The race to elect a new federal NDP leader is down to its final two months. The party will select its next leader at its 2026 convention in Winnipeg, between March 27 and 29.
Five candidates are vying for the position: Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, filmmaker and activist Avi Lewis, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada leader Rob Ashton, Campbell River, B.C., city councillor Tanille Johnston, and farmer Tony McQuail. McPherson, Lewis and Ashton are widely recognized to be the top contenders.
As it stands, none of these three frontrunners have substantial name recognition with the Canadian public. According to polling conducted by Pollara in October, approximately 20 per cent of respondents recognized McPherson, while Lewis and Ashton registered 16 and 14 per cent recognition, respectively.
McPherson, Lewis and Ashton also seem to appeal to different segments of the NDP base. Pollara suggests that McPherson connects most with the party’s progressive, urban electorate: white-collar workers, the university educated and immigrants. Ashton, by contrast, “excites blue collar workers, lower income earners, and those without university degrees.” Lewis’s base skews younger and is more concentrated among the environmental and social activist core.
Though McPherson appears to hold a slight lead, any of the three top candidates has a viable path to the leadership, and thus a chance to revive the party’s fortunes.
Despite significant setbacks in the last federal election — including losing official party status— nearly half (46 per cent) of those contacted by Pollara indicated they were open to voting NDP in the next election. There is therefore a real opportunity to make headway by offering a bold vision that addresses the various crises facing working people.
Thus far, Ashton has most successfully occupied the working-class lane, centering affordability and promising a return to the party’s labour roots. Ashton’s campaign, however, has been relatively short on policy details.
On January 22, the Lewis campaign released its labour platform, “Dignified Work in a Digital Age.” Complementing previous policy releases related to a Green New Deal, housing, health care and a public option for groceries, Lewis’s labour platform offers a bold agenda to expand workplace democracy and workers’ rights, rein in artificial intelligence, fix Employment Insurance, and promote justice for migrant workers, immigrants, and refugees.
The question now is, will Lewis’s labour plan pull more workers and unions behind his progressive campaign?
Lewis launched his leadership bid in September 2025 with a video taking aim at grocery, telecom and oil monopolies and big banks, and calling for a wealth tax, a national rent cap, a public option for groceries, health-care expansion to cover “medication to mental health,” and “a Green New Deal that creates millions of good-paying jobs.”
While Lewis’s opening salvo centred class conflict — “they’re not just hoarding extreme wealth, they’re foreclosing on our shared future,” he said of oil and gas CEOs — it was less clear what a Lewis-led NDP might mean for labour.
“Dignified Work in a Digital Age” provides this detail.
The platform begins by framing the issues facing workers: “Full-time jobs with benefits and pensions are being replaced by temporary, contract, or part-time work. Thanks to legal loopholes, gig workers and migrant workers are being left without basic protections. Rapid technological change, especially generative AI, is reshaping industries faster than labour laws are adapting, leaving workers without the rights, training, or bargaining power they need. And our broken employment insurance system doesn't kick in fast enough, pay you enough or last long enough.”
It then addresses five policy areas: workplace democracy and the right to strike; a “humans-first AI policy”; defense of workers’ rights; reforming EI; and justice for migrant workers, immigrants, and refugees.
First, Lewis plans to expand access to union membership as well as options for worker ownership.
To strengthen workplace democracy, the government led by Lewis would pass MP Leah Gazan’s bill to repeal section 107 of the Canada Labour Code and protect the right to strike, expand sectoral bargaining, and enforce decent labour standards and union membership on government-funded projects. The new policy document also calls for reintroducing single-step union certification in the federal jurisdiction, though this point is somewhat odd since the Canada Labour Code already permits card-check certification with a simple majority threshold.
When it comes to promoting worker ownership, a Lewis-led NDP government would: create a “national worker ownership fund” to help workers buy businesses when owners retire, sell or relocate, give workers the first chance to buy firms when bosses walk away, and provide low-interest loans and other technical support to worker cooperatives.
Lewis’s campaign further promises to introduce a series of measures to: defend the rights of gig and other freelance workers, including guaranteeing employment and collective bargaining rights for creators, platform workers, and digital labourers; protect copyright for workers; and rein in the use of digital surveillance technologies in the workplace.
When it comes to the federal public sector, a Lewis NDP government would support telework rights, an ongoing and contentious issue between federal public sector unions and the government, and fully implement pay equity legislation.
“Dignified Work in a Digital Age” is particularly strong when it comes to transforming Employment Insurance (EI), a social program in desperate need of reform.
The Lewis campaign wants to make EI “accessible and universal” by creating a standard threshold of 360 insurance hours, in contrast to the current model where eligibility varies by region. The rate of wage replacement would also be raised from the current 55 per cent of previous earnings to 75 per cent, with a $600-per-week minimum benefit. The plan would also make parental benefit access fairer for new parents, restore the EI Board of Appeals and ensure migrant workers have access to the program. These proposals align strongly with Canadian labour’s longstanding demands related to EI.
What stands out about Lewis’s labour platform, however, is its breadth. Recognizing that most labour and employment legislation is a provincial jurisdiction, the campaign has framed other social issues impacting labour as matters of worker policy. This is most clear in the platform’s “humans-first” AI approach.
“Dignified Work in a Digital Age” calls attention to the stolen private data used to build and train AI systems, the dangerous financial bubble created by overvalued AI companies, the potential of job displacement, and the industry’s massive and environmentally destructive energy use.
A Lewis-led NDP would address these issues through: a public service “human guarantee” to protect federal public sector workers’ jobs and service users alike; pausing the expansion of AI data centres and supporting a “peoples’ consultation” on a national AI strategy; banning AI use in government publications; regulating AI tools by, for example, requiring disclosure and warning labels, as the European Union now plans to do.
The campaign’s commitment to recognize the contributions of and ensure justice for migrant workers, immigrants, and refugees is also ambitious.
A Lewis NDP government would: hire 3,000 immigration public servants to clear the backlog of more than one million outstanding applications and reunite families; end closed-work permits that allow employers to abuse migrant workers and provide “permanent resident status for all and equal rights from day one”; and improve housing standards for migrant workers. The plan would also end the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement “because the US is not safe for refugees,” and establish a “national plan for asylum with dignity.”
Combined, these proposals make for a remarkable document that complements the Lewis campaign’s other policy plans in the areas of housing, health care and the environment.
As Larry Savage, professor of Labour Studies at Brock University told Class Struggle, “Lewis appears to have offered up an ambitious and comprehensive blueprint for labour and employment law reform that is forward-looking and unapologetically pro‑worker. There’s a clear recognition by the Lewis campaign that rapid technological change requires bold new approaches to defending workers’ rights. I think Lewis’s plan stands out amid NDP leadership pitches for squarely centring economic democracy.”
Will “Dignified Work in a Digital Age” give Lewis an edge in the final stretch of the NDP leadership race, and will it bring more workers and unions to not only support him but also to reconnect with the party?
So far, Lewis has racked up some impressive individual labour endorsements, including from Sid Ryan, former president of both the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario, Nas Yadollahi, president of CUPE Local 79 in Toronto, and Pam Parks, president of CUPE Local 6364.
At the same time, as Savage put it to Class Struggle, “Solid policy proposals are crucial to rebuilding union support for the NDP. On their own, however, they’re not enough to lock in union votes. Bold policies need to be paired with equally bold movement-building strategies to give confidence to unions and their members that the NDP is a viable option at the ballot box.”
With his new labour plan, Lewis has built the foundation for such movement-building strategies to take shape.
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