This article was originally published in early June 2026, in issue #3 of International Marxism, the international political journal of International Socialist Alternative. Click here to subscribe or to buy a copy of the full issue.
Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) is opening a new chapter in its history, bringing the possibility of significant opportunities for the socialist and working-class movement. The NDP and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), dating back to the 1930s, is the most electorally successful socialist/labor party in Canada. In recent decades, however, the NDP struggled for national relevance as it moved away from its working-class roots. This culminated in its worst-ever electoral result in 2025, which prompted the election for a new leader of the federal party.
Avi Lewis, running as a socialist, won the leadership decisively with 39,734 votes on the first ballot, 56% of the total, the largest majority won by a leader in decades. His campaign raised $1.23 million, more money than the other four candidates combined, with an average donation of $105.
Avi Lewis’s bold program was a sharp break with the present and past failed policies of the NDP both federally and provincially. He talked about an NDP “that works for the many, not the money,” offering a sharp contrast to the Liberals and Conservatives.
His campaign focused on demands such as building public homes, protecting tenants, creating one million good green jobs, and free transit. Lewis wants “the unmatched power of public ownership” in groceries, banking (using post offices as public banks) and pharmaceutical manufacturing, to tax the ultra rich, and to end corporate handouts. He opposes further fossil fuel industry expansion, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), to truly combat climate change, and pledged that “no one who works in the industry will be left behind.”
Alongside Lewis’s election, the decision that the NDP will campaign year round, rather than just in elections, is another important step to rebuild the party, as is the commitment to empower the constituency associations rather than having everything controlled by the headquarters.
The same conference that chose Lewis also elected an executive leadership that supports his policies, and a few weeks later the old establishment National Director Lucy Watson announced she was stepping down. This gives Lewis some support within the machine, but it does not mean the struggle to transform the party is already won.
Lewis will face fierce resistance from the NDP establishment and many provincial leaders if he campaigns on his program. The outcome of this will be crucial for the NDP’s future. Andrew Coyne, one of the more astute conservative commentators and no fan of Lewis’s program, wrote “In the chaos that is headed our way, more voters may be willing to give the NDP a look than is presently accounted for.” Building a socialist, campaigning NDP is the best way to prepare for the battles ahead.
Radical Origins: A Party of Struggle
The CCF (later becoming the NDP) was started during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which devastated the Canadian economy resulting in 30% unemployment and years of drought for prairie farmers—the dustbowl. Neither the Liberals or Conservatives offered any kind of serious program of economic stimulus or relief as millions of working-class people and small farmers became destitute. It was clear to millions that an alternative was needed.
The CCF was founded in 1932 and the next year adopted the Regina Manifesto, which called for “a planned and socialized economy in which our natural resources and principal means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people… no CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Cooperative Commonwealth.”
By 1943 the CCF was the most popular party in some opinion polls. It won 32% of the vote in Ontario’s election, becoming the official opposition. This surge in support, part of an international radical mood, pushed the Liberals to introduce several key CCF policies.
For years in the prairie province of Saskatchewan the CCF built support, especially for a public healthcare system, with many meetings, including in villages and around kitchen tables. In 1944, the CCF was elected decisively in Saskatchewan, and Tommy Douglas, the premier, fought to implement a government for workers and small farmers, rather than the rich. The CCF government created new public utilities and services including for electricity, intercity buses, and automobile insurance. It improved labor laws, including allowing public sector workers to unionize, and passed Canada’s first Bill of Rights.
In 1946, the CCF implemented a universal hospital and medical care program in the Swift Current region, the first of its kind in North America. It was a huge success, causing a steep reduction in infant mortality. In 1962, the CCF extended the system province-wide.
A section of doctors, big business, private insurance companies, and the American Medical Association all opposed the public healthcare system. But overwhelming popular support forced the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons to retreat. A compromise was agreed with doctors remaining self-employed and paid by a fee-for-service model, rather than becoming paid government employees. While not without its flaws, this secured universal health coverage for all Saskatchewan residents, funded by the provincial government and free at point of service. This model proved so popular that within a decade all of Canada had universal public healthcare.
In 1956, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) was formed as the largest national congress of trade unions. The CLC and CCF forged better ties between organized labor and the political left, which culminated in the creation of the New Democratic Party in 1961, with Tommy Douglas elected as its first leader.
The NDP built a base in working-class and rural communities across the country, although it was always strongest in the West, struggling to grow in Québec and Atlantic Canada. The NDP acted as the party of the labor movement and described itself as a socialist party.
In British Columbia (BC), the NDP won the 1972 provincial election in a surprise result when the right-wing Social Credit Party collapsed. This provincial NDP government carried out many radical improvements including improving labor and renters’ rights, protecting farmland, and establishing public car insurance. It was defeated in 1975, as big business united around one of the three pro-capitalist parties.
In federal elections, the NDP consistently received 10-20% of the vote, typically coming in third in the seat-count behind the Liberal and Conservative parties. While never forming a government itself, the NDP was at times able to wield influence over government policy when neither of the other big parties controlled a majority of seats in the House of Commons. For example, the Saskatchewan model of universal public healthcare became federal policy under the minority government of Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, under pressure from the NDP.
Neoliberal Decline
With the onset of the neoliberal era, the NDP was transformed like other social-democratic and labor parties around the world. The grassroots participation of members declined, and party policy was increasingly decided by a careerist leadership at the top.
The federal NDP has not organized any major campaigns since the 1980s outside of election years, reduced to statements of moral indignation and the occasional strategic vote in Parliament. It focuses on elections, downplaying its strongest working-class demands in the hope that it might gain some centrist voters.
