A different track

A personal political history

I was hesitant to share this, as I find contemporary autobiographical sketches rather dull and indicative of the current monetizable culture of “influencers” of which I am deeply critical - particularly in politics. But I’m presently working through a lot of emotions and kept returning to my own experiences with the party that suffered the most in Monday’s election. So, If you’ll indulge, I’d like to set aside my own aversion to lengthy personal histories and set the stage for today’s edition with a glimpse into my political education.

That story - the story of how I came to support the New Democratic Party - started with an unexpected dinner guest.

***

But a backstory before we get there. I was in the last few months of Grade 5 when Governor General Adrienne Clarkson accepted Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s request to dissolve the 36th Parliament of Canada, kicking off the 2000 Federal Election. At that point, I had already begun to display nerdy tendencies, as evidenced by my habit of following the student teacher who had been assigned to my class around during recess, relentlessly pestering them with inane questions about everything around me.

That endlessly patient student teacher had been handed the task of introducing all of us to the wonderful world of civics and had decided that the best way of getting us ready to be good citizens was to hold a mock election. Some of my classmates were given the responsibility of being advocates for each of the major parties - the governing Liberals, the opposition Canadian Alliance, the still-new Bloc Québécois, the New Democrats, and the not-quite-dead-yet Progressive Conservatives - and would try to convince the rest of the class to cast ballots for their party. Either because of my pestering, or owing to a desire to keep me occupied with a meaningful task, I was given a special role: class “returning officer”, responsible for counting the ballots and making sure the election was free and fair.

My classmates made their pitches, everyone voted at a fake polling station, and then I opened the box to do the count. Two things happened during that faux election. First, Chrétien’s Liberals earned a massive majority from the Westwood Elementary School Grade 5 class. Second, I became obsessed with politics.

***

As my interest in politics grew, things began changing in Canada. The slow-motion Liberal Party coup over 2002 and 2003 eventually crested, resulting in Paul Martin becoming Prime Minister. At the same time, Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay began their awkward tango that would eventually result in the creation of the modern Conservative Party. Alexa McDonough had ceded the NDP leadership to a slightly-unknown Toronto city councillor named Jack Layton and the Green Party was on track to field a full slate of candidates for the first time in their history.

But the most significant factor in my political maturation had to be the Sponsorship Scandal. It seems like a silly little historical relic these 20 years later but, at the time, it dominated the news. Sheila Fraser’s revelation that the Liberal Party had funneled hundreds of millions into party-affiliated ad firms, the explosive testimony about actual corruption at the Gomery Inquiry, the razor-thin margins on votes in Parliament to keep Martin’s government alive…it was genuinely fascinating to me. Not only did I watch the news obsessively, but I began searching for as much information as I could on the Internet.

The enthusiasm amongst Canadian conservatives for their new party and the prospect of regaining power after over a decade in the splintered wilderness meant that most of the Sponsorship Scandal content I was consuming came from the online right. As a consequence, my political coming-of-age was influenced to an incredible degree by conservatism. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I became an obnoxious little teenage libertarian.

***

Contemporary right-libertarianism is unrestrained arrogance manifest. It is, at its core, a very teenage philosophy - this notion that all your successes, all your positive attributes, all your accomplishments are yours and yours alone. And, on the flip side, if something isn’t working, it’s because there’s a nefarious authority figure preventing it from working as it should. It suited me well; I balked at being told what to do, thought I was invincible, and knew that things were broken and needed to be fixed, assuming I already had all the tools I would ever need to fix things all by my big boy self. Just your average suburban teenager.

After the 2006 Federal Election, Martin’s Liberals were thrown out in favour of Harper’s Big (Tent) Shiny Tories. As enthusiastic as I was about this change, I was concerned that my riding - Hamilton Mountain - had not flipped from Liberal to Tory, but had instead gone to the NDP, and by a sizable margin at that.

