The 2025 defeat was crushing. The party lost official status, was reduced to seven MPs, saw its support collapse. This creates two possible responses: ****Option A: Incremental adjustments. ****New leader, better messaging, more focus groups, refined advertising. Essentially, keep doing what hasn’t worked but try to do it better. Option B: Fundamental transformation. Acknowledge we lost our way, reclaim our radical roots, become something genuinely different. Which candidate supports Option B? It’s a clean break with decades of drift, a declaration that everything is on the table, an invitation to reimagine what the party could be. Psychologically, this offers: **Hope: **We’re not managing decline but beginning renewal Purpose: Clear mission to build cooperative commonwealth **Identity: **Members know who they are and what they stand for Energy: The excitement of building something new (that’s actually old) ***For younger people especially—consigned to “lives of permanent precarity” with “so little faith in the party”—a genuine socialist alternative might inspire engagement that incrementalism never will.

**Liberals: **Manage capitalism, accept possessive individualism, practice austerity while preaching compassion Conservatives: Embrace capitalism fully, celebrate possessive individualism, openly serve corporate interests NDP: Challenge capitalism, reject possessive individualism, build cooperative commonwealth Voters would understand the choice. Those who want transformative change have a home. Those comfortable with capitalism can choose accordingly.

What I expect from our new leader.

We are fundamentally different. We don’t just want better capitalism; we want to transcend it. We don’t seek to manage the liberal order; we seek to challenge and supplant it.

When threatened by the far-right, left-wing voters chose the “real” liberal party. The NDP cannot out-liberal the Liberals. That’s not a viable electoral strategy, and more importantly, it abandons the party’s reason for existing.