The party has been, at one point or another, the government in six of ten provinces. It won elections in Ontario in 1990, and Nova Scotia in 2009 with radical policies, which it rapidly abandoned, and fell to third place in the next election. The federal NDP received its best-ever electoral result in 2011, becoming the official opposition to Harper’s Conservatives, when both the Liberal Party and the Bloc Québecois votes collapsed. This breakthrough was squandered in 2015, as the Liberals’ new leader, Justin Trudeau, posed as the “progressive alternative” to Harper, and the NDP dropped back to third place.
Since the 2010s, the NDP has formed provincial governments in BC, Alberta, and Manitoba, while it last won in Saskatchewan in 2003. But in all recent cases these provincial governments have been marked by moderate pro-capitalist policies with a few minor reforms for working people.
The party agreed to support a minority Liberal government in 2022 that implemented a partial and limited national dental care plan and Pharmacare Act. However, as Socialist Alternative (ISA in Canada) then warned, by the time the NDP ended its support in 2024, the party was seen as Trudeau’s crutch. As a result it suffered its worst ever electoral result in 2025, winning only seven seats (since then, two of those MPs have left the party).
The 2025 election was dominated by Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports and threats to annex Canada as the “51st state.” Many would-be NDP supporters “strategically voted” for the Liberals and their new leader Mark Carney to avoid a victory for the Trumpish Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
Overcoming NDP Establishment Resistance
The silver lining of the electoral disaster was that it opened a period of “soul searching” for the federal NDP. It was clear that the establishment strategy had failed. NDP members and supporters urged the party to return to its radical roots as a working-class party campaigning on bold demands, with an active working-class membership, democratic structures, and an accountable leadership.
At the start of the leadership campaign Heather MacPherson, the only MP among the candidates, was the establishment favorite and had a clear advantage. During the campaign however, Lewis’s radical policies gained increasing support and his fundraising surged ahead of all the other candidates. Lewis’s leadership campaign energized the party, with 40,000 people joining the NDP to support him. There is a deep-rooted enthusiasm for bold socialist politics in the NDP base, something that Socialist Alternative has been arguing for years.
But the NDP’s old guard will not give up without a struggle. The day Lewis won, the NDP leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Naheed Nenshi and Carla Beck, both attacked his program. Nenshi even falsely stated that Lewis “openly cheered for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government.” The NDP leadership in British Columbia has been more circumspect, aware that most NPD members in BC supported Lewis.
The experience of Corbyn in Britain, who was undermined and eventually defeated by the capitalist establishment within his own party is a stark warning. Corbyn was elected Labour leader twice—in 2015 with 59.5% of the votes and again in 2016 with 61.8%. However, most Labour MPs were so hostile to his leadership that they preferred electoral defeat to a Corbyn-led government and did everything they could to sabotage the party in the 2017 election. Labour still gained nearly 13 million votes, three million more than Starmer’s 2024 victory. Despite this, Labour’s neoliberal apparatus undermined Corbyn as party leader and eventually drove him out of the party altogether.
The clash between Lewis’s policies and supporters against the NDP machine will most likely open a debate about what sort of party the working class needs. Lewis will have to fully mobilize his supporters to resist inevitable sabotage as well as pressure from the establishment to moderate his message.
The Working Class Needs Its Own Party
Socialist Alternative believes that the type of party that is needed—a workers’ party—would organize bold campaigns, mobilizing young and working people, for affordable housing, free public transit, quality healthcare, climate action, and public ownership of key sectors of the economy.
These campaigns would be year round, meeting people on the streets and in their neighborhoods. An NDP which was transformed along these lines would encourage, empower, and help unions and community activists in their struggles. It should be normal for the NDP to be on picket lines. While in most cases the bosses and their politicians have the upper hand today, there are important examples of workers’ struggle like in 2025 when the Air Canada flight attendants stayed out on strike even after the government declared their strike illegal, and won a better contract. A workers’ NDP would be at the center of these types of struggles to help spread the lessons and act as a political leadership for the whole labor movement.
Rather than doubling down on support for resource extraction and the export of raw materials, while ignoring Indigenous concerns and damning the environment (as Carney is doing), the NDP should champion an economy built for both people’s needs and to protect nature.
This type of program should include massive investment in infrastructure—for example, taking the railways into public ownership and then investing in a significant upgrade to re-lay the railway bed, double the track wherever possible and electrify most of the lines, which would allow both faster freight and the extensive establishment of passenger travel. Other actions could include a universal publicly-owned telecommunication network, rebuilding rather than destroying Canada Post, a massive home building program concentrating on publicly-owned rentals, and a rapid transition to clean energy. All of these would provide millions of good union jobs using steel, wood and aluminum, which are currently tariffed by Trump.
Another vital part of a real program in the interests of workers is to end the workplace dictatorship of the bosses. Public ownership of the key sectors of the economy should be combined with workers’ democracy in the running of the workplace. With a party that fights to win, workers and the oppressed can fight to build a better society and system—socialism.
Socialist Alternative supported Avi Lewis and his program in the leadership elections and intends to be part of the battle to transform the NDP into a party that fights in the interests of working-class people. Lewis has launched a tour of rallies across Canada, which is a good start to reinvigorate and rebuild the NDP from the ground up around well-organized campaigns.
The victory of Lewis and his program is part of an incipient international trend of the working class trying to regain independent political parties. In several cases these eventually failed as the leaders bent to the pressures of the capitalist class and their allies. Standing up to the billionaire class on behalf of working-class Canadians is going to take unapologetic principles based on class analysis, serious movement building around immediate material struggles, and democratic structures in both these movements and the NDP. If the NDP is transformed into a workers’ party, it will be a step forward of international importance.
