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 Tony McQuail:
McQuail is an organic farmer from Huron County, Ontario who labels himself as a “green progressive.”
He distinguishes himself through his work in sustainable agriculture, presenting a campaign focused on environmental regeneration, de-growth, wealth redistribution, electoral reform, and pacifism.
McQuail describes a dire picture for the NDP of 2025, which lost its official party status in a devastating defeat that saw the party go from 25 seats in parliament to just 7.
“I came out of the 2025 provincial and federal elections feeling really a sense of despair… are we ever going to make progress on social justice for ordinary people, and a fair economic return to the overall community?” He asks. “Are we ever going to get around to really dealing with the environmental crisis we’re in?”
McQuail rejects the left/right labels commonly used to describe the political spectrum: instead he prefers to divide the political camps of the country into “top” and “bottom,” describing the 99% at the bottom as those who do the work to keep society going, and those in the top 1% as those who have structured Canada’s economic system to benefit them.
From McQuail’s farmer background, he draws on a folksy populism that calls for a radical redistribution of wealth. He credits his father with a nugget of wisdom that informs his economic philosophy: “Money’s like manure. It does the most good when you spread it around.”
McQuail frames the current economic moment for Canadians as one where more and more of the country’s money is being funneled to an ever-shrinking group of exorbitantly wealthy individuals and families, while most people increasingly struggle to make ends meet. “That is just so destructive for a community and a society,” he says.
McQuail lays the primary blame for the NDP’s 2025 election woes on the electoral “first past the post” system, in which citizens from each riding vote for their preferred representative, in a winner-takes-all system at the riding level.
He says this system leaves people who vote for losing candidates feeling unrepresented in their government, as if their vote didn’t count at all. “Either people stop voting, or they start voting strategically: not for what they want, not for what they believe in, but for what they dislike least in the other parties,” he explains.
McQuail says the looming threat of Donald Trump motivated many voters to strategically vote for the Liberals, at the expense of the NDP. In place of the old system, McQuail is calling for a system of “proportional representation,” in which each party’s total representation is based on its share of national votes, rather than being decided at the riding level.
Proportional representation would likely benefit smaller parties like the NDP and the Green Party, both of which struggle to win many individual ridings even when getting a respectable share of the national vote.
On the economic front, McQuail calls for a policy of de-growth, arguing that Canada’s economic system prioritizes growth above other concerns he deems more important.
He says humanity has survived as a species because of our ability to care for others and share with each other. “Those values are deeply embedded in communities, but the religion of economics has been preaching selfishness and greediness, and just ‘look after yourself’. It’s a false religion and it is not serving us well,” he argues.
He suggests that Canada end its subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, which amount to about $30 billion.
“Let’s take that $30 billion, and put that to a regeneration and redesign program at the community level, at the grassroots level… That $30 billion could translate into 30,000 $1 million grants to community groups, municipalities, service clubs.”
McQuail proposes that money be used for environmental protections, transportation upgrades, senior care, or any number of other projects that individual communities feel they need.
The Huron County farmer is an unapologetic pacifist, who cautions against military rearmament even during the current political moment, when old alliances are coming into question and Canada’s sovereign future is uncertain.
He argues that Canada will never be able to militarily compete with the United States, which spends more on its military than next seven countries put together.
Instead, McQuail proposes that Canada pursue unarmed civilian or social defense policies, to train people in non-violent resistance techniques.
He feels Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy, which proposes 125,000 new jobs for procurement, infrastructure, and other defence-supporting industries, represents wasted potential.
“Couldn’t we get enough imagination and enough creativity to say, ‘how could we put those 125,000 jobs into making things that Canadians actually need to make a transition to a green, regenerative future?'”