I was even more concerned that, having been selected as one of my high school’s participants in one of the 2007 sessions of the Forum for Young Canadians - the ultimate field trip for young political nerds - I would need to invite my NDP MP, Chris Charlton, to a reception dinner. A teenage libertarian inviting a social democrat to dinner!? Perish the thought!

I sent in the invite through the official channels and set off for Ottawa, full of youthful enthusiasm. I met my three roommates for the few days I was in the capital - including eventual (and soon-to-be former) Québec solidaire co-leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and 2012 Alberta Liberal candidate Kyle Morrow - wandered down Sparks Street, and gazed in awe at Parliament Hill, where I’d spend most of my time during the Forum.

When it came time for the reception dinner, I was told by the event’s organizers that my MP had accepted the invitation and was, in fact, one of the few to do so. That was my first time meeting Chris Charlton, who was one of the stars of the event, asking about our experience in Ottawa, letting us know about the role of an MP, casually chatting with everyone from the awkward teenage participants to the seasoned chaperones.

This unsettled my world view. The internet people told me the NDP was full of angry, mean socialists who would make economy not work no good no more. And, yet, my MP took time out of her busy schedule, seemed competent and personable, and had showed a genuine interest in my ideas.

***

A few months later, I was working on my university applications and becoming increasingly concerned about the cost of tuition. I had a job at Fortino’s, had good enough grades for a modest entrance scholarship, and could count on support from my family. Still, tuition costs kept increasing and it seemed like the numbers weren’t adding up. In my youthful naïveté, I wanted to do something about it while keeping my options open. So, naturally, I sent letters to Chris Charlton and Peter MacKay. I never received a response from the latter, but my own MP took the time to call me to discuss my concerns. For over an hour, we talked about how to make Canada a better, more inclusive, more vibrant place and what it would take to universalize post-secondary education (yes, it is technically a provincial issue, but we agreed that the federal government could have a role in coordinating a national-level response like it did with the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act and Canada Health Act).

That settled it for me. Chris was funny, kind, and patient with me - a curious kid who had previously held vastly different views to her own. Here was an MP who genuinely took an interest in my concern and worked with me to address it. I felt seen by someone in politics and, more importantly, felt like I was truly engaging with democracy.

I began reading up on the history of the NDP, familiarizing myself with the political left, and began to ask how I could involve myself more with my workplaces’ union. And then, on my 18th birthday, I took out an official membership in the NDP.

As luck would have it, just over two months later, Governor General Michaëlle Jean accepted Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s request to dissolve the 39th Parliament of Canada, kicking off the 2008 Federal Election.

I looked up where the NDP’s campaign HQ was on Hamilton Mountain (a run-down, out-of-place bungalow on Upper James that, after briefly becoming a nail salon, was demolished in 2021) and, after finishing my first week of classes at McMaster, hopped on a 27 - Upper James bus. I walked in and announced to the first person I saw that I wanted to volunteer, which raised some understandably cautious eyebrows. Only after a few weeks of volunteering did I understand why people were initially suspicious; over the course of the campaign, a handful of people wandered into the office at different times, purporting to be “interested” in the NDP, all while trying to get a look around, study our maps and any open tabs on the office computers, and make everyone feel as uncomfortable as possible. Each one of these people would eventually be spotted at Liberal Party events, having been part of their party’s campaign all along.

I evidently passed everyone’s test (a healthy dose of “why are you here?” and “what interests you about the NDP?” and “do you know Chris?”) and was soon tasked with assembling lawn signs. I graduated up to a very brief stint calling supporters (that lasted all of an evening given how bad I was at it), then to data entry, and, eventually, to canvassing. By mid-September, I was canvassing whole polls on my own, bounding around the Mountain with youthful enthusiasm, only stopping once it had grown dark and people became less interested in opening the door for a strange young man with a clipboard. People seemed impressed by Chris’ time in Ottawa, shared stories about family members helped by her office, and liked the alternative that Jack Layton provided to the same old stale politics many were used to at that point.

