Debate is at https://www.ndp.ca/debate
More info on debate and candidates:
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-leadership-candidates-debate-preview-9.7096023
- https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/02/19/ndp-leadership-candidates-face-off-aim-for-breakaway-in-key-debate/
Candidate sites:
- Heather McPherson - https://www.heathermcpherson.ca/
- Avi Lewis https://lewisforleader.ca/
- Tanille Johnston - https://www.tanille.ca/
- Rob Ashton - https://robashton.ca/
- Tony McQuail - https://tonymcquailgreenprogressive.ca/
Uncle Rob might have you covered:
I was hopeful for Rob at first but starting his candidacy with an AI AMA on Reddit was a bad look. They even hit him on that point at the end of the debate.
He also didn’t much charisma on the stage. I guess I understand why he had his helpers do the AMA with AI, because he had to keep looking at his notes last night, and it makes me wonder how much he believes and how much he’s just parroting.
Yeah, I was initially leaning towards Rob as first pick and Avi second but I might swap.
“Gives workers real power — migrant workers will have clean path to permanency, open work permits, they can join unions and organize without fear, which means stronger unions and better wages for everyone;”
This sounds kind of worrying.
If you’re worried about giving workers real power, the NDP is not for you.
I don’t want more citizens when we have no housing and we have double digit youth unemployment. The NDP aren’t progressive if they do.
These problems aren’t caused by immigrants no matter what the frothing-in-the-mouth Right wants you to believe.
Little Quebec data point: the vast majority of immigrants move to Montreal. Guess where the housing crisis is more acute: the regions. Immigrants are not causing the housing shortage. Stupid car-centric city planning, NIMBY zoning, and the financialization of housing is what causes it. Read the CCPA report.
Youth unemployment? At the same time when our healthcare system is buckling from chronic under-staffing? And at the same time when we are missing teachers, early childhood educators? At the same time when we are faced with a climate resilience crisis, a housing crisis, sectors that require actual trained labour? Gee I wonder if there are some solutions to that. Maybe some kind of, oh I don’t know Green New Deal, funded by the ridiculous wealth hoarded by parasites like Galen Weston over the past few decades of neoliberal orthodoxy?
Immigrants are a rhetorical scapegoat, sold to you by demagogues who dream of bringing Trump style authoritarianism to Canada. We know exactly where that leads. No thanks.
https://economics.bmo.com/en/publications/detail/fb3ff12e-3054-4c6b-befb-fe9d2fac77af/
Is BMO far right?
“or housing, this move will dampen price pressures and rents, all else equal (e.g., rate cuts and mortgage rules). That said, the sudden shift in TR inflows should clearly soften the rental market just as a torrent of supply is coming online in some regions (e.g., Toronto condos). Growth in average asking rent across Canada has slowed to just 2% y/y according to Rentals.ca, with outright declines seen in some markets. We’ve long argued that Canada has a housing demand problem. This policy change will be felt quickly, and will make other supply-side measures look almost like rounding error.”
I feel like you people must be trying to gaslight, its an absurd premise to argue that additional demand doesnt raise prices on an inelastic good like housing, I cant even believe you are arguing in good faith.
BMO is a seller of mortgages, and therefore heavily invested in the financialization of housing. About 15-20% of their assets are in residential mortgages and HELOCs alone. Of course they want to talk about anything EXCEPT the root of the problem that is literally driving their profitability. This is like bringing up a study from the oil and gas industry to argue that greenhouse emissions are not a problem. And just like Oil&Gas keep pushing an inefficient and outdated energy technology stack and standing in the way of common sense electrification, the real estate financialization industry is keeping Canadian capital in an unproductive and parasitic sector. Imagine if we instead used all that capital not to invest in inert land, but to build up the Canadian economy.
