Art supplies, beachside walks and a town hall: Inside the bruised NDP's attempts to rebuild
On the coast of Vancouver Island, the remaining NDP members of Parliament came to do some soul-searching.
The seven survivors — the "mighty seven" as they sometimes jokingly call themselves — gathered in the quaint coastal community of Parksville, just north of Nanaimo, for a caucus retreat last week ahead of the fall sitting in the House of Commons.
These types of multi-day meetings are meant to help political parties regroup and strategize before returning to Ottawa.
And there's a lot the NDP had to figure out over the summer.
In the smallest boardroom the hotel had, designed for "intimate gatherings," according to its website, a facilitator was brought in for the day to work with the MPs. They were armed with markers and other art supplies.
Behind a closed door decorated with a cheerful hand-drawn welcome sign, there was laughter — sometimes it was very loud. Was it part of an exercise?
Just a few hours in, the facilitator came out to shoo the one journalist who showed up to cover the caucus event away from the hallway, saying their presence impeded on the creation of a safe space for the MPs to share.
Later in the session, the MPs paired up and hit the beach. Some took long walks together, others sat on the benches and the large pieces of driftwood that lined the shore. They talked it out as the tide rolled in.
It hasn't been a smooth few months for a party still licking the wounds of its worst election night showing in Canadian history.
When the campaign started, NDP officials confidently stated they were more prepared and better funded than they had been in a long time. It didn't help. New Democrats went from 24 seats down to just seven, a loss so severe the NDP no longer has official party status in the House of Commons.
Interim leader Don Davies has called it one of the worst campaigns he's seen. Many NDPers regularly refer to the results as devastating.
"The NDP has to take a hard look at why our messages didn't resonate in the way that we wanted it to," Davies said in an interview at the retreat.
Then there's the infighting after the campaign. In May, three of the seven remaining MPs wrote a letter slamming the party for its decision to pick Davies as interim leader, saying they weren't properly consulted. Leah Gazan, the MP for Winnipeg Centre, says she learned the news from media stories.
Emerging from the meetings with the facilitator in BC, it seemed like some things had been worked out.
"We're a good caucus and we get along and we're having fun in there," Gazan said. "You hear it on the outside. We're laughing a lot. And yeah, I think I feel very hopeful going forward.
"We are working really hard together to rebuild our party."
One town hall at a timeThat evening, the MPs drove an hour north to Courtenay for a town hall in a historic log building.
The room was full; close to 100 people were there — making it better attended than some of former leader Jagmeet Singh's campaign stops.
A few former MPs were there too, including Lisa Marie Barron, who lost her constituency of Nanaimo-Ladysmith, a riding notorious for being a tight race that often splits the vote between the NDP and Greens. A Conservative now holds the seat.
Addressing the crowd, each MP stood to name off their many critic portfolios. With so many to divide up between so few people, some of them had to stop to remember all the departments they are now tasked with following.
"I'm the spokesperson for every issue in French," the party's only Quebec MP, Alexandre Boulerice, joked.
The MPs answered the audience's questions with passion, straight answers and humour. Maybe they've been through the worst — there's nowhere to go but up.
A table at the back of the hall held some homemade cookies, coffee and petitions to sign. With 25 handwritten signatures, an MP can rise in the House of Commons to present it. It's a scrappy way the New Democrats can still get a voice when they aren't guaranteed time in question period or seats on committees. Those privileges were lost with their official party status.
On the table is a spot to sign up to volunteer or donate to the NDP. After the election, dozens of New Democrat employees who worked for the leader's office or defeated MPs lost their jobs. Now there's a skeleton staff and campaign debt to pay off.
It's not an accident the MPs are on Vancouver Island to start the rebuilding process. Until the election, it was NDP territory — the party held six of its seven ridings. (Green Party Leader Elizabeth May holds the seventh.)
But on election night, Canadians voted all but one New Democrat off the island. Only Gord Johns managed to keep his riding of Courtenay-Alberni.
Standing on the boardwalk in Parksville, which is part of Johns' riding, people stopped to say hi to the well-known MP.
"We need to do a much better job of getting back to the grassroots, which is really what our party is," Johns said.
Johns said he believes the party can win support back one town hall at a time.
"People have underestimated us before. We know that we're the underdog," Johns said.
New leader, new party?The process of choosing a new leader will also be a chance for the NDP to decide what it wants for its future.
Some have criticized the NDP's rules for nominating a leader, which have long required a candidate garner a certain percentage of signatures from different groups, including women, people of colour, youth, members of the LGBTQ+ community and residents of various regions of the country. Advocates say those rules are integral to make sure the party properly reflects the country's makeup.
Davies has said he believes the NDP has veered too deep into identity politics and too far away from its working class roots.
"It's just a question of the right balance. Are we really understanding what working people are going through?" he said on a recent podcast.
Others, like Gazan, say people's race, gender and other identities are intrinsically linked to class — pointing out how the majority of striking Air Canada flight attendants were women.
On Friday, the NDP announced its first leadership event in October will be hosted by the Canadian Labour Congress. "The relationship between labour and the NDP is as important as ever," the news release read.
Davies said an upcoming review will look at why the NDP lost so many working-class voters to the Conservatives, who garnered support from several private-sector unions.
"There's very, very strong agreement that rebuilding those relationships and reconnecting with our roots is one of the core ways that we can rebuild our party," Davies said.
The party will also look at how it lost votes to the Liberals. The NDP feels strongly that left-leaning Canadians lent their votes to the Liberals to try to prevent a Conservative government.
The party sees an opportunity to win those voters back, as they see Prime Minister Mark Carney moving the Liberal Party further to the political right.
That's leaving a growing space for the New Democrats' progressive voice on issues like climate change, Indigenous rights and labour.
"This is a moment where Canadians need the New Democratic Party. They need us more than ever," Johns said.
"And the seven of us are going to give everything we've got."
But in a House of Commons with 343 MPs, the question is whether these seven will be heard.
cbc.ca
