By barring Bianca Mugyenyi, NDP shows it’s not interested in renewal

On January 19, the unnamed, three-person NDP vetting committee disqualified Bianca Mugyenyi from running for the party’s leadership.

Mugyenyi, they say, is a proxy candidate. She acknowledged that she decided to run after her husband, Yves Engler, was denied entry into the race. The committee argued that this constituted a breach of “honesty, professionalism and integrity” and therefore disqualified her.

Mugyenyi has been clear about her intentions and has not misrepresented why she is running, directly contradicting the vetting committee’s claim that she was dishonest or lacked professionalism and integrity. In a press conference announcing her rejection, she said, “We did exactly what a democratic party asks candidates to do.” She added that the committee rejected her for vague reasons, “including the suggestion that I am not my own candidate.”

If the “democratic” part of the New Democratic Party meant anything at all, the party brass would have recognized they had no real basis to reject her, approved Mugyenyi, and perhaps crossed their fingers that she would lose. Instead, they invented a reason to keep her out of the race.

The Engler-Mugyenyi campaign has exposed the deep democratic rot that plagues the party—and exposing it is treated as a capital crime by the party brass.

This leadership race is about far more than choosing the next leader of the NDP. After the so-called Red Wave allowed the Liberals to cling to power, the party has been effectively dead in the water. The race has become a conduit for members to express their desire to rebuild the party—to renew and transform it.

And yet, the decision to bar Mugyenyi suggests the opposite: this is not a party genuinely interested in renewal. By preventing a candidate from even clearing the vetting stage, the NDP leadership constricts who is allowed to participate, which ideas may be debated, and which political tendencies are kept safely out of the spotlight.

Vetting has been a fundamental part of the NDP’s problem. For years, party officials have pushed out candidates who think too independently or are too critical of the direction set by leadership. At the same time, the process has driven away people who want to get involved in politics but become cynical and frustrated by the intrusive reach into their personal lives, and the lives of those close to them.

In 2019, Janet-Lynne Durnford from Orillia dropped out of the federal election after the NDP’s vetting process dragged on. She was the sole candidate seeking the party’s nomination. Durnford said the party demanded access to a private Facebook group made up of personal friends. Even after she provided proof that the group consisted entirely of friends, the party continued to insist on access, which she refused.

That same year, Sid Ryan also withdrew from running due to vetting delays. In New Brunswick, the NDP cancelled its leadership race after the sole candidate failed to pass vetting. The party did not name the candidate or explain the decision.

Vetting is typically justified as a way to ensure that a candidate won’t embarrass the party with something unsavoury from their past. Unelected party staff and volunteers comb through social media posts and public commentary, looking for any reason to reject a candidacy. In Mugyenyi’s case, however, the issue was not an old statement or hidden controversy, but the allegation that she was a “proxy” candidate—an even clearer example of how vetting functions as a tool of control, policing what counts as acceptable politics within the social democratic party without input from members.

One longtime NDP caucus member told me they noticed a clear difference in the level of debate and criticism toward the leader depending on how aggressively candidates were vetted. Tighter vetting, they explained, encouraged conformity, stifled independent thought, and produced a caucus that was uncritical and uncombative, with less debate and far less dynamism.

That lack of energy is obvious from the outside. Many members often seem unsure or incapable of defending NDP principles when pressed by journalists, with a few exceptions. They sometimes appear afraid to challenge right-wing policies, or simply leave it to the leader to do all the heavy lifting.

Vetting also has the side effect of discouraging racialized candidates from running—particularly when it is opaque, discretionary, and aggressively enforced. Professor Erin Tolley has studied this phenomenon and found that vetting disproportionately removes racialized candidates. Broadview magazine summarized her research this way:

In a study that examined race, gender and intersectionality in legislative recruitment, Tolley looked at more than 800 political aspirants in Canada across three major parties during the 2015 election. She found that as racialized Canadians move through the recruitment process, their presence shrinks at each stage of selection. ‘Racialized candidates come forward for party nomination in numbers that exceed their share of the population, but parties still show a preference for white candidates,’ she wrote in a column. Data collected by Tolley and other researchers reveals that of 4,516 candidates who ran in the 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019 federal elections, 83 percent identified as white.

Mugyenyi is hardly a fringe activist. She co-founded The Leap (alongside fellow NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis and his wife—see what I did there?), serves as the director of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, and sits on the board of the Council of Canadians. It appears her only disqualifying characteristic is who she decided to marry.

“I stepped forward to carry a shared vision and shared platform that was built collectively,” she said at her press conference in January. That is democracy. Instead of allowing members to evaluate those ideas… three unelected people made that decision for them.”

Denying Mugyenyi highlights the contradictions that make the NDP so ineffective. While policies have dominated this leadership race, the party’s real deficiency isn’t in its platform, it’s in its internal democracy. Without fixing the mundane, bureaucratic machinery, the party will never be able to fight dynamically and strategically for the progressive policies its leadership candidates espouse.

The three, unnamed members of the vetting committee are a symbol of this deficiency. And yet, in a leadership race that has focused on renewal, I don’t see any of the other candidates decrying Mugyenyi’s rejection. The only candidate that even mentions vetting in their platform is Heather McPherson, who promises faster, clearer, and more transparent vetting, with consistent timelines, better communication, and clear expectations for candidates and local teams.

Social media is a tool of social control. When the left relies on it to determine which candidates are “acceptable,” we hand over our decision-making power to the techno-fascist owners of social media platforms whose interests directly conflict with our own. And when vetting becomes the excuse to block radical politics from gaining a foothold in the party, we have to ask—what is the point of this social democratic party at all?

In Canada, there has always been a tension between social democrats and socialists. But unless the NDP explicitly bans socialists from its party—a move members would likely never support—denying a candidate based on who she is married to isn’t just deeply sexist and racist; it raises a larger question: what is the point of this party at all?

Consider Rosemary Brown, the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature and the first woman to run for the leadership of a major federal party. In 1975, she ran on a bold left-wing platform that championed public ownership, worker control, decentralization, and global solidarity, all while standing unapologetically for human dignity and equality. Her campaign, built on principles and courage rather than conformity, would be almost impossible to imagine in today’s NDP, where invasive vetting and rigid gatekeeping dictate who is “acceptable.” Ask yourself: would this party even allow a candidate like Rosemary Brown to run today?

Nora Loreto is a writer and activist based in Quebec City. She’s the president of the Canadian Freelance Union and co-host of the popular podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics.