Personally the two candidates I like most are Avi Lewis and Tanille Johnston in that order. That both have accounts on Canadian Mastodon instances shows me they’re serious about our sovereignty and are willing to match their actions to their words.

Lewis to me just feels like he embodies ideas I’ve had in my head for some time. Like I was curious why we haven’t explored crown corporations for groceries before, which he’s thrown the idea into the ring. I’ve also thought about how rural communities have been abandoned by both corporations and provincial governments with the loss of Greyhound and Saskatchewan Transportation Company, and he’s talked of making a public option for a federal bus fleet, and is just very focussed on increasing public options as a whole. I really like his energy, he gets his message across well, and he’s got a record holding people in office accountable.

Tanille has also impressed me. Guaranteed Livable Income, tough on AI policies like Lewis, closing tax loopholes, and even though it may be more virtue signalling with how grand an idea it is, I love her idea of working with the international community to implement a global wealth tax. Everything else is pretty much on par with Lewis, but what puts Lewis ahead in my books is that he does a better job mobilising people and getting the message out there. That she’s the first indigenous candidate for a federal political party is very impressive.

Everybody else to me is a mixed bag. I like Tony McQuail since he seems like a genuine, down-to-Earth guy and means well. I like how he wants to strengthen regional associations and strengthen small communities, which I feel is important, but I just don’t think party leader is the best position in the party for the changes he wants to make.

Rob Ashton seems like a nice guy, but using AI for an AskMeAnything left a real sour taste in my mouth. Like I get you have a background in labour rights, but I question your ability to stand ground in federal politics if you can’t connect personally with the base as a party candidate by using a tool that most people in the party agree to be a detriment to worker’s rights. People make mistakes, and I hate purity tests, but I question his ability to read the party base despite all the good work he’s done.

Heather McPherson is a tough one for me. She’s pretty establishment for the party, but being from Alberta, I do believe she makes a fair point with the party needing to gain better ground here, and her record in having the safest NDP seat in the country in arguably the most Conservative province. My biggest worry though is that in working in connecting and improving the party’s connection to the province, that she’ll make the same mistake the provincial NDP made under Notley and try to “meet halfway” regarding fossil fuels and piss everyone off. That she equated Alberta sovereignty to Quebec sovereignty in one of her emails didn’t come as a good sign.

Yeah, I was initially leaning towards Rob as first pick and Avi second but I might swap.

If you’re worried about giving workers real power, the NDP is not for you.

Unless you believe in zero immigration which you absolutely have the right to, the material reasons for when immigration is bad for workers are the lesser workers rights they have and the shortage of housing and transit. Workers rights because unionized workplaces mean corpos can’t pay a migrant less than a Canadian, therefore have little incentive to bring them in. And if they do so in a non-unionized workplace, the migrant worker has the economic means to switch jobs, which means the corpo has to pay them similar to Canadian labour. And housing and transit are about the only limited resources standing in the way from scaling up any Canadian town or city from its current size to virtually any size. If we get housing and transit building so that we don’t have those constraints, and new people entering the economy aren’t at permanent worker rights disadvantage, like new Canadian grownups aren’t, then the economic effects should be more or less equivalent to natural increase in the population, which tends to be economically positive. Better yet, the economy should benefit more than natural pop growth because Canada didn’t spend the resources raising and educating this new population, while we’d get the surplus it produces as it enters the workforce.

If immigrant labour does not have the same rights (including recognition of experience, education through some process, etc) as non-immigrants, then the only way to not have corpos use them to lower wages is to not let them in at all - or zero immigration. But new workers constantly enter the workforce in a growing population as kids grow up so the mere entry of new workers into the economy doesn’t appear to be bad for wages. The baby boom along with strong workers rights (much weakened later) produced a pretty great economy for working people.

Excluding Yves Engler was a mistake.