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 Heather McPherson:
McPherson is the sole candidate in the race to currently hold a seat in the House of Commons, as the MP for Edmonton Strathcona.
Her elected position is a central selling point for her candidacy: that her political experience and institutional know-how qualify her to rebuild the NDP better than anyone else.
She describes the results of the 2025 election as more than just devastating to the NDP, but “devastating for Canadians, because what we’ve seen since then is a pretty radical shift to the right by both the Liberals and the Conservatives.”
McPherson suggests that a strong NDP has the ability to hold the government accountable, and pull the national conversation leftwards on the political spectrum.
She points out that in the last parliament, with just 25 NDP MPs, the party was able to push the Liberals on dental care, pharmaceutical care, and anti-scab legislation.
“But now, without party status, we can’t push the government to fulfill those promises,” she explains.
McPherson argues that with a weak NDP, the government’s priorities shift in favour of large corporations, at the expense of other constituencies.
“I mean, the perfect example was watching the government give half a billion dollars to Algoma Steel. I was supportive of supporting our steel industry, of course. But that same company laid off 1000 workers two weeks before Christmas,” says McPherson. “That’s not protecting Canadians. That’s protecting corporate interests.”
The Edmontonian compares Mark Carney to Stephen Harper, describing the two as willing to take on large projects, but unable to handle them the right way.
“We all want to use Canadian labour and Canadian materials to build up our infrastructure, our cities, our communities,” she says. “But if you do it the wrong way, without acknowledging our obligations to Indigenous people, or in a way that tries to push projects through against provincial or territorial agreements, they don’t get built.”
McPherson says doing things the right way sometimes means they will take longer, but otherwise “you can end up in court, or you can end up with protests and you can get nothing built.”
Among McPherson’s policy proposals is a national jobs program for youth, which would offer guaranteed paid work placements for young people in fields like green energy, care, and the skilled trades.
She says the policy “would support our small businesses, it would support industry, and it would also be a way for young people to get working.”
She also advocates for free post-secondary education “so that young people can get the education and the training that they need, so that they can contribute to our economy.”
McPherson’s education outlook stands in stark contrast to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who recently suggested too many students are wasting their time studying useless pursuits such as basket weaving.
“You will not be surprised to hear that I do not agree whatsoever with what Doug Ford is saying,” says McPherson in response. “That’s ridiculous. That is absolutely putting blame in the wrong place… I mean, that echoes avocado toast for me.”
On the world stage, McPherson is critical of Canada’s consistency in upholding international law.
In watching Mark Carney’s viral Davos speech, McPherson says Carney takes the wrong lessons from the fracturing of the international rules-based order.
“He talks about how we take the world as we find it, not as we wish it to be. And that didn’t sit well with me. Yes, of course the is the reality of where we are finding ourselves, but we also need to be building the world that we do want,” she says. “If the frameworks that we’ve had in place since the Second World War are crumbling, they are crumbling because countries like Canada have not lived up to our obligations.”
As an example of Canada applying international human rights law inconsistently, McPherson questions why Canada was willing to take in unlimited Ukrainian refugees (which she proudly supports) while having a refugee backlog that includes tens of thousands of Afghans, thousands of Sudanese, and hundreds of Palestinians.
“This is what it looks like when you pick some human rights over others. This is what it looks like when you abandon the principle of universality with regard to protecting human rights,” she says. “This is the breaking of the international world order.”
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