***

It’s important to remember that I was 18 at the time. While I had moved on from my teenage libertarian phase, I was still a little too cocky for my own good. In late September, I was given the task of “cleaning up” a poll in Eastmount along Concession. Poll clean-up meant going back over a poll that had already been extensively canvassed to try and reach the people that had not yet been contacted by the campaign. From the start, the whole endeavour was a disaster. An elderly Liberal supporter scolded me for bothering her (despite her husband’s past support for the NDP), a Green supporter questioned my use of paper canvassing sheets, and an Effort Trust apartment supervisor threatened to call the police on me (which would, itself, be illegal, as property managers and supervisors are prohibited from preventing candidates and their representatives from reaching voters). Dejected, I returned to the campaign office and aired my frustrations around Chris and the campaign team. This, I quickly learned, was absolutely verboten so as to not demoralize the candidate. I had a stern talking-to from one of the campaign workers and opted to slink home, embarrassed by my inadvertent faux pas.

I stayed away from the campaign office for a few days, mortified by the prospect that I might have demoralized the candidate I was now so enthusiastically supporting. But, within a few days, I had gotten a call from one of the campaign workers asking when I’d be back. They missed having me around the office and relied on my enthusiastic canvassing efforts to help them identify voters in key polls across the Mountain. And, importantly, they needed my help with something. Jack Layton, it turned out, would be coming to Hamilton Mountain on September 22 and needed party supporters to fill the room. When the day rolled around, I mustered the courage, hopped on another bus (this time a 43 - Stone Church), and made my way to Michelangelo’s to see the man himself.

The enthusiasm in the room was intoxicating. Students and labour leaders and local environmentalists and seniors and people from all corners of Hamilton talked excitedly about the NDP’s prospects, sharing stories about how the party’s campaigns were finding supporters in the most unexpected of places. Momentum, it seemed, was on our side. And, when the time came to file into the main ballroom, someone pulled me aside, handed me a sign, and told me to get up on stage. I had been chosen to be part of the backdrop.

I remember shaking his hand. I remember the raucous applause his best lines earned from the crowd. I remember how stiflingly hot it was. I remember worrying if I wasn’t smiling enough. I remember feeling like I was part of something.

Only after the event did someone from the campaign tell me that I managed to make it into one of the photos. Turns out I was smiling plenty.

***

That wasn’t the end of the 2008 campaign. After my little misstep and subsequent recovery, I threw myself into the campaign with even more enthusiasm. But, as the polls began to tighten, the Liberal campaign on Hamilton Mountain became even more aggressive.

The Liberal candidate - local lawyer Tyler Banham - had a campaign staffed heavily from the ranks of McMaster’s Liberals. His team brought the same youthful enthusiasm to his campaign as I did to the NDP’s, only with more resources and a more polished central party to support them. In early October, they did something that shook up the race: they released a YouTube attack ad. The novel approach became a major story in the Spec, with columnist Mark McNeil noting that the “spunky” ad had racked up “more than 1,000” views. The ad claimed that Chris’ constituency office closed at 1:00 PM everyday, portraying the NDP as a bunch of slackers. “It’s 3:00 PM on Hamilton Mountain,” the ad read, asking “Where will you turn when you’re [sic] MP won’t pick up the phone.” The ad was a deliberate mischaracterization, of course; Chris’ office spent the afternoons doing follow-ups and hosting in-person meetings. I personally knew this, as that was precisely the time when Chris answered my tuition inquiry that so inspired me.¹

There were other run-ins with the Liberals that offered me a real-world education in the rough-and-tumble world of Hamilton’s electoral politics. There were more instances of spying, obscene phone calls, accusations of a “sign war”, near-fist fights at all candidate’s debates, and plenty of petty sniping on the Internet.

On election day, I was assigned with “pulling the vote” from some of the NDP’s strongest polls near the escarpment, around Concession Street. As I watched the count happen as a scrutineer at St. Stephen-On-The-Mount Anglican Church, I remembered back to when I was in Grade 5, serving as the returning officer for my class’ mock election. There I was, just eight years later, volunteering during the first election in which I was eligible to vote.

