Former NDP MP Charlie Angus, who served roughly 25 years and ran for the party leadership in 2017, reflects on what it would take for the left to rebuild a movement rooted in ordinary Canadians — and offers advice to new NDP Leader Avi Lewis.
Angus frames the present moment as one of genuine threat to Canadian sovereignty and democracy, and argues the left has largely missed the gravity of it while figures like Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew “get it.” He invokes the nationalist tradition of Ed Broadbent, Tommy Douglas, and Bob White, and recalls joining the NDP under Jack Layton, whose practical mantra he favours over the deathbed call for “love, hope and optimism”:
“Bums in seats.”
The core of the essay is a critique of how the NDP has handled leadership transitions. Angus describes a recurring “leader takes all” pattern in which the team and institutional knowledge behind one leader is shown the door when the next arrives — tracing the party’s slide from 100 seats under Layton to 44 under Mulcair, to 24, and finally to seven seats in the 2025 election. He argues the party lost touch with its working-class base by becoming “too focused on internal battles over identity and language,” and recounts failing the “social democrat or democratic socialist” purity test at a town hall by joking that he was “a democratic hoser.”
On the 2025 result, Angus writes that the NDP “bet the house on Jagmeet’s likability” while Mark Carney “wrapped himself in the flag,” and warns that key New Democrat constituencies migrated to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives — voters the party will need to reclaim.
He closes by wishing Lewis well and counselling against the assumption that a new Orange Wave will emerge from “bolder language and a new team at the helm”:
“My advice to the new leader is to be a builder of bridges. There is a lot of goodwill and ideas out there.”
Angus argues social democracy will succeed only if rooted in the experiences of people in places like Nickel Belt, Swift Current, Chicoutimi, and St. John’s, and says that — given the threat of rising fascism amid inequality — “only the NDP can provide that credible voice for those suffering from increasing economic precarity and wage stagnation.”