FeaturesCanada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP), which has the third-largest membership base in federal politics, is facing controversy in its 2026 leadership race after an unelected three-person vetting committee rejected two successive candidates advancing an explicitly anti-war, anti-capitalist platform. The decision has sparked fierce debate about the boundaries of acceptable political discourse within the country’s social democratic party.
Yves Engler, a longtime anti-war author and activist who has written 13 books on Canadian foreign policy, was the first to be barred from the race in late December. In confidential correspondence obtained by the Globe and Mail, the party’s Leadership Vote Committee cited concerns that Engler had “echoed Russian state propaganda with respect to the Russo-Ukrainian war and NATO,” made “comments consistent with antisemitic rhetoric,” used the term “Holocaust industry,” and engaged in harassment by “following people to their private accommodations” and confronting elected officials. The committee pointed to an April 2024 incident where Engler followed Liberal MP Anna Gainey to her vehicle while asking about Israel and Gaza, with video showing Gainey appearing distressed and twice asking him to “leave me alone.”
Engler denied the allegations, stating he has “publicly condemned on dozens of occasions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as illegal and brutal” and noting the term “Holocaust industry” was coined by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar whose family perished in the Holocaust. His lawyer, Dimitri Lascaris, submitted a 4,500-word rebuttal addressing each accusation, but an independent Review Committee upheld the rejection with a one-sentence decision offering no counter-arguments.
Following Engler’s disqualification, Bianca Mugyenyi—a veteran organizer who co-founded the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute and The Leap, and played a central role in coordinating the launch of the Leap Manifesto (a plan for Canada to move beyond fossil fuels while respecting Indigenous rights), announced her candidacy. In a January 6 op-ed, she stated: “Let me be clear: Yves Engler should be allowed to run. If the party reverses this undemocratic decision, I would step aside.”
In an email correspondence, the committee rejected Mugyenyi’s application on January 19, determining she represented an “explicit proxy candidacy” that violated standards of “honesty, professionalism and integrity.” The rejection cited three main grounds: publishing her announcement on Engler’s website and stating she would withdraw if he were approved; breaching confidentiality by publicly announcing before completing vetting; and submitting her application at 10:30 PM on December 31 then criticizing party staff for not immediately processing her fee during the holiday period. The committee also characterized her subsequent statements calling the process “rigged” as “inflammatory” and “inconsistent with the standards of conduct required of leadership contestants.”
The fact that Mugyenyi is married to Engler became central to the controversy. In her appeal, she argued the committee was relying on “sexist tropes” implying “a woman cannot have her own ideas, that she must live in the shadow of her husband.” She wrote: “Being a standard bearer doesn’t mean being a puppet or a placeholder. It means I have the conviction to stand behind a set of principles and the ability to carry them forward in my own way.” The Leadership Review Committee upheld Mugyenyi’s rejection with a brief letter stating that “after careful consideration” it had “decided to uphold the original decision” and that “in accordance with the Leadership Rules, the Committee’s decision is final, and no further review will be considered.”
At a press conference held on January 29th after the NDP’s vetting committee definitively denied Mugyenyi’s entry into the leadership race, Mugyenyi rejected the characterization of her candidacy as illegitimate: “I stepped forward to carry a shared vision, a shared platform that was built collectively, and that is democracy. Instead of allowing members to evaluate those ideas for themselves—those ideas we hold dear, that are beloved to us—unelected decisionmakers made that decision for them, for the entire party. And what are these ideas? Socialism, activism, justice. That is what this platform is built on.”
Mugyenyi emphasized the campaign’s grassroots strength: “Without access to the [mailing list], without access to the machine, we were able to raise tremendous support, the kind of money that people didn’t think was possible for a grassroots campaign.” She also highlighted her historic candidacy: “This year I became the first black woman in 50 years to seriously contest the leadership for the NDP since Rosemary Brown in 1975, and that matters. The [NDP] establishment talks a lot about diversity but by blocking the first black woman to seek this leadership in 50 years, it shows that diversity is welcomed when it protects the status quo.”
