineered the NDP’s decades of incremental, Liberal-lite politics” and that “their kind of politics brought us to the low point where we now must begin again." Lewis charged that these insiders “are going to fight like hell for what they insist belongs to them” because “they think of the NDP as *their* party. Their (broken) toy. Their club, to run by their rules.” Lewis demanded that "our process - our decision - is made in the sunlight of collective action, not the back rooms where insiders ply their trade.” He concluded “let the members decide.” Hear, hear!
All I am asking and calling for is public support, from Rob Ashton, Tanile Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson, and Yves Engler, and whoever else wants to, for this principle. It ought to be easy for Avi, they’re his words! Similarly it ought to be easy for Rob Ashton. If Ashton is as hard as nails, born in the labour union as he says, then he’ll be more than familiar with weasel words and procedural ratfuckery, and would want to publicly oppose this kind of conduct in the strongest terms possible. Even McPherson, if she really stands against ‘purity tests’ and wants to welcome a broad tent in the party, then there could be no finer demonstration of that than by publicly affirming support for an open, transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest. I don’t know Ms Johnston well but I think she’d likely support it, too. And I know that my friend and comrade Yves Engler would support such an initiative.
This is important. It is actually incredibly important. I owe Avi Lewis $100, but I have a stop payment on this debt until such time as I am assured that my hard earned dollars are actually permitting of the democratic process – which now I am not so sure of. Can we have a democratic leadership contest? Is HQ going to procedurally disqualify the most vibrant and necessary voices a-priori? I’m not going to argue the details of the manufacturing of consent for this, because I think they’re silly. I’ll just note that if consent *is* manufactured for this kind of undemocratic conduct, it would be a wound from which Social Democracy in Canada may not actually ever recover.
I do not care if my preferred candidate wins. I genuinely don’t. If there is a transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest, I’ll fight for the gills for the party of the person who wins. But if that doesn’t occur, if there is first principles rat-fuckery, I will not only not donate to or support that party – buddy, I will devote my waking hours to heaving it into the dustbin of history. I don’t want that, and for those blithe to the ramifications of the ‘New Democratic Party’ starting out its fledgling new life upon an act of supreme anti-democracy, I assure you, you don’t want that. That, feeling like the NDP isn’t actually the party of Democratic Socialism in Canada at all, that HQ is just pulling the strings to sell us another stupid spectacle, is exactly what got us here in the first place. We should not be fighting one another, we should be uniting to oppose Carney and his devastating cuts, and Poillievre and his idiocy. Beginning this leadership contest by being lax as it pertains to procedural exclusion by the NDP insider caste would, perhaps irrevocably, poison this.
So, again, I am publicly asking for each of the NDP leadership Candidates, and preferably NDP central itself, to on record affirm their support for a transparent, fair, and democratic leadership contest.
Thank you,
- dc
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