On October 1, Rob Ashton announced his campaign to be leader of the NDP party at Leslie Lookout Park. Ashton, a long-time supporter of the NDP and a regular donor to the party, works as a longshoreman and serves as President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada (ILWU).
“I never thought I was ever going to be running for a political job,” said Ashton. “I’m done with the way politics is run in this country. And it’s time that the NDP gets back to its roots. Because the working class built this party and the working class better run it. Because the working class built the country as well. And I swear to God, we’re going to run this country, because I’m tired of bankers and career politicians running us into the ground.”
Ashton also addressed the housing crisis and spoke about creating more employment opportunities for Canadians.
“The Canadian government should be building tens of thousands of homes across this country and using Canadian lumber that’s milled in Canada. That’s going to put loggers to work, that’s going to put lumber mills to work, that’s going to put building trades to work. These are all job creators for young people, for middle-aged people, and hell, for old people.
“We have to look at new industries that we don’t necessarily do a lot of, like shipbuilding. We build ships in this country that sail on the Great Lakes, or tugboats that run the coasts. If we build them here, that’s going to spur on the steel mills in Hamilton. That’s going to spur innovation that we have to create more products in this country. That’s going to give more jobs to engineers and architects.”
Max Chapman, a 26-year-old organizer with Ashton’s campaign, said he met Ashton at the recent Ontario NDP Convention. “I think Rob’s, first of all, a pretty fresh voice when it comes to what we’re seeing in politics. If you look at the last Conservative leadership election, it was people who’d been elected half a hundred times. You look at the last Liberal leadership election and it was career politicians, people who had been movers and shakers in high-up circles for a long, long time. And Rob’s campaign is not that…He’s been a worker, he’s been a labour movement guy. He’s not someone who’s had to go to the cocktail parties, be on the circuit, and do those kinds of things. I think that’s just a really fresh perspective to have in politics right now.”
Chapman explained the disillusionment felt by many Gen-Z voters. “We’ve been watching politicians our whole lives kind of talk out of both sides of their mouths, say one thing and do another,” Chapman adds. “A lot of people my age, I think, were really put off after 2015 with the first Liberal government of Trudeau that didn’t achieve a lot of the goals that they said they were going to achieve.
“I would like to see a strengthening of Canada’s labour code overall. Getting rid of some of the things that we’re seeing with the postal workers right now, the government threatening to force them back to work,” Chapman continues, echoing the labour focus and the working class sentiments shared by Ashton. “I’d also like to see a focus on how we can keep good jobs in Canada, national projects like high-speed rail. Also, good unionized jobs like we’ve seen lost in the forestry sector or in the mining sector. I’m from Northern Ontario, you know, so it’s really important to me that we have policies in Ottawa that don’t sell off those jobs somewhere else so that you know the companies who own those resources. Keeping them here in Canada, so that people have work; good work is really important to me.”
With the NDP still recovering from their loss of party status, and the resignation of Jagmeet Singh following the last election, one thing is certain: the NDP need to know their agenda — and listen to their supporters — in order to stand out against Carney’s Liberals and Pollievere’s Conservatives as a serious option in the next election.