Mugyenyi was direct about challenging party orthodoxy: “I’m willing to say you can’t solve the housing crisis while pouring billions into NATO militarism, I’m willing to say that you can’t claim moral leadership while being complicit in genocide, and I’m willing to say you can’t promise change while defending the same systems that created the crisis.”
At the press conference, Engler focused on what he called the committee’s disconnection from global realities. “We are in a situation where Trump looks like he is about to attack Iran, two weeks after he kidnapped the Venezuelan President, while Israel continues its genocide in Gaza,” he said. “Mark Carney has been backing genocide [in Gaza], backed Trump’s [actions] in Venezuela, and will likely back whatever Trump does in Iran. The whole global foreign policy world order is in flux, and Canada’s role in it is in flux.”
Engler argued that “Mark Carney is pursuing the most radical, militarist agenda since Korea in the early 50s. Huge increases in Canadian military spending—unprecedented. There is no way to pursue the social democratic reforms the other [NDP leadership] candidates are talking about without countering and slashing these huge military spending increases.” He pointed to Canada’s subordination to U.S. foreign policy: “We have a President down south threatening annexation—yet our military, as The Economist just put it a couple days ago, continues to fulfill Donald Trump’s orders. Canadian soldiers were involved in the attack against Venezuela.” Engler proposed a different vision, comparing Canada’s military spending to Mexico: “Why doesn’t the Canadian military spend the same amount as Mexico—0.7% of GDP versus the 2% we are already at and the plan to go to 5%? Let’s take that 1.3% of GDP and put it into the real emergency, the real security threat—the unhoused, the precariously housed, and the climate emergency.” He argued: “There needs to be a place in the NDP to say Canadian imperialism. That should be allowable in the NDP leadership race. NDP members want to have that discussion, but here you have a three-person unelected vetting committee that summarily says no.”
Engler also challenged the legitimacy of the proxy candidacy determination itself: “There is no rule that says you can’t be a proxy. Where is that rule? Why doesn’t the NDP cite that rule? They just come up with these rules as they go because they have control. So there does need to be a big picture conversation about the role of vetting in undermining democracy in Canada—clearly billionaires, clearly corporate power, clearly rich people controlling the media, that all we know undermine democracy, but there are other elements. We know there is a problem with the first past the post mechanism, but there are other mechanisms, including how the NDP operates.”
During the January 29th press conference, Jasmine Peardon, a campaign organizer, contextualized the exclusion within historical patterns: “Throughout history, movements for radical change have been silenced—rationalized on the grounds of race, gender, inherent capacity, or by being labeled as a proxy. WEB Du Bois, a Black intellectual and pioneer of civil rights, was called a proxy for the Soviet Union even as he advocated peace and equality. Patrice Lumumba was also labeled as a proxy to discredit his fight for liberation.” She added: “A woman with a long history of activism and organizing has been reduced to a puppet controlled by her husband. If Bianca is a proxy for anything, she is a proxy for socialism, for policies that myself and 45 other activists and researchers drafted and democratically voted on.”
Mike Palecek, lead communications for Mugyenyi’s campaign, emphasized the grassroots mobilization: “We have managed to raise over $100,000 in [pledged campaign donations] in over a week, without access to the NDP membership list, without access to any institutional support whatsoever. We believe that the only future for the NDP is rooted in social movements, struggling for working-class demands, struggling to change this economic system, which is what this moment in history requires.”
