Alberta’s Heather McPherson Joins Avi Lewis in NDP Leadership Race

Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson launched her campaign to lead Canada’s New Democrats out of the wilderness they found themselves wandering in after last April’s federal election on Sunday.

Vowing to “make the NDP a viable choice again, a choice that unites, that delivers on the promise of good jobs, of wages that keep up, of homes people can afford, of public services that we can count on,” McPherson made her expected announcement to more than 300 supporters at the University of Alberta’s French-language Campus Saint-Jean in her riding.

She joins Avi Lewis, scion of the Lewis dynasty prominent in the NDP in the 1970s in Ottawa and the Ontario Legislature, in the contest to replace Jagmeet Singh, whose seven-and-a-half years at the party’s helm contributed mightily to the federal NDP’s present unhappy predicament. Singh resigned when the party was reduced to seven seats, losing official party status, in April.

Lewis, who failed to win a Vancouver seat in the April election, first announced his leadership bid on social media on Sept. 19, then held an official launch on Wednesday in Toronto. He’ll have another French-language launch in Quebec next month.

No one I heard today at Campus Saint-Jean mentioned Singh by name, but that of another former federal NDP leader, the late Jack Layton, came up often enough. Maybe it was just the hometown crowd, but even if her message was mostly anodyne, McPherson’s well organized launch did have a buzz reminiscent of Layton’s 2011 federal election campaign, which turned into the famous Orange Wave.

No one from the Alberta NDP’s current leadership seemed to have shown up, but former premier Rachel Notley was the best known of those chosen to introduce the three-term MP, describing the party as “a group of people who know how to work diligently to earn electoral success that is necessary to make notion-building progressive changes in service of our country and in service of the millions of Canadians who need us to be there.”

“That is the tradition upon which Heather McPherson’s political career has been built,” Notley stated.

Unlike the easy choice of being a Conservative in Alberta, Notley observed to laughter, McPherson’s path “is not the kind of choice people make in service of ladder climbing or career development.”

Just the same, she said, “it tends to reveal a genuine principled commitment to the values of our party and, through that, to the livelihoods of the greatest number of people who are our neighbours, who are our friends, and who are in our communities.”

McPherson targeted Prime Minister Mark Carney in her remarks. “People deserve better than a conservative government and a conservative prime minister wearing a Liberal jersey.”

What’s more, she added, “People deserve better than a Conservative Party led by Pierre Poilievre!”

“You know, Conservatives target rural seats and Western seats, and the Liberals target urban seats and Eastern seats. But the NDP isn’t a regional party. We are Canada’s party. We were built by farmers and urban workers coming together, and we need to reconnect with both. We need to show Canadians that we can make our party stronger. We can make our country stronger.”

“If you want pharmacare, if you want dental care, if you want better health care, you have to elect more New Democrats,” she said.

This message is neither unexpected nor likely to be controversial in NDP circles, but it will be much harder to achieve than merely to say.

Turning to the record of Conservatives like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and federal leader Pierre Poilievre, McPherson observed: “They thrive on division. They turn politics into an us-versus-them, a rural-versus-urban… workers versus the environment. That’s not my vision for the New Democratic Party. We don’t grow by pushing people out. We grow by being bringing people together.”

“That’s the path that Jack laid out. That is the path that Rachel paved. And, like them, we need to make space for everyone.”

McPherson pointed to NDP governments in Manitoba and B.C., and New Democrats leading the opposition in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia. “We know how to win as New Democrats,” she said.

“We win when we build a federal party with the provinces, not when we pull away from them,” she added, perhaps including a subtle jab at Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, who has talked about disaffiliating the provincial NDP from the federal party.

“Every fight I’ve taken on, from protecting water in Treaty 8, to stopping coal mining in the Rocky Mountains, to calling for justice in Ukraine and Palestine, to standing up for jobs here at home, I’ve done it out of a belief of fairness, and I’ve done it bringing people together, and that’s what we need to do,” McPherson said.

“We don’t have the luxury of waiting,” she said “People are counting on us now for jobs, for help, making ends meet, for fairness, for hope and, yes, for change, and that change starts with us.

“You know. We’re New Democrats. We know how to work hard. We know what to do, because politics does not have to be small. It doesn’t have to be closed. Cuts and cruelty don’t have to be the only options. Canadians deserve better.”

The party will elect its new leader in Winnipeg in March. There will likely be a few more candidates, but it looks as if the real contest will be between McPherson and Lewis.

With a seat in Parliament and a record that has made Edmonton-Strathcona, in otherwise all-Conservative-blue Alberta, one of the few safe NDP seats in Canada, McPherson can both demonstrate electability and parliamentary experience. Despite the location of her launch, McPherson spoke only a few words in French — like Carney, she probably has more work to do on that file.

Lewis, meanwhile, is a well-known broadcaster, documentary-filmmaker and environmental activist. He is married to high-profile author and social activist Naomi Klein. So he has traction and enjoys name recognition in a world driven by social media.

Whether his role with Klein in the controversial Leap Manifesto in 2015 helps or hinders in the NDP of 2025 remains to be seen. Despite their important contributions, I doubt the roles played by Lewis’s grandfather David Lewis as leader of the federal NDP and father Stephen Lewis as leader of the Ontario party are remembered by many NDP members today.