In Lisbon, Portugal, nestled between a Gucci store and another European luxury brand, is the office of one of Europe’s strongest Communist parties. Outside, sit an older woman and a child. As the child runs in and out, the woman is handing out flyers for the Portuguese Communist Party’s three-day music festival, Avante! Feste. The office is lively, people are moving about inside, and music is being projected onto the street from a speaker set up.
It struck me, as someone who has walked past the Jack Layton building – the NDP’s national office that it would be easy, for the average person walking by, never to know that the building — a gift from the labour movement during Jack Layton’s leadership — is the nerve centre of Canada’s democratic socialist party. In recent memory, it has never been used for events; most members in Ottawa have probably never seen the inside.
Compared to Portugal, where parties across the political spectrum not only have public headquarters, but have dozens of offices across the country in every major city, Canada’s political parties seems significantly less physical. In Portugal and across Europe, local offices are hubs for organizing efforts and places of community.
But we don’t have to look to Europe to see the impact that having permanent offices can have on building a social movement. Community organizer Chiara Padovani, one of the founders of the York South-Weston tenant union, has run a community office for years. After her near victory for city councillor in 2022, Padovani fundraised to convert her campaign office into a community space. Once the meeting place of canvassers and campaigners, it has turned into a home for left-wing movements throughout her neighbourhood.
In an article for Jacobin, Padovani said the office has become “the foundation of resourcing this movement, just by having a physical space in the community where people can meet and organize.”
Padovani provides a model for the NDP. In a time when movements are resource-constrained, and physical space available to organizers is limited, the NDP could use its resources to invest in permanent community hubs, as one way to build bonds with social movements and cultivate a partisan identity. It would also allow the NDP to move beyond campaigning only around elections to campaigning 24/7 365, and building durable infrastructure and practices to sustain that organizing.
Scholar William Gillies, in his piece Solidarity Needs A Room, argues that working-class politics, rather than being “politicized to class,” is “socialized into it.” For Gillies, this socialization process happens in the physical spaces of working-class life. Similarly, few people are politicized into the NDP; more often than not, they are socialized into it through networks of friendship, campus clubs, and, primarily, social media. The NDP right now coalesces socialists and progressives, rather than creating them. If the NDP wants to take advantage of the surge of interest in socialist politics, it needs to provide a place for interested people to be socialized into the party.
As the Avi Lewis NDP pursues a new organizing strategy, regional councils seem to be top of mind. Regional councils would allow Electoral District Associations (EDAs)s to pool resources across areas and may be the perfect vessel for an NDP real estate strategy. It doesn’t have to start large; a public office pilot project in Ottawa could be a test case for building working-class power physically.
The NDP, outside of campaign seasons, lacks a physical presence in the communities they hope to represent. There may be group chats, EDA meetings, the occasional event or canvass, but there is nowhere the NDP can call home.
It is time the NDP changed that; it’s time the NDP invests in real estate.
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