In the year since he lost the federal election to represent Hamilton Centre, former MP Matthew Green says, among other things, he’s been busy coaching an “absolutely tenacious,” flag-football team of 10-year-olds.
“I feel like The Bad News Bears sometimes,” Green said, referring to the 1976 movie about a team of young, outcast baseball players. “But we go out there and really, really play with a lot of heart.”
For the next three months, the longtime local politician will be taking on a leadership role with a different group of outcasts: Canada’s New Democratic Party, which lost official party status in the April 2025 election.
On Thursday, the NDP announced it picked Green for a three-month stint as the party’s interim national director. It said the permanent position “will be filled through an open hiring process.”
What does the NDP national director do?
“In simple terms, I’m going to go and help reorganize and rebuild the party from the ground up,” Green said in an interview Friday, adding he’ll work closely with the party’s national office.
He said he won’t apply for the permanent job, which would require uprooting his family to Ottawa, something he’s “not in a position” to do.
“I’m recognizing and treating this very much like a campaign. So, I have 87 days left,” Green said. “I’m going to work incredibly hard … to ensure that when the handoff happens, there are systems and principles in place that are rooted in the shared values of New Democrats across the country and reflective of our leader Avi Lewis.”
Green said Lewis, the filmmaker, activist and former journalist who won party leadership in March, approached him while Green was working as a political and communications specialist for Amalgamated Transit Union Canada — a job he started in November.
“I basically sat out the leadership race,” Green said, adding he got to know many of the candidates but never endorsed anyone.
He said Lewis, who he’s known for a decade, asked him about his vision for the future of the party, and its interim needs.
“When the opportunity came to provide support,” Green said, he and his family decided it was something he could take on.
Green served as city councillor for 5 years, MP for 6
“Matthew Green has spent his entire political life fighting against injustice and building power from the ground up,” Lewis said in a news release Thursday. “From his years as a community organizer and city councillor in Hamilton to his work in Parliament challenging systemic racism, wealth inequality, and attacks on workers’ rights, he has always been a dedicated people’s champion.”
Born and raised in Hamilton, Green was the first Black person elected to Hamilton city council in 2014. He became an MP in 2019, serving until he lost reelection as Hamilton-Centre MP to Liberal Aslam Rana in the last election.
While working with the transit union, Green said he learned “there’s a big disconnect between the political class in Ottawa and what everyday working-class Canadians are going through.”
“Things that we spent the most amount of time, attention and energy on in hyperartisan contexts don’t necessarily resonate with people on the ground who are just trying to pay their bills and keep up with the cost of groceries,” he said.
Green pointed to recent NDP efforts to ban surveillance pricing, where businesses offer different prices based on personal data about consumers.
“Canadians are demanding regulatory measures to reign in the unchecked and unfettered greed of corporations. I think that’s resonating and it often goes beyond the cultural war issues, the scapegoating, [and] a lot of the hyper-partisanship.”
Canadians want “meaningful solutions for the economic pressures they’re under,” Green said, adding he thinks the NDP can provide those solutions and a “working class voice,” he says is missing from the House of Commons.
So what does Green think needs to change for a party with five MPs to get to the point where it can meaningfully raise that voice?
For one, Green said he’d like to see the party become more decentralized, empowering riding associations and rank-and-file members to build engagement.
He said that also means showing up on picket lines and at rallies.
One of the best ways to support Canadians through tough economic times is “having a good union and strong representation,” he told CBC Hamilton in November.
The party can advance that, Green said Friday, by educating people on labour law, connecting them with unions, and showing up for labour actions.
Part of his work as interim leader will involve “reaffirming” and “strengthening” the NDP’s labour and social connections, he said, adding those will be “an essential key” to getting official party status and making “considerable inroads in the next election.”
A rebuild is do-able, Green said, adding the party has come back from big losses before, including under Jack Layton, eventually becoming the official opposition.
In April, Lewis told CBC’s The House “things are so deeply, grindingly unfair and bad and getting worse that we need fundamental structural changes and I’m interested in trying that.”
Lewis has promoted the idea of public grocery stores, a policy idea he shares with New York’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani’s runaway success has shown “there’s no need to shy away from left-wing populism,” Green said.
Like Mamdani, he said, Lewis is a strong communicator, who can identify people’s challenges and talk to them about solutions in a straight-up way.
“We don’t shy away from the challenges that are ahead,” Green said. “We’re going to be calling on Canadians to join us in these months to come to help build and shape what a New Democratic Party could look like.”
With files from The House