Labour isn't working (for the NDP) anymore
Union bosses brought the endorsements of 700,000 workers to the leadership race. They delivered 4,200 votes.
If you want to understand the real tragedy of the recent NDP leadership convention, don’t just look at the winner (which I’ve done). Look at the wreckage of the coalition left behind on the convention floor.
Historically, the NDP was built on a very specific, carefully balanced three-legged stool: the eco-radical hippies (your vegans and pipeline protesters), the out-of-touch champagne socialists (the faculty lounge crowd mixed with downtown elites), and the blue-collar union workers who provided the actual political muscle.
At the NDP leadership convention, that stool tipped over - perhaps for good. The blue-collar leg hasn’t just been sawed off; it’s been put through a woodchipper.
To appreciate how staggering this is, you have to remember the NDP’s DNA. This is a party literally birthed by the labour movement. For decades, unions didn’t just support the party; they owned it. They had massive blocks of automatic convention delegates. Union bosses were the ultimate kingmakers.
So what the hell happened to Rob Ashton?
Ashton wasn’t just some guy who bought a hardhat for a photo op. He’s the National President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Canada. He was the designated labour heavyweight, proudly plastering massive union logos all over his website. We aren’t just talking about local chapters here.
Consider the sheer scale of the organizations that officially told their members to stand with Rob. He had the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and their 250,000 members across Canada. He had the United Steelworkers (USW) - a literal founding pillar of the NDP - and their 225,000 members. He had the backing of CUPE BC (100,000 members) and CUPE Saskatchewan (31,000 members). Throw in SEIU Local 2, MoveUP, his own longshoremen, OEIU 115, and the official backing of three entire District Labour Councils (Vancouver, North Coast & Haida Gwaii, and Nanaimo-Duncan).
I did some quick math on this, and while it’s tough to get a perfect, down-to-the-person count, we are easily looking at a candidate with the official, on-paper blessing of organizations representing nearly 700,000 Canadian workers. He was supposed to be the working-class firewall against the Avi Lewis activist takeover.
And he failed spectacularly.
Let’s look at the brutal reality. The modern NDP is now a straight-up “one member, one vote” party. With a direct line to nearly three-quarters of a million unionized workers, if the blue-collar labour movement was seriously still with the NDP, they could have swamped the membership rolls and owned this convention in their sleep.
They didn’t.
When the ballots were counted, Ashton walked away with a pathetic 4,200 votes out of 70,000 counted. His fundraising was just as abysmal, scraping together around $200,000 compared to Avi Lewis’s $1.23 million haul. With nearly 700,000 workers officially “endorsing” him through their union brass, Ashton couldn’t even convince 1% of them to actually show up and vote for him.
The union bosses might still play NDP politics, but their members have completely checked out.
Now, let’s be brutally honest: part of the reason he failed is that Ashton himself was a terrible candidate. His debate performances were a masterclass in deer-in-the-headlights panic, and his closing convention speech - where he literally screamed into the microphone “eat the damn rich” - was both physically painful to watch and hilariously weird at the same time. Clearly, the guy needs more prep time in NXT before getting called up to the main roster.
But that begs a much bigger question for the labour movement: if Ashton was this bad, why did the union bosses endorse him? Why couldn’t the mighty Canadian labour movement find a better standard-bearer to protect their influence in their own party? The answer is simple. The true working-class talent pool within the NDP has dried up.
To be fair, Avi Lewis didn’t run completely without union backing. He had the enthusiastic support of CUPE Ontario and a smattering of downtown locals. But that actually proves the point. It exposes a massive, ideological civil war within the labour movement itself: the divide between the “hardhats” and the “lanyards.” Even massive public-sector unions fractured geographically, with the Western chapters in BC and Saskatchewan backing the traditional labour guy in Ashton, while the hyper-aggressive Ontario wing went full-blown activist for Avi. The old-school union factions went to war for Ashton and got completely embarrassed by their own membership, while the urban, activist wings went for Lewis and officially captured the party. The modern NDP isn’t the party of the factory floor anymore; it’s the party of the downtown municipal bureaucrat.
Contrast this with the Jack Layton era. Layton was an urban, champagne socialist through and through, but over his years as leader, he morphed into a guy who could actually speak to the working class. He led the party to a historic Official Opposition breakthrough by watering down the radicalism (though it certainly helped that the Ignatieff Liberals were collapsing and the electorate was largely fine with Stephen Harper staying in power, which neutered the “strategic voting” fear).
The modern NDP, now fully captured by the Avi Lewis wing, isn’t just ignoring the working class; they view their industries with outright contempt.
And nature abhors a political vacuum.
Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have been laser-focused on this exact vulnerability. They aren’t wooing the union bosses - they’re going straight to the actual members. The Tories are aggressively championing what my campaign in 2021 first identified as the “left behind.” These are the voters who play by the rules, work their hands to the bone, and watch everyone else get ahead while they get crushed by the housing crisis and skyrocketing affordability issues. They’re exhausted, they’re angry, and Poilievre is speaking their language - even backing pro-labour, anti-business legislation over the years to prove he means it.
This could fundamentally shift the political math in this country.
If you look at the raw values of the Canadian electorate, it breaks down to roughly 60% progressive and 40% conservative. The genius - and the frustration - of the federal Liberals is that they hunt in both camps. They routinely capture massive chunks of the 60% progressive pie despite crowded competition from the NDP, Greens, and Bloc, and they still manage to bleed the conservative block. For the Tories, the historical math has always been defensive: fiercely guarding our 40% from Liberal poaching, while looking for surgical opportunities to claw just enough progressive voters across the aisle to form government.
I’ve said it many times: a bad NDP is historically bad for the Conservatives. We saw this exact dynamic play out in the 2019, 2021, and 2025 elections, where soft NDP voters panicked, flocked to the Liberals, and kept the red team in power.
But if the CPC continues to aggressively devour the blue-collar, working-class vote, and the NDP continues to run away from them into the waiting arms of the radical left... the old rules might not apply. That 60/40 split, and what it means, may disappear as the traditional lines blur. We are rapidly approaching a scenario where a weakened, extremist NDP is no longer the strategic roadblock for the Conservatives that it used to be.
The NDP used to be the party of the lunch pail. Now, it’s the party of the locally sourced, government-mandated tofu ration. And the working class is clocking out.
P.S. Yes, I know the current polling is great for the Liberals and terrible for the Conservatives. I’m not pretending everything is rosy in Toryland right now. But when you’ve run as many campaigns as I have, you learn that politics is about looking around the corner, not just staring at today's snapshot. If this fundamental math keeps shifting, the game is going to change completely before the next writ drops.
I've listened to you on Power & Politics, am always amazed at your patience. I thoroughly enjoyed this post, thank you.
The NDP abandoned their labour roots and class struggle for woke identity politics and ideological purity tests. And with that, many of the blue collar union workers who once helped form their base have moved to the Conservatives.