The NDP and the parliamentary illusion

Despite being far more animated than the leadership transition that followed Jagmeet Singh’s acclamation in 2017, the current NDP leadership race remains constrained by a narrow understanding of what political parties are—and what they can do. Until progressives broaden that understanding, the left is likely to keep falling short, even when it manages the occasional electoral win.

The dominant approach views the success of parties as being a function of two variables: how left-wing (or right-wing) the platform is, and the personal charisma of a party’s leader. It is striking how much political commentary remains preoccupied with these two variables, often at the expense of deeper questions about power, organization, and strategy.

Much contemporary debate is dominated by confident declarations that victory—and even utopia—are within reach, if only the right platform can be put forward. The other side presents equally hollow arguments that victory is only possible if the NDP moderates itself in pursuit of centrist voters. Compared to these recurring mantras, debates about the “likeability” of candidates can begin to seem like a more concrete, if still limited, form of analysis.

The parliamentary road to failure

Implicit in this dominant approach is an unusually optimistic faith in state power. The entirety of politics, as in how we organize and order our societies and lives, is flattened into elections, which are construed as a magical black box. We simply have to plug the correct progressive platform into the NDP, the party wins an election, and voilà, progressive outcomes follow. Underlying every leadership candidate’s campaign is an assumption that elections translate directly into power. This belief reduces politics to a narrow sequence of campaign inputs and policy outputs.

In reality, political contestation continues between elections. Political outcomes are determined by the balance of political forces, which is a separate issue from the partisan composition of Parliament. For example, Avi Lewis’s platform calls for a public telecom option to compete with the monopolistic pricing power of Canada’s private carriers. This is a welcome idea, but one that runs headlong into the power of Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

Bell, on its own, posted annual revenues of $24 billion in 2024. The company also has 45,000 employees working full-time to advance its interests. On the other side, the NDP has an annual budget of around $6 million, a few dozen employees, and around 100,000 paper members. Under what model of politics can we believe that the latter could defeat the former—let alone defeat every other entrenched economic monopoly? The only way to square this circle is to believe state power to be entirely neutral and easily wielded; a vision of the state as a neutral and highly effective instrument, readily usable by whoever happens to control it.

In reality, modern public bureaucracies are gargantuan and notoriously difficult ships to steer. For outsiders and counter-elites, it can take an entire political term just to understand how they function. In the meantime, the incumbent elite, already well-organized, can utilize their economic, social, and media power to break the governing coalition. History is replete with examples of progressive governments—from SYRIZA in Greece to provincial NDP governments closer to home—that achieved electoral breakthroughs only to be undermined and defeated by entrenched elites.

It is a curious paradox within contemporary progressive thought—that a critical view towards our brutal capitalist elites is reconciled with a deep faith in political institutions that often exceeds their demonstrated capacity to deliver transformative change; as though something can be summoned into being simply because 172 people in a cold room on Parliament Hill decreed it so.

Full-spectrum political forces

A more fruitful approach is to understand parties as a form of social technology for collective action. Unless you are a billionaire, individual action is not the relevant domain for politics. Regular people lack sufficient resources for their actions as individuals to have any meaningful impact. Simply scaling this up, the belief that the aggregation of uncoordinated spontaneous action by individuals can lead to power or social change is also a chimera. In the breach, parties are a vehicle for collective organized action, allowing individuals to connect and scale their resources through predictable and democratic hierarchies, and engendering a division of labour in pursuit of collective goals.

Theoretically, the masses of regular working class people could advance their interests through a set of multiple institutions: an organization focused on housing, another focused on labour, another focused on health care, and so on. This ecosystem of institutions could allow regular individuals, powerless on their own, to scale up and pursue their collective interests across multiple domains. This vision captures some of the reality of the rich associational life of the 20th century working class in Canada and other liberal democracies. Preachers of the social gospel would organize through their churches, unions would have their halls and locals, progressive Ukrainian and Finnish-Canadians would build their labour temples, and generations of ambitious proletarians would pass through the Communist Party’s cadre programs, becoming sharpened and more skilled organizers in the process (even if many moved on from the party).

Like the hidden portion of an iceberg, an entire ecosystem of working class coordination backstopped successful left-reformist governments in places like western Canada. In this context, the CCF/NDP could function simply as a parliamentary force representing this wider ecosystem. But it is 2026, and this ecosystem is mostly gone, eroded by decades of deindustrialization, expanding inequality, and the deliberate dismantling of working class institutions. Today’s fragmented labour markets, weaker unions, and social atomization render a re-creation of that old ecosystem unrealistic. Any serious progressive strategy has to account for this reality. It is insufficient to simply be a party of the ballot box and the streets (le parti des urnes et de la rue was a slogan coined by Québec’s left party, Québec solidaire), as the latter part of that formula has declined.

