Online voting started Monday in the NDP leadership contest, which from the start has appeared to be a two-horse race between Avi Lewis and Heather McPherson.
The auguries suggest Lewis is now in the lead and pulling farther ahead.
Lewis is the scion of the Lewis political family, which has been prominent in the NDP since the 1970s, when his grandfather David led the federal party for five years and his father Stephen was leader of the Ontario NDP for eight.
McPherson is the only one of the five candidates seeking the party’s leadership with a seat in the House of Commons, and the only NDP Member of Parliament at the moment elected in Alberta, where the electoral map in almost any recent year has been a sea of what we used to call Tory Blue.
Lewis is a committed environmentalist and a leader of the coalition behind the LEAP Manifesto a decade ago, a fact that generates a lot of excitement in many parts of the NDP’s base and more than a little hostility here in Alberta, where talk of a Canadian Green New Deal a decade ago went over like the proverbial lead balloon, including inside the NDP.
Many in Alberta NDP circles to this day blame promoters of the LEAP Manifesto after 2015 for the provincial NDP’s failure to get re-elected in 2019, an argument that contains enough truth to be dangerous but is far from the whole story.
For his part, Lewis has not proved he can get elected to Parliament in a country where there are no safe NDP seats except, possibly, Edmonton-Strathcona – which McPherson has represented since October 2019.
McPherson is a capable Parliamentarian beloved by many in the Alberta NDP’s base, which is considerably more conservative, if I may use that word in this context, on environmental issues than many in the federal party, or for that matter segments of the pre-Mark-Carney federal Liberal Party.
Tellingly, when McPherson announced her bid to lead the party, former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley showed up at her September 28 campaign launch in Edmonton to introduce her as someone who knows how “to work diligently to earn electoral success that is necessary to make nation-building progressive changes in service of our country and in service of the millions of Canadians who need us to be there.”
The current Alberta NDP leader, Naheed Nenshi, was not there, whatever that means – possibly nothing at all, given Nenshi’s occasional talk about pulling the Alberta NDP out of the national New Democratic Party.
Avid supporters of both candidates have warned that election of the other might lead to the demise of the party, by being too radical or too like the ruling Liberals – which given the sorry state in which former leader Jagmeet Singh left the NDP, is a possibility either way. As for myself, though, I’d bet the NDP survives whoever leads it, so everyone can calm down a little.
The votes will be counted in 19 days in Winnipeg, and, while I can’t tell you who is going to win, I can report that the vibe last week during the Broadbent Institute’s annual Ottawa “summit” – named for the late Ed Broadbent, federal NDP leader from 1975 to 1989 – was that Lewis would win without breaking into a sweat, possibly on the first ballot.
McPherson was the only leadership candidate that I saw at the three-day event, and only briefly at the opening reception, but that did not seem to dampen the enthusiasm for Lewis’s chances or the feeling that there’s now a whiff of desperation about McPherson’s campaign.
The latest Elections Canada fundraising numbers reinforce this impression – with Lewis absolutely dominating the cash stakes, collecting more than double the amount raised by McPherson and leaving the other three candidates in the dust.
This, wrote polling analyst Éric Grenier on his Substack, makes Lewis “the odds-on favourite to win the contest.”
By February 24, Grenier noted, Lewis’s campaign had raised $1,229,484. By February 17, McPherson’s campaign had raised $560,144, from which Grenier estimated she would have raised about “another $27,000 or so” by February 24, “keeping her below the $600,000 mark and hardly making a dent in Lewis’s fundraising.”
BC-based labour leader Rob Ashton had raised $356,933 by February 17 and Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail earlier reported less significant amounts. It’s possible, Grenier wrote, that Lewis “is over the 50-per-cent threshold in fundraising, making a first ballot victory entirely plausible.”
Grenier argues there is a strong link between fundraising success in NDP leadership races and ultimate victory.
Here in Wild Rose Country, the (badly) governing United Conservative Party is sure to try to use Lewis’s perceived radicalism on environmental issues to attack Nenshi and the provincial NDP.
Alberta’s separatist crowd will go nuts, of course, but they go nuts about most everything Canadian, so any impact of their nuttiness on a contest like this can be discounted as not very significant.
But – think about this, dear readers – isn’t it possible that the very real progressive conservatism (to borrow a phrase) of most successful provincial New Democratic parties in Canada is as likely to be a problem for Lewis as Lewis is for them?
Should he win, and if he manages to build some excitement for a genuinely social democratic platform, perhaps the day will come when Lewis sees an advantage to casting off provincial parties that are hard to tell from Liberals and, for that matter, some Conservatives.
