After months of campaigning, the federal NDP is currently choosing a new leader and will announce the winner of its contest on March 29.
Our newsroom interviewed the five candidates currently in the race.
Read on to learn more about NDP leadership candidate Rob Ashton:
Ashton is a lifelong union man.
He is a dockworker, and currently represents the International Longshore Workers Union as National President.
Union-centred policies play a big role in Ashton’s campaign, as well as policies to expand transit systems across the country, and reform the tax system to address wealth inequality.
“I’m trying to bring us back to our working class roots,” he says, on being asked where he hopes to steer the conversation in the leadership race.
“We lost quite a few members of the working class not only to the Conservatives, but also to the Liberals. I’m trying to get us to the point where we can have those conversations again with workers… that feel like we fell out of touch with them, that don’t see themselves in us anymore.”
Ashton says the NDP has forgotten how to listen to its constituents, and failed to successfully sell its brand even when it has achieved success.
He points to the NDP’s supply and confidence agreement with the Trudeau-era Liberals, which succeeded in pushing for dental and pharmaceutical care legislation, and anti-scab legislation.
He says the Liberals took all the credit for those wins: “The Trudeau government ate our lunch on that.”
As a union leader, Ashton is highly critical of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, which allows the federal government to intervene in strikes — a clause the Liberal government has employed several times over the past few years.
“It sways the balance of power towards the employers, because employers then go, ‘we don’t have to bargain with our employees anymore. We’ll just sit back, wait ’till they go on strike, then the government will enact Section 107 and send us all to binding arbitration.’”
Ashton goes so far as to question whether the past NDP should have ended its agreements with the Liberals.
“When the federal government started hitting all of us unions with the Section 107s, the NDP, in my humble opinion, should have brought the government down almost instantaneously,” he argues.
Ashton is not opposed to future agreements with the Liberals if it furthers NDP goals, but maintains that any agreement would operate on a case-by-case basis: “Every bill that gets put in front of us will be looked at as, ‘does it help the working class?’ If it doesn’t help the working class, then we can’t support it.”
The longshoreman wants the focus of the NDP to be on universally appealing issues: housing, jobs, and affordability.
He is proposing deep reforms of the tax system, under the slogan “tax wealth, not work.”
Ashton says our tax system was “created by the ruling class. Period. It was created to take money from the working class, and to keep the working class in a state of flux, fighting for our survival.”
He is proposing eliminating tax brackets below $40,000 annually (meaning those making less than that would pay no income tax,) and making up for it with higher taxes on large fortunes over $10 million.
He also calls for closing tax loopholes which allow large corporations and the wealthiest of individuals to park their money in offshore accounts.
Ashton is the only one of the five candidates to have never sought public office, prior to this race.
He presents his newcomer status in politics as a point in his favour.
“Politicians always want to talk at you, not with you. I’ll listen first, ask questions, and then we’ll work together to create the solutions.”
