The Tragicomic Death Throes of Canada’s (Former) Workers’ Party

By now, many readers—even those who don’t know (or care) about Canadian politics—will have seen the excruciating video highlights from this past weekend’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leadership convention in Winnipeg. The NDP is a venerable left-wing political party that once was tightly conjoined with Canada’s blue-collar union movement. But in recent years, it has been spiralling into irrelevance. And the viral footage from the Winnipeg conference—where a silver-spoon socialist and militant anti-Israel activist named Avi Lewis was elected as the party’s next leader—shows why.

In one clip, a woman in a keffiyeh told fellow convention delegates that she’d been unfairly leapfrogged in the speaking order, even though she’d flashed her official NDP “gender equity card,” which is apparently supposed to let her speak before men. In the same vein, another speaker, who said she “identifies as a black woman,” complained that an equity card had been used “inappropriately” by an unidentified third party. A trans-identified man complained that a “cisgender woman” (which is to say, a woman) had been allowed to speak before him, despite the fact that he was a “racialized and transgender delegate” seeking to discuss “multiple intersecting parts of my lived experience.” Another keffiyeh woman denounced the military “bloodbath” in Iran, but then was immediately upbraided by the “non-binary” they/them chairperson for misgendering her as “Madame Chair.”

(An alert Quillette contributor notified me that this chairperson is none other than Adrienne Smith, a British Columbia-based DEI consultant whom I’d featured in a 2023 Quillette article after she was caught on tape presiding over an unhinged struggle session with a group of B.C. public servants. Smith also played a leading role in defunding a Vancouver women’s rape-crisis shelter because it wouldn’t permit a trans-identified man to serve as a “peer counsellor” to raped women.)

Of course, radicals and single-issue obsessives can be found at every political convention. But the fact that a cracked nut such as Smith was put in a position of authority at the NDP’s marquee national showcase speaks volumes about how irrelevant this party has become to the ordinary working people it formerly represented. The party that once pitched itself to miners, factory workers, and farmers has been captured by superannuated student activists obsessed with demonizing Israel and courting “the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.” In last year’s federal election, the party won just 6% of the national vote—down from 18% in 2021.