Introduction:
During the August long weekend, a Canadian politician sat in a Smitty’s diner, recording a selfie video. He talked about a waitress he met who worked at least sixty hours a week but still finds that her money “vanishes into thin air.” This, he noted, is “what I see everywhere. People telling me that they’re working harder and harder, and their money just evaporates.”
It sounds like something the leader of the New Democratic Party might say. The story is about ordinary Canadians stretched thin. It’s a story of the working class. But no, the kitchen-table parable was delivered by Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader. Canada, Poilievre said in the video, should be a country “where hard work pays off.”
Just over a month later, former journalist and left-wing activist Avi Lewis released his own YouTube video, a hype trailer for his bid to lead the federal NDP—a race to replace former leader Jagmeet Singh that will culminate in a vote at the party’s conference in March. (Lewis’s grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founders of the party.) Canadians, he said, are living “an everyday emergency of just trying to get by in an impossible economy,” and he lamented that “working hard doesn’t earn you a living.”
You see the problem for the NDP. At a time when the rent is devouring paycheques, wealth is pooling at the top, and economic nationalism is resurgent, right wingers are beginning to sound like Canada’s leading social democratic party. A closer listen reveals important differences in the solutions they propose—more on that later—but the topline narrative is the same.
You’d be forgiven for assuming this is strictly about branding. It’s not. What the NDP is up against is much more structural, more deeply cultural. The real challenge isn’t just the language it uses; it’s semantics. The shared understanding of what words mean has shifted dramatically under the party’s feet. This fundamental change, driven by a new kind of political and ideological identity, has left the NDP struggling not just to communicate but to understand its mission as a social democratic party.
Now, with just a handful of seats left in the House of Commons and a leadership race underway, the NDP finds itself at a critical juncture. It can reclaim its mission by giving new meaning to its message, or it can keep misunderstanding the cultural landscape and fade into nothingness. Evolve—or die.
Carney already cut immigration significantly but the previous influx has already changed the demographics, voting tendencies and culture of Canada, forever.
The NDP haven't been the labour party in a long time, since Layton, it's the party of immigrants and social justice causes. The economy is such a fundamentally significant factor that reaches across all other issues and the NDP have abandoned improving labour's relationship with that economy by ensuring the value of that labour is distributed justly across the economy. Jagmeet was an immigrant leader who chased a life of privilege and luxury but rose to popularity because of those demographic shift brought on by the immigration policies of Trudeau and the imported labour schemes of business friendly Harper.
There is no labour, working class party and the workers are largely to blame as they can't seem to figure out what is actually important to the empowering of the working class. Instead, they chase social justice issues, demanding an equal splitting of an ever shrinking pie, prioritize immigration politics, make believe themselves into conservative entrepreneurs, or pick a color and never think about policy at all.
Yeah that's summed up well.
Still waiting on a truly democratic socialist party to come around. I hate liberalism and this corporate socialism and big mergers like shaw and Rogers make me fucking sad.
It all concentrates power into fewer and fewer hands. People like to think slavery and horrible living conditions are a historic thing but the only thing preventing it is the even distribution of power and were losing that. Humans isolated by their power disparity today are just as capable of not seeing the powerless as human beings and treating us that way. Power concentrations are the antithesis of democracy and of a healthy and adaptable community. We are losing that with every merger and every increase in wealth disparity.