Mark Carney has radically militarized Canadian society and handed the bill to working people. The former investment banker has gutted climate protections, trampled Indigenous rights, and overseen a sharp erosion of democratic priorities. Meanwhile, it has been painful to watch him defer to the fascistic U.S. president on border policy, policing, and the taxation of big tech. The result is a country where working-class people are being squeezed out of even a basic standard of living.
Over the past six months, I’ve co-managed an NDP leadership campaign under the banner “Socialism. Activism. Justice.” We distributed tens of thousands of leaflets detailing Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide, backing striking workers and challenging overconsumption. The insurgent left campaign has also put up thousands of posters and released dozens of statements on issues ranging from abolishing post-secondary tuition to shutting down the tar sands.
We’ve organized email petitions opposing Canadian support for Trump’s war on Venezuela and calling to convert Real Estate Investment Trust units into housing co-ops. We’ve supported striking workers with petitions and picket-line visits, mobilized for marches against genocide and actively supported grassroots campaigns for social, environmental and economic justice. In doing so, we sought to show what the NDP could be if it turned towards social movements and working-class struggle. We can be so much more than a voice in Parliament; we can be the voice of the streets.
In July, 45 activists and researchers came together to create the campaign’s policy committee. Over three months, issue-specific working groups crafted a comprehensive platform through a highly democratic process. Since its October release, Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed – Onward to a Socialist Future has likely been Canada’s most widely read anti-capitalist document.
The platform and campaign have energized thousands of people long alienated from parliamentary politics. Just as importantly, many NDP members recognize something familiar in it — a return to the party’s founding spirit, when the Regina Manifesto called for the eradication of capitalism and the party fought uncompromisingly for dignity and justice.
In a functioning democratic party, members would decide whether they support a leadership candidate advancing these ideas. Instead, an unelected three-person vetting committee blocked the candidate promoting this platform.
Let me be clear: Yves Engler should be allowed to run. If the party reverses this undemocratic decision, I would step aside. Members, not a secret committee, should decide who runs and who leads.
In response to the NDP vetting committee’s decision to exclude our candidate, we’ve protested, gone to the media and published articles. About 5,000 individuals have called on the NDP federal council to overturn the decision through our email petition campaigns.
It was during this mobilization that activists in the campaign began encouraging me to run, to ensure these ideas remained in the race. I take this step reluctantly, but with purpose. I submitted my vetting materials last week in good faith, because members deserve the opportunity to debate these ideas openly and democratically.
I bring over two decades of experience in movement organizing and democratic leadership. I co-founded and directed the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, co-founded and served as co-executive director of The Leap, and played a central role in coordinating the launch of the Leap Manifesto in 2015. I’ve also served as chair of the Canadian Federation of Students–Quebec, led campaigns at Concordia’s Centre for Gender Advocacy, and currently sit on the board of the Council of Canadians.
The decision to exclude my husband Yves Engler was undemocratic, but this campaign was never about one person. The greater harm is shutting these ideas out of the leadership race altogether.
We have no intention of allowing that to happen. Doing so would leave Canada’s support for Israel’s lawlessness and genocide on the periphery of the race while offering renters little more than platitudes instead of a concrete commitment to convert Real Estate Investment Trusts into housing co-ops. It would leave the leadership race constrained so that fundamental questions — like shutting down the tar sands, Land Back, or whether capitalism itself is the problem — are pushed out of the discussion.
Anyone who doubts this need only watch the Montreal leadership debate, where none of these issues were meaningfully addressed. Most egregiously, Carney’s massive diversion of public funds toward militarism went completely unchallenged — even as those same resources are desperately required for social programs. Stopping this government’s unprecedented surge in military spending must be central to the NDP’s focus.
Members deserve a real alternative to the status quo — and a genuine opportunity to chart a new course beyond the tired ideas that were decisively rejected in the last election.
Our campaign is offering a real break with militarism and capitalism and a clear vision of what comes next. We are fighting for an economy that guarantees everyone the right to live with dignity, where basic needs like housing, healthcare, education and real security are met because people matter more than profits. A society where no one is forced to live in a constant state of anxiety — about rent, debt, illness, or war — because we’ve chosen to have each other’s backs.
We know this future doesn’t arrive on its own. It’s won when ordinary people organize, act together, and insist on change. Activism is how change has always come about. We need more of it. This campaign exists to help people recognize their own power, to build it collectively, and to use it to create a society rooted in care, democracy, and justice.
I’m running to give voice to the thousands of NDP members who have already put their time, resources, and trust behind these ideas — even as democratic participation has been repeatedly constrained. I’m running to lead a party rooted in the principles we’ve advanced throughout this race: Socialism. Activism. Justice.
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