Chris won every poll that I observed the count at, and won re-election by a substantial margin despite a drop in voter turnout. The Liberals sank to third in the riding. And I felt like I had done my part to make a difference in our democracy.

***

After that, I joined the Hamilton Mountain NDP riding association as a youth officer. I mostly bored them with my reports on how difficult it was to get a McMaster branch of the Campus New Democrats off the ground. Lacking any proper organizing training, I ended up bombarding prospective student volunteers with emails to the point where our e-newsletter membership list dropped and one frustrated list member said my emails “made them want to vote Liberal.” I abandoned my efforts after just one year.

It wasn’t all bad, though. During that tumultuous year of campus organizing, I also helped on the campaign of Andrea Horwath, who was running an underdog campaign for leader of the provincial NDP. While my support for Horwath was based largely on her endorsement by Chris Charlton and the Mountain NDP, I also had a personal connection to the Hamilton Centre MPP; while I was pestering Chris about tuition fees, I was also running a food drive at my high school on the west mountain. Not only did Horwath come and provide support, she helped pack boxes of canned goods on Halloween night, gave a motivational speech to volunteers about the importance of community-building activities like the one in which we were engaged, and sent us all congratulatory notes after we surpassed our goals for amount of donations collected. She showed a genuine interest in us, much the same way Chris did for me.

Not long after the 2008 campaign wrapped up, I was in the Hamilton Convention Centre, standing with her supporters, as Horwath won the party’s leadership, becoming the first woman to lead the provincial NDP.

***

Little did I know that that would be the high-point of my involvement with the party.

By 2011, any free time I had was consumed with student government, meaning I wasn’t able to offer as much help during the incredible campaign that brought the NDP to official opposition status. From there, it was all downhill, slow but steady.

Jack died just three months after the 2011 election. I found out while working a shift at the campus bookstore. My supervisor gave me an extra break. A short while later, we played his funeral over the store’s televisions. Colleagues and customers alike said they felt like they had lost a friend.

Jack’s death threw the party into turmoil. Chris and the Hamilton Mountain NDP backed one of Layton’s closest advisors, Brian Topp, so, naturally, I did as well. At the 2012 NDP leadership convention, I was captured (partially obscured by a microphone) by a Maclean’s photographer, standing behind Topp and one of his highest profile supporters, former leader Ed Broadbent, as it was announced former Quebec Liberal Tom Mulcair had won.

The magazine entitled the photo “Disappointment”.

***

All along the way, there were internal party battles over executive positions and nomination races and electoral strategy. I had the support of the Hamilton Mountain NDP when I ran for public school trustee in 2014, but other wings of the party backed another candidate. After I lost, I felt left out, washed up, irrelevant, all at the ripe old age of 24.

When Chris announced her retirement, the stage was set for a nomination battle. I had moved to Hamilton Centre, but remained close with my political mentors and offered my enthusiastic support to Bryan Adamczyk, the ONDP’s candidate on the Mountain in 2007 and one of the kindest, most dedicated party members I had come to know during my time with the NDP. In a surprise turn of events, Ward 7 councillor Scott Duvall also announced he would be running, which shocked many of the riding association’s long-term members. The nomination race was contentious, as they often are, though, when Duvall won, there were calls for unity from Chris and from Adamczyk.² Over the next few years, the Hamilton Mountain riding association would change dramatically, with nearly every person I had known during my formative political years moving on.

I stepped back, threw myself into grad school, and, in 2016, ventured off to Montreal for my Ph.D. The same year, Mulcair was ousted by the party’s leadership, kicking off a whole new race for leader. I backed Charlie Angus, with whom I was consistently impressed, even as my friends in the Hamilton Mountain wing backed Guy Caron. Neither candidate could topple the powerhouse that was Jagmeet Singh, who clinched the leadership with nearly 54% support on the first ballot. In 2019, the party lost 15 seats and sank to just below 16% in the popular vote.