The campaign’s policy platform, “Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed – Onward to a Socialist Future,” was developed by 45 activists and researchers over three months, according to Mugyenyi’s op-ed announcing her candidacy. The platform called for ending Canada’s support for what it termed “genocide in Palestine,” halting new tar sands projects and rapidly winding down existing ones, stopping what it characterized as “Carney’s Militarization Project” through slashing the defense budget, converting Real Estate Investment Trust properties into housing cooperatives, abolishing tuition fees for post-secondary education, immediately withdrawing from NATO, and opposing Canadian imperialism. The platform advocated for “a radical, socialist, and anticolonial transformation” of Canadian society, with extensive sections on public ownership of major industries, ecosocialism, universal basic services, and what it termed “peace, solidarity and anti-imperialism.” Mugyenyi wrote that “since its October release, Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed – Onward to a Socialist Future has likely been Canada’s most widely read anti-capitalist document,” and argued these ideas represented “a return to the party’s founding spirit, when the Regina Manifesto called for the eradication of capitalism.”
In her final appeal to the NDP, Mugyenyi wrote: “It should be obvious that the answer to so-called ‘dangerous ideas’ is more democracy, not less. Ideas should be debated openly.” She compared the situation to how “supporters of Palestinian rights were kept out of nomination contests for many years,” arguing it “took a prolonged, live-streamed genocide to begin moving the party toward the right side of history.”
Lucy Watson, the NDP’s national director, stated the committee “determined [the applicants] did not meet the eligibility standards that apply to every applicant.” The committee argued it has “an obligation to protect the integrity of the leadership process” and ensure it is not used “in a manner that undermines its purpose or the Party’s interests.”
The rejections raise contentious questions about party democracy. The NDP’s rules grant the Leadership Vote Committee broad discretion to assess applicants, with decisions subject only to review by another unelected committee whose decisions are final. Approximately 5,000 people signed petitions calling on the NDP Federal Council to overturn the vetting committee decisions, but the council has not intervened.
With the membership deadline passing, the race proceeds with five approved candidates: MP Heather McPherson, environmental activist Avi Lewis, union leader Rob Ashton, disability advocate Tanille Johnston, and Ontario farmer Tony McQuail. Lewis, whose campaign has raised over $1 million, describes his bid as an “anti-capitalist movement” proposing public options for grocery stores, though it stops short of the more progressive positions advanced by Engler and Mugyenyi.
The approved NDP leadership candidates have largely remained silent on Engler and Mugyenyi’s exclusions. McPherson indicated in an interview with the National Post that she would not personally stand in the way of Engler’s candidacy, stating “He can put his offer forward.” Lewis, Johnston, and Ashton have not explicitly issued public statements criticizing the party’s decision to bar Engler and Mugyenyi.
In early January, former NDP deputy leader Libby Davies, stopping short of explicitly calling for Mugyenyi to be allowed into the race, said “it would be interesting to have her in the debate because she is very well-versed on foreign policy and I think we do need to have that, and that has been lacking—[the other NDP candidates] have all focused on domestic issues, bread and butter issues, which is important.” However, Davies argued that “a leadership time is a time to open up a huge array of issues and I think the membership, and people joining the NDP because of this leadership race are really hungry for that and they want to know where these candidates stand.”
Davies also criticized the structure of the leadership race itself, expressing concern about the limited number of debate forums: “I wish the party was holding more leadership forums by the way, there is not enough of these formal debates, they need to have one on foreign policy.” She noted receiving significant complaints about the first NDP leadership debate, saying: “I got so many complaints from the first [NDP leadership debate]—saying ‘Oh they didn’t talk about Palestine.’” Davies explained the constraints placed on candidates during that debate: “What I was told is any candidate who went off the question would have their mic cut off—that is what I was told.”
At her January 29th press conference, Mugyenyi reflected: “Movements don’t get blocked when they are weak; they get blocked when they are strong.” The controversy crystallizes tensions within social democratic parties worldwide about how much ideological diversity they can accommodate and who gets to draw those boundaries. As the leadership race continues toward its March conclusion, the absence of these voices ensures certain conversations about capitalism itself, about Canada’s military spending surge, and about the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy critique will remain at the margins of party debate. The controversy has exposed deep fissures in how the NDP understands its mission, its boundaries, and ultimately, who gets to participate in determining its future direction.
