NDP grassroots buck against 'top-down' leadership race

National Observer

12-06-2025

After the unmitigated disaster that was the NDP's 2025 election result, prominent members are pushing back against an 'elitist' leadership race and want the party to rebuild from the grassroots up.
'We lost touch, and we have to be honest about that,' former MP Charlie Angus said at a June 11 press conference in Ottawa. 'We have to re-engage with people.'
When asked about Angus' comments, NDP interim leader Don Davies said it was a 'tough election' but he doesn't think the party lost touch.
The question of how to rebuild has become existential: the NDP is down to seven MPs and lost official party status for the first time since 1993. This limits the party's influence significantly. They no longer get a seat on committees to study issues and amend legislation, and no longer have the right to ask daily questions of the government during Question Period, among other lost privileges.
The party is searching for a way out of the wilderness, and doing so without a leader.
According to Angus, the party needs two things: a strong leader and a return to grassroots organizing. But the NDP must do more than just rally behind a leader, he emphasized.
'Nothing against Jagmeet [Singh], but we stopped being the New Democratic Party. We became Team Jagmeet, and that wasn't selling,' Angus said in an interview with Canada's National Observer.
With the NDP reduced to seven seats, Former MP Charlie Angus and party activists are pushing back against a "top-down approach" to the NDP leadership race and instead are advocating for a return to grassroots organizing.
'If it's all about just going to cheer on the leader, then the riding associations start to disintegrate,' he said.
Proposed leadership contest rules controversial
Angus, who once again ruled out a bid for the leadership, has run before: he ran against Singh in the 2017 NDP leadership race. At the time, the entry fee was $30,000. Now, there are rumblings among a handful of prominent New Democrats that the entry fee could go up to $150,000, the Globe and Mail reported last month.
Angus said he doesn't know what an acceptable fee for entry is but said $150,000 'seems like a high number.'
Brad Lavigne, a key member of former NDP leader Jack Layton's leadership team who also participated in Thomas Mulclair's race, said the leadership campaign needs to strike the balance between duration, financial viability and broad support.
Running a long leadership race can make the costs of a campaign for both the candidates and party unsustainable, Lavigne said.
Lavigne didn't speculate about an appropriate leadership fee, but noted fee thresholds self-select tenable candidates that have grassroots support from across the country.
"If you can't find 1,000 people to contribute $20, then how viable are you as a leadership candidate?' Lavigne said.
The primary objective of running any leadership campaign is to find a leader that has broad support from party members and get the majority of Canadians to vote NDP at the polls so it can implement the party's policies, he said.
'Grassroots members that I've talked to want to see a successful electoral game plan,' he said.
'It's not enough to make the case for policy ideas in the hopes that other parties will adopt them and enact them in Parliament.'
Grassroots 'tired of this top-down approach'
Des Bissonnette and Ashley Zarbatany, co-chairs of the Indigenous People's Commission, criticized the proposed leadership race fee and short race, arguing the plan is the brainchild of an unelected party elite that wasn't vetted by the executive council and will potentially exclude grassroots supporters and ideas.
'There are a lot of grassroots and team members who are tired of this top-down approach by the consultant class in our party,' said Zarbatany, who added the proposed fee is 'abysmal' and didn't represent the values or pocketbooks of a working-class party.
Ideas about the leadership race were floated in the press before discussing them with the federal executive, she added, reflecting the poor internal communication that also led to pushback by half the elected caucus around the selection of the interim leader, Don Davies.
Bissonnette, the NDP candidate for Lakeland, Sask. in the last election, agreed.
'There's never really any consultation with [federal NDP] council members on what direction the party is going to take most of the time,' she said.
'You're rubber-stamping decisions that they've already made, rather than actively engaging in the democratic process.'
The party has also shifted away from grassroots progressive values, she said, citing the decision to remove socialist language from the party's constitution and the failure to push hard for electoral reform while backing the Liberal government or in the election campaign.
'People like myself in the grassroots, the volunteers who are passionate about progressive politics want to see a real progressive party,' Bissonnette said.
Bissonnette and Zarbatany said the climate crisis is a key issue with many grassroots members of the party who feel environmental policy proposals get ignored.
Doubling down on centralist ideas that are too similar to the Liberal Party isn't going to lead to the renewal of the party, Zarbatany said.
'They are the reason why our party has suffered catastrophic electoral losses.'
'Kill Zoom'
Rebuilding the party is about far more than the leadership race, and last time round, the party's leader-centric focus undermined the role of local riding associations, Angus said.
'People living in 12 ridings probably decided the leadership last time and that left a lot of parts of the country out in the cold,' he said. The party must find a way for members in New Brunswick or rural Saskatchewan to feel like a part of the movement.
Angus' main recommendation to bring the party back to its grassroots origins? 'We need to kill Zoom,' he said.
'Everything by the NDP is done on Zoom. Zoom doesn't include anybody,' he told Canada's National Observer at Parliament Hill.
'We used to do pub nights. We used to do bean dinners,' he said. Angus said 'doing old-school organizing' with an emphasis on public meetings and getting people involved to vote at the party's convention are key, adding that TikTok views did not translate into votes.
Mobilizing the grassroots is trickier when you're strapped for cash, Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University, told Canada's National Observer last month.
'On the right, they just buy people, they just hire people to go out and go door to door, but the NDP don't have the resources to do that,' Pilon said.
With fewer people voting in general elections, the NDP is suffering more than other parties, Pilon said. In the postwar period, voter turnout was about 75 to 80 per cent, but in recent elections, it has slipped to between 60 and 65 per cent.
'The missing voters aren't just anyone. They tend to be poor. They tend to be less integrated with the political system. They tend to have less sense of social entitlement,' Pilon said.
The NDP needs to reconnect with these missing voters, but it will be challenging because you have to actually go out and meet them, he said.
The party lost touch with its traditional working-class base because it lacked an 'on-the-ground force,' Angus said.
'We need an honest appraisal of what went wrong,' he said. 'New Democrats aren't very honest when it comes to disasters. We sort of blame strategic voting, or we blame something. We made a lot of mistakes. I think people just want an honest accounting.'
Angus would not speculate on who might run for the party leadership.
'At the end of the day, this has to be about winning,' Angus said.
Rather than repeat the mistake of gambling everything on a likeable leader, Angus prefers to focus on how the party finds its people again.
'We don't need big ideas. We've got tons of big ideas … We don't need dramatic and bold moves. We need to re-engage and be the party that ordinary people feel has their back. It's pretty simple stuff, but maybe that's the hardest thing, is just going back to the grassroots, going back to coffee shops, going back to inviting people in and making them feel like they belong and that they're welcome, regardless of whether they say the right thing or not.'