The NDP in 2026 is a Party Stuck in 2016

The New Democratic Party (NDP) in the current year is a party stuck in the past. While we have praised the Provincial NDP under Premier Wab Kinew in Manitoba, the Federal NDP are in a sorry state, still barely recovering from having lost official party status with the Federal Election in 2025.

With the election of Avi Lewis to the leadership position of the Federal NDP, the party has managed to shed its “orange liberal” token minority leader in favour of a bargain Bernie Sanders.

Both Lewis and Singh are representative of the type of candidates that may have worked in the early to mid-2010s, but at this point are tired tropes for a tired party who’s entire hope lies in their ability to learn from yet another mistake if the party survives until that point.

To start off with the positives, at least the party has taken a step in a better direction, though the bar is extremely low, Jagmeet Singh represented the worst of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform, representing neo-liberalism relying entirely on tokenism with aesthetics of “Wokeness.”

Avi Lewis represents the more positive aspects of a DSA type platform, still is far from perfect, but not entirely negative. The best rhetoric coming out of the new leadership is advocating the fight against neo-liberal austerity policies by leveraging the Crown Corporations.

As Canadian Republicans — building an organization with our own platform, policy, and political ideas — this is something we can wholeheartedly get behind. The execution is key. It remains in question how well this would be implemented if pigs started flying and the NDP win the federal election.

If done well, a revival of our state-owned assets could provide a massive number of well paying unionized jobs, making our infrastructure world-class at a time when it is critical to meet the demands of a growing population. This is necessary to maintain our country’s sovereignty and could put our abundant natural resources towards much more productive uses.

At the bare minimum, it will make the current oligopoly of corporations have to be more competitive, but could also be the key to reducing our incredibly heavy tax burden by bringing in revenue to the federal budget.

Crown Corporations, with the right set of policies to accompany them, could be the building bloc for a system of market socialism in Canada, developing a dynamic economy that can compete on the world stage. However, the rest of the Lewis platform makes it clear that their version of this idea is more about managing a welfare state, stuck in an era that has already passed.

Unfortunately when it comes to economics, it seems the NDP leadership are steadfast on picking up the Western leftist legacy of the declaring war on efficiency. This would be a war fought against new technology in emerging fields, such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), and against the energy industry, as well, not only fossil fuels, but also nuclear energy.

The basic premise that this war on efficiency is built on is a falsehood of the material privilege of the “labour aristocracy” without the realization that without modern imperialism, the raw resources necessary to build out an economy being only renewables is simply unfeasible. Ironically, this approach would save the pencil pusher jobs in the bureaucracy by increasing the price of electricity needed for replacing their mental labour with AI.

This will keep Canada’s development stagnated, ignoring the fact that it is the leap to a higher level of productivity which is the ultimate path to prosperity for a society. in the name of keeping unionized workers comfortable in the immediate short term horizon. This is the equivalent argument of claiming that modern farming equipment “took away the livelihood of serfs.”

While change is scary, it’s necessary to be at the cutting edge of the global economy. The role of state should be in enabling innovation, taking advantage of the opportunities presented up by these unstoppable developments in the global economy, determining how to direct sustainable growth while making sure that disruptive technology is responsibly regulated, so that we do not end up in a technocratic dystopia, like what is happening in America.

This negligence of disruptive technology is criminally lazy, fetishizing labour for labour’s sake, serving only to keep the country frozen in time in the 2010s.

The new platform makes a lot more sense when you take even a small look at Lewis’s family legacy within social democratic politics. This contextualizes the party’s direction as a niche for ideologically driven radical leftists who want to use the party to virtue signal instead of getting legislation passed.

This could be seen from the floor at the 2026 NDP Federal Convention with the speaking access to the microphones tiered via the so-called “progressive stack” leading to viral clips that felt borderline satirical, featuring the kind of “point of privilege” discourse made infamous by DSA.

This added to the feeling that the current year NDP is straight from the culture wars of the 2010s. The fact this type of radical leftist still makes up a sizable amount of the delegates of the party is a problem preventing the NDP from being seen as a serious political party by working class Canadians.

The party today embodies a right-wing strawman attack of socialists.

Hopefully the NDP will come to its senses before it’s too late so that the party infrastructure can be put to good use by Canadians attempt to break us out of being a two party dominant parliamentary system. It is clear that beyond Carney, that Liberal Party doesn’t have the youth or the young politicians.

In any event, the Provincial NDP will have to do the heavy lifting.

It’s a shame that Charlie Angus, the former NDP MP for Timmins — James Bay, lost himself in the COVID-19 hysteria and ruined his political career, though not without saving, he would have made a far better NDP leader as Bernie-type social democrat with real conviction and charisma that could have reached both the party faithful and the general public in Canada.

The 2017 NDP Federal Convention started the tough lessons solidifying the lost decade for the left-wing by making sure that the NDP was, in addition to the Trudeau administration, also fronted by an unpopular woke neo-liberal due to the “progressive stack.” The party elite had ignored the emblem of welcoming warm hearted rural Canadian attitudes the NDP was founded on by discounting Angus for being a “middle aged white man,” choosing Jagmeet who turned out to be a dumpster fire of a politician for not one, not two, but three election campaigns, all because he was a “brown guy in a turban.”

Though we were big fans of Charlie angus at CRN, he wasn’t without his own lessons too. Wile we are not the strain of right-wing populists that embodied the movement against COVID-19 restrictions, we can acknowledge how the pandemic was used by the establishment to scare the left-wing socialists into lockstep and Angus admittedly bought this line hook, line and sinker.

This led to Angus being in full support on the crackdown against the trucker convoy instead of standing up to the Trudeau administration, dooming the party’s attempt appear anti-establishment in 2022. Along with Singh’s “woke” neo-liberal ideology, this miscalculation made the NDP indistinguishable from the Liberal Party, which has led the party to be all but wiped out today.

At least the NDP under Lewis is distinguished from the Liberal Party, but it appears the Liberal Party are performing above expectations under Carney. The NDP still seem to be struggling to find a practical direction, beyond a politics is simply approved by radical leftists as more ideologically “pure.”

For Canadian Republicans, these developments around the NDP has set in stone the need for us to have a shift in focus away from federal politics to a focus on devolved power. It’s time that instead of waiting for the right federal candidate, we start to do the work of creating our own political faction.

Still, the potential of our political line winning out remains, seeing the popularity of the Wab Kinew administration with the Provincial NDP in Manitoba. Under any videos surrounding the recent leadership convention, including really embarrassing ones, where Lewis was met with mixed appeal, Wab received endless comments expressing desire to vote for him as the federal party leader once he’s done being Premier of Manitoba.

Now the question is who will make up the party of Wab?

Though we aren’t promised this position some three election cycles in advance, as Canadian Republicans, we at least have a chance by sharing Wab’s desire to build a Canada which serves all three of our foundational peoples, and those who have come to constructively contribute to the country, instead of just smug progressives who occupy the NDP today.

The NDP is stuck in the past with a limited niche appeal.

The party has come to represent the type of radical leftists who constantly condescend to everyday Canadians all while internationally embarrassing themselves, pushing away the best and brightest of the younger generation.

We should let the party collapse so it can be rebuilt from both the inside and outside by our members, those who still love Canada, those who want to use ideology to serve the country and not to use the country to serve ideology.

We seek to benefit Canadians as a whole, to meet people where they’re at, to gain wide scale public support for a pragmatic economic program, instead of promoting ideological purity at the expense of keeping our country stagnant.