Why is housing inelastic in the current system? Because it is not treated as a universal right, but as an asset. It is being hoarded by Real Eastate Investment Trusts who quite literally profit from maintaining scarcity. The solution is breaking the back of REITs and building non-market infill development across the country. Build the missing middle and keep it the fuck out of the profit-driven market, make it coops and public housing. Oh and guess what we need to do that. That’s right, workers, of which we have a shortage, so therefore …immigrants.
Here’s what Avi Lewis’ platform has to say about housing: https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/housing-full-plan
If you call this “gaslighting” and “bad faith” argumentation, I honestly have no idea what you would consider “good faith” argumentation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GIKDuBWcjyo
I see you as Bernie says, a far right anti-worker non-empathetic sociopath, who doesn’t care about housing prices or wages. I don’t think we can convince each other.
You’re not making any sense. Sanders is slamming precarious low wage temporary guest worker programs. Nobody is defending those. Look at the thing you objected to earlier. It was talking about empowering immigrant workers, precisely the opposite of a precarious work program:
Edit: it also seems that Bernie Sanders has evolved in his positions over time: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/bernie-sanders-immigration-record-explained
And yes, I can see that you don’t want to be convinced by anything I wrote. You are not responding in substance to anything I’ve written. But you haven’t actually made any substantive argument to try to convince me or anyone. You haven’t tried to convince me in any real way. But you’ve accused me of gaslighting and bad faith arguing, when it’s clear I’m not doing either. You’re using inflammatory language (“sociopath”) to describe my views, when I haven’t. I think you’re just trying to make it look like you’re not losing the debate by desperately trying to making it look like the leftists are mean to 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.
Its called capital shallowing. It does degrade wages.
But the Canadian population grew from 14M to 23M between 1950 and 1975, and inflation-adjusted avg income (in 1995 $) more than doubled from 8.6K to 20K in the same period. Why do you think the increase in population did not degrade wages in that period?
Well a productive immigrant raises living standards. Tim Hortons workers who bring their elderly family lowers living standards. Easily observed by how most countries are selective on immigration, and try to limit bringing in the elderly population onto social security.
Well productivity is just GDP produced per hour per worker. An individual workers can’t change productivity significantly. Productivity can only be changed in any significant manner by capital investment. A worker from 150 years ago can never produce as much garments as worker today with the current sowing machines. The sowing machines make the current worker significantly more productive than the one 150 years ago. That sowing machine is the capital investment that makes the modern worker more productive than the old timer. Productivity is different across sectors but that’s a sectoral difference which is also unaffected by individual workers. A Tim Hortons worker would always be less productive than a plumber or a machinist, regardless of who a particular Tim Hortons worker is.
An immigrant Tim Hortons worker bringing their elderly parents would put extra strain on OAS but it wouldn’t have any material difference on Tim Hortons wages if the have the exact same workers’ rights as a Canadian, would it?
A key point here is that the economy doesn’t stay static when new people enter the workforce. Whether it’s Canadian kids or immigrants, new entrants present both extra labour as well as extra demand for goods. As long as there’s natural resources to produce the extra goods demanded by the new entrants and labour to transform those natural resources into the goods demanded, the economy expands. That’s literally how the economy grows - more hands turn more natural resources into more physical things.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/10/canada-and-australia-collapse-into-productivity-sinkhole/
This was based on a report by the banks that argues it leads to less productivity investment by company.
Here’s a far larger presentation with a lot more data about how mass immigration depressed wages and capital investment:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bOXgOLCm54A
I’m not arguing that in the current environment, with TFW cheap labour, etc. immigration has’t had neg effect on productivity, wages, etc.
But that doesn’t answer the question of why things were different in the 1950-75 period. The analysis says we can accept immigration at 0.85% per year at the moment to keep prod stable. In the 2015-2025 period population grew by 1.1% per year. Yet in the 1950-75 period, pop grew by 2.3% per year, prod grew and real wages more than doubled. Something must have been different back then to produce such stark results. What was it?
On a related note, do you believe that growing productivity causes growth in wages?
BTW, thank you for engaging in good faith. I’m doing the same whether we agree or not. 😊