Interview by Gerard Di Trolio

The leadership race that was set in motion for Canada’s federal New Democratic Party after then-leader Thomas Mulcair was ousted at the party’s April 2016 convention is entering its home stretch. The cutoff point for new members to sign up to vote is August 17, with the final two debates soon after. By mid-October, the winner will be announced.

In the 2012 leadership campaign, party members decided to play it safe and go with the centrist Mulcair, who was seen as the person who could lead the NDP into government for the first time at the federal level. But Trudeaumania came along in 2015, and the NDP went from the second largest party in parliament back to its traditional third-party status.

That result was seen by many NDP supporters as a result of a very cautious campaign in which the NDP promised to balance the budget and did not attack the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the campaign’s opening days. Trudeau, meanwhile, was able to outflank the NDP from the left by promising deficit spending to revive a stagnant economy.

The NDP finds itself at a political crossroads like so many other social-democratic labor parties around the world. But with the Trudeau government breaking so many of its promises, there is a real opening for a left alternative.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton is proposing such an alternative. Running for the party’s leadership seat, she’s cited Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn as important developments for the Left globally. At the launch of her campaign, she quickly came out to support policies like abolishing tuition fees for higher education and opposition to oil pipelines — the kind of policies that galvanized Sanders supporters.

Gerard Di Trolio, an editor at rankandfile.ca, spoke to Ashton about how the NDP ended up in its current situation, her beliefs, and her policies that would shift the NDP leftwards and reconnect with its democratic-socialist origins.