And then there was a global pandemic. And then I moved back to Hamilton. And then I offered my help to the Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas (The HWAD) NDP in an effort to get back into things. I loved helping Roberto Henriquez, who was as personable and kind as Chris Charlton was when I first got involved with the party. While I was happy that, through the work of Roberto and the campaign’s handful of volunteers, he was able to earn nearly 20% of the vote in a riding that overwhelmingly favoured the Liberals, that campaign did more to disillusion me than anything.

I sat in the campaign office, flipping through the materials sent to us by the central party on how to canvass and craft a message. For every single policy point - national defence, healthcare, the COVID-19 response, the environment, electoral reform - the party’s suggested response began with “Justin Trudeau has failed us on…” There wasn’t a shred of positivity in any of the party’s messaging, nor was there any of the ambition that had characterized the campaigns when Layton was the leader. The party seemed to be content to campaign as though it wanted to remain in opposition rather than provide a coherent and compelling governing alternative. The proposals offered were vague, the messaging was negative, and the campaign focused almost exclusively on the presumed popularity of Jagmeet Singh. During his brief stop in Hamilton, Singh spoke for a few minutes about how Justin Trudeau needed to go before spending three times as long posing for selfies with the assembled crowd.

The 2021 election was a mixed bag. The NDP won more seats in British Columbia and Alberta, while losing their last seat in Atlantic Canada and, devastatingly, ceding Hamilton Mountain to the Liberals. Even though we were able to increase the NDP’s share of the vote in The HWAD, the party lost support in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek - an ominous foreshadowing of trends to come. At the end of 2021, I let my party membership lapse for the first time since I was 18, unsure I could so closely associate myself with an organization that seemed so unwilling to change.

And then came the 2022 provincial election. And then came the Sarah Jama nomination, election, and expulsion in Hamilton Centre. And then came the NDP’s inability to define itself amidst a rejuvenated Liberal Party - both provincially and federally, throughout 2025.

And then came Monday night.

A brand new world

The 2025 election results are the single worst showing by the New Democratic Party since the party was created in 1961. The caucus is the smallest it has ever been - smaller even than after the party’s last complete collapse in 1993. The percent of the popular vote earned by NDP candidates across Canada is the lowest it’s ever been in both the history of the NDP and the history of the CCF that preceded it. A party affiliated with labour has not earned so little of the vote since disparate groups of independent Labour candidates ran in just 11 ridings across Canada in 1930. The approximately 1.2 million votes cast for NDP candidates is the fifth smallest overall total number of votes the party has ever earned. There are still some judicial recounts to be conducted, but preliminary results indicate that the overwhelming majority of NDP candidates running earned between 1% and 5% of the vote. For the first time since 2004, there are no New Democrats from Ontario in Parliament.

Here in Hamilton, the combined NDP vote total for the five ridings that intersect with our city limits was 9.8%. That represents a 17.5% drop from the party’s average over the last three elections. This is more substantial than the Canada-wide decline and far more dramatic than the less extreme, yet still relevant collapse in Green and People’s Party support. Combined, 88.4% of Hamiltonians voted for their local Liberal or Conservative candidate.

Hamilton lost our last NDP voice in Ottawa, Matthew Green, who fell to fourth behind Conservative Hayden Lawrence and Hamilton Centre’s new MP, Aslam Rana. While Green only lost around 4,000 votes, voter turnout in Hamilton Centre surged, allowing both the Liberal and Tory candidates to earn over 10,000 more votes than their predecessors did in 2021. Rana, who lives in Mississauga, told voters that, if he won, he would like to move to Corktown.

***

There have been a lot of think pieces published in the 48ish hours since the election. The NDP’s result has been blamed on Trump, on Singh, on Carney, on local candidates, on the party’s central organization, on strategic voting, on history, on wokeness, on centrism, on high voter turnout, on the loss of local media, and on Tom Mulcair (always a classic).