Recognizing the hollowness of contemporary progressive parties, some have called for re-connecting parties to social movements, or for creating new formations like Québec solidaire as parties of the ballot box and the streets. But this framing misses the underlying problem. “Social movements” suffer from many of the same coordination failures as parliamentary parties themselves. When conditions are favourable, these movements can grow rapidly, drawing energy from moments of crisis or outrage. Yet with few durable structures, weak mechanisms for internal discipline, and minimal costs to exit, they are just as prone to rapid collapse—or to fossilization within the NGO and advocacy ecosystem once the moment passes.

Rather than undertaking the doomed task of rebuilding this ecosystem, a more efficient path is to organize political parties on their own as full-spectrum political forces. We live as tenants, workers, consumers, patients, and so on. Our vehicle for collective action, our party, should be able to contest power across all these domains. The interesting strategic questions are those about how we can build a party with enough depth and breadth to do so. How do we accumulate the resources? How do we get individuals to join? How do we train ourselves to lead and be led?

The masses of regular people cannot increase their power if their party is only a parliamentary brand—it must be transformed into a state-in-waiting, a counter-hierarchy that builds an alternative society within the shell of the old. Platforms and parliamentary leaders are elements of a wider strategy but not the most important issues. Our problem is not that our structures for collective action are following the wrong ideology or led by the wrong people, but that our existing structures for collective action are fragmented, uneven, and often inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Debates about revolution versus reformism, or other ideological differentiation is only consequential within an organized hierarchy that can be steered in some direction.

Recent commentary on Avi Lewis’s leadership bid has argued that his labour platform lays the foundation for renewed movement-building within and around the NDP. And it is true that the document is unusually ambitious in both scope and substance, touching not only on workplace democracy and Employment Insurance reform, but on AI, migrant justice, public services, and economic democracy more broadly.

Yet this only reinforces the central problem. Even the most comprehensive and pro-worker policy blueprint remains inert without an organizational apparatus capable of mobilizing workers, sustaining conflict, and coordinating action beyond episodic electoral moments. Policy can gesture toward movement-building, but it cannot substitute for the hard work of constructing durable hierarchies, discipline, and shared capacity for collective action. Without that infrastructure, even the best labour plan risks becoming another admirable document circulating among activists, unions, and commentators—instead of a lever capable of shifting the balance of power.

A class for itself

Rather than focusing primarily on long-term policy visions detached from questions of power and organization, our focus should be on intermediate paths to increasing our power. To function as a full-spectrum force, the party must embed itself wherever people live, work, and struggle. Why shouldn’t the NDP have its own newspaper, or even eventually its own TV channel? Why should it not operate party halls as community centres across the country? Why shouldn’t the party create its own milieu of organizations like tenants’ unions and even launch its own labour organizing?

Although the NDP is still formally linked to the Canadian labour movement, a more integrated approach is needed—one in which unions and party overlap and cooperate within a single organized hierarchy, rather than existing with disjointed priorities that coordinate only episodically. Why not launch its own shareholder proxy advisor, guiding pension funds and other member-controlled investment vehicles to shift corporate conduct? Why not create its own consumer cooperatives, or even party-owned enterprises?

We should strive immediately to use one of the few remaining working class institutions, the NDP, to advance our collective power. It is entirely possible to increase our power in this country without winning elections. At a certain threshold, more power will require electoral victories as a necessary condition—but never as a sufficient condition. These paths are not even in opposition: the construction of an alternative state-in-waiting is valuable for electoral success. Of course, while we shouldn’t simply assume electoral victories, we also cannot assume that we can resolve the collective action problems innate to any of the endeavors listed above. But we should at least shift some of the left’s intellectual firepower away from policy wonkery towards the actual problem: the increasing difficulty of collective action.

It is illuminating to flip the Clausewitzian cliché: politics is war by other means. But the unique asymmetry of inequality rigs the battlefield. The rich already have a standing army at their command: their money, their institutions, their corporations. While parties can be useful, the rich don’t need them. Their numbers are smaller, they have more resources, and they all already know each other. They don’t need the social technology of political parties to achieve coordination, collective action, and to build popular support. For the wealthy, coordination is automatic. For the rest of us, it must be built.

The great mass of atomized working and middle-class individuals cannot coordinate as easily. Parties are a necessary tool to getting individuals connected and transforming their shared interests into a collective class interest. The left will not win by simply voting for better politicians, but by forging a political instrument worthy of the world it seeks to create, an instrument that operates beyond elections. This is the promise of a party—not a ballot-line, but the means by which the many overcome the few.

The author is a commentator and organizer writing under the name Ali Terrenoire. He can be found at @AliTerrenoire on X, @aliterrenoire.bsky.social on Bluesky, and @ali.terrenoire on Instagram.