ADAMS: NDP Leadership Race Crashes and Burns in Montreal
After the federal NDP's catastrophic result in the last election—seven seats, the worst outcome since the party's founding—this moment should have been a collective reckoning, a chance for the party to interrogate not just policy, but purpose. To ask, plainly and without euphemism: What is the NDP anymore? What does it want to be? And why should anyone trust it to govern?
Leadership races are supposed to shake political parties awake, and the debate is one of the rare moments when a party can put its internal contradictions on the table, contrast competing visions, and demonstrate vitality. Instead, the NDP's first official debate in Montreal revealed something far more troubling: a party unwilling to be honest with itself, unwilling to engage in genuine debate, and apparently unwilling to take seriously its own national obligations.
That starts with the language issue, the elephant in the room the party pretended was a decorative house cat.
A “French-language debate” that wasn't
The NDP announced a French-language debate. What it delivered was a bilingual event only in the most generous, charitable, mathematically illiterate sense of the term. By any reasonable count, approximately 19% of the discussion occurred in French. The rest unfolded in English; halting, meandering, often self-conscious English from candidates who knew they were breaking the rules but pressed ahead because they had no alternative.
Only one candidate, Avi Lewis, could actually debate in French. One more, Heather McPherson could stumble through a sentence. The remaining contenders simply could not communicate in the language at all. This is not a minor flaw. It is not a matter of “accessibility” or “candidate diversity.” This is a leadership race for a national party. A leader of a national party must be able to address the country in both official languages. Full stop.
Pretending otherwise is the political equivalent of insisting a pilot doesn't really need to understand the cockpit controls as long as they have good intentions and a positive attitude. And the hypocrisy ran deeper. French journalists in the post-debate scrum asked substantive questions. Some candidates simply couldn't even understand them.
Meanwhile, the one candidate who is francophone and is a socialist—Yves Engler—was blocked from participating at all. The party insists it was about paperwork; the optics suggest something else entirely: a party terrified of the one contender fluent enough, ideological enough, and unpredictable enough to disrupt the pre-scripted kumbaya chorus.
This raises a straightforward question: does the NDP want to be a genuinely national party, or a regional NGO that occasionally runs candidates in Quebec? Because if the party can't even manage a French-language debate in French, it should stop pretending it's contesting for government.
The real crisis wasn't linguistic, it was cultural
The language fiasco matters. But the deeper failure of the debate was cultural. The whole event radiated an almost performative positivity, the sort of carefully managed, lowest-common-denominator atmosphere parties adopt when they are terrified of conflict.
It was an exercise in pleasantness masquerading as democracy. A leadership race should be a contest of ideas. This one felt like a corporate HR retreat where everyone has been warned not to say anything that might upset the facilitator. The candidates floated proposals, many of them thoughtful, some ambitious, but they were never meaningfully interrogated.
No sharp exchanges. No real disagreements. No ideological tension. No evidence the party is wrestling with the existential questions staring it in the face.
Instead, the debate format invited bromides:
- Unaffordability is bad
- Workers deserve better
- Pipelines raise concerns
- Indigenous reconciliation is important
All true. None new. None illuminated.
The issues the party most needs to confront—foreign policy, internal democracy, structural reform, the future relationship with labour, electoral strategy, the failure of the 2025 campaign, and most importantly, how to rebuild trust—were either ignored or politely brushed aside.
The message received wasn't “we are ready to rebuild.”
It was: “we are afraid to face ourselves.”
A party in collapse behaves as though everything is fine
Here is the uncomfortable truth: a party that wins seven seats doesn't need a makeover. It needs reconstruction. There is a difference. Rebranding is cosmetic. It asks what colours, slogans, or personalities might make people like you again. Rebuilding is structural. It asks what must change in the foundation to make your organization viable. The NDP, at this moment, needs the latter. Desperately. That requires friction. Debate. Competing worldviews. Candidates willing to attack the status quo and defend their alternatives. Members willing to hear uncomfortable arguments.
Instead, the leadership race so far has felt like an attempt to glide through turbulence without spilling the drinks. The party cannot afford this. If the NDP cannot articulate a clear answer to “what went wrong,” voters will supply one: the party no longer knows what it stands for.
The leadership race is at risk of becoming a missed opportunity
When a party is on the brink of irrelevance, leadership races are not administrative exercises. They are existential ones. They define whether a party enters its renewal phase, or its hospice phase. The Montreal debate suggests the NDP is drifting toward the latter. The refusal to confront linguistic reality; the cautious format; the absence of ideological challenge; the exclusion of a qualified francophone candidate; the avoidance of internal criticism; the reduction of political crisis to pleasant talking points.
These are not signs of an institution ready to rebuild. They are signs of one that hopes to avoid embarrassment until the wind somehow changes. But political winds do not change for parties that refuse to change themselves. Renewal requires the courage to name failure, the discipline to repair structures, and the humility to admit that the organization has lost its way.
What the NDP demonstrated instead was a hope that the appearance of unity will compensate for the absence of direction.
Renewal is necessary, but not inevitable
The NDP is at a crossroads. It can treat this leadership race as a turning point: a moment to interrogate its purpose, reclaim its national identity, and rebuild itself from the ground up. Or it can continue treating renewal as an exercise in branding, smoothing edges while ignoring rot beneath. The candidates have ideas. The grassroots still has energy. But unless the cultural and organizational habits that produced the party's collapse are confronted head-on, the NDP risks mistaking motion for progress.
Canada needs a strong, principled, disciplined social democratic party. The question after this first debate is whether the NDP is prepared to become one again, or whether it will settle for being a footnote written in both official languages, but spoken in neither.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