The analysis I’m most interested in, though, comes from Charlie Angus, who opted to not run for re-election. In a post on his Substack, Angus made some astute observations:

There have been endless critiques of the way the party has operated for years. The grassroots has bemoaned the fact that conventions are stacked to avoid controversy, that unelected officials have too much say in how the party operates, that communication from the NDP asks for your credit card number more than it asks for your perspective, that the party elevates the leader to such a degree that they eclipse all the real talent that exists in caucus. This isn’t just the gadflies in the Socialist Caucus or militant young activists. These complaints have come from all corners and at different times, both good and bad. And these complaints have consistently been ignored.

***

I don’t know where to go from here. I haven’t been a member of the party in years, having been effectively ostracized for not following the line with fanatical devotion. Indeed, I’ve been informed by trusted associates that many of the party’s higher-ups in the area believe I am untrustworthy or that I’m a secret Liberal spy, all because I had the audacity to publicly critique some of the party’s more ill-advised decisions.

I have said this before, but there are four obvious paths.

The first is to give up and accept that Canada is slowly becoming a two-party state. This means we have to rely on the benevolence of an unreliable centre-right Liberal Party to save us from the unhinged recklessness of a hard-right-wing populist Conservative Party. That’s no solution. That’s capitulation.

The second is to shift support to the Greens. While this has proven to be a viable alternative for our friends in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia, the Canadian Greens simply haven’t put the effort into defining themselves as a competent alternative. With the loss of Mike Morrice in Kitchener and Jonathan Pedneault resigning after the Green’s disastrous result on Monday, they once again become the Elizabeth May Party - west-coast focused, ideologically-eclectic, and unmoored to any social movement of substance.

The third is to dig in, work to transform the party from within, and focus on rebuilding. That’s what Jack worked to do when he took over the NDP in 2004, bringing the party out of the wilderness of the 90’s and putting them on track to become a compelling, serious, inspiring option for Canadians. That work is complicated by the party’s institutionalized staff who tightly control the party’s operations - both day-to-day and during campaigns. With them at the helm, there’s little opportunity to change the ship’s direction. They’re committed to the course they’re on, even if they keep running into iceberg after iceberg.

The fourth is to splinter and create a new party. Take the Reform route and just keep at it until people see you as a legitimate option. Take key seats from the NDP, position yourself as the party’s successor, and then swallow them up. The Reform/Alliance folks did that with the PCs. The Coalition Avenir Québec did it to the Action démocratique du Québec. The British Columbia Conservatives did it to the British Columbia Liberals/United. The Saskatchewan Party did it to that province’s PCs and Liberals. The Wildrose did it to the Alberta PCs. The political right is really, really good at this in Canada. If a party proves to be too inflexible, too committed to its losing ways, too controlled by pigheaded staffers, then break off and provide a more interesting alternative. We on the left rarely have that kind of success (the 2011 iteration of the Socialist Party of Ontario is the cautionary tale there).

Based on all these options, I once again return to say: I don’t know where to go from here. Is the NDP brand worth saving? Do we need to try something new? Is there another brand that could be a more effective vehicle for left-of-centre politics? Is it even worth trying?

I don’t know what the answer is anymore.

But I know that the answer isn’t to just give up. People deserve a legitimate, compelling, viable, evidence-based, human-focused left-wing alternative. People deserve a party that tells them it isn’t too outlandish to dream of a better world. People deserve a party that will, as Angus says, stand up for the little guy.

When I walked into that NDP campaign office in 2008, I felt like I was joining a movement I really believed in. I want to feel that again. I want a party that I am enthusiastic to vote for, willing to campaign with, happy to become a member of. I want a party that matters. We all deserve that.

We know we have to choose a different track. The goal now is to figure out which track is best.

1  _{Mark McNeil. “Campaign trailblazers” Hamilton Spectator, October 8, 2008 (Spec archive link).}

2  _{Daniel Noman. “NDP seeks to heal wounds after Duvall wins nod for Hamilton Mountain.” Hamilton Spectator, March 30, 2015 (Spec archive link).}