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 Tanille Johnston:
Johnston is the youngest candidate in the race, and the only Indigenous candidate in the running — she is actually the first Indigenous person to appear on a federal party leadership ballot.
Johnston is a social worker and a City Councillor in Campbell River, British Columbia.
Among her campaign focuses are democratic reform, Indigenous reconciliation, and fighting poverty.
She wants to see a renewed NDP empowered at the local level, and reaching out to new constituencies.
“I really want to see us have a strong relationship with our student movement,” says Johnston. “There are hundreds of thousands of students across this country that are very active in political spaces, and our party doesn’t have solid relationships there yet.”
Johnston says the student population will feel the decisions of present governments for years to come, and should be treated less as a constituency of the future, and more as one of the present.
She wants to see access to voting expanded for remote first Nations, with ballot boxes available closer to home.
Johnston argues that Indigenous communities already vote for chiefs and councils, so elections bodies could “utilizes those spaces that already exist in communities, so that we can really see that voter turnout increase.”
One way a Tanille Johnston NDP could mobilize voter turnout is through her proposed Guaranteed Livable Basic Income (GLBI,) also sometimes known as a Universal Basic Income, which could attract young and old voters alike.
Canadians experienced something close to a GLBI with CERB (the Canada Emergency Response Benefit,) a basic income program that millions of Canadians received during the COVID-19 Pandemic to make up for job and income losses.
“We had a guaranteed income that was coming into homes to support people to get through that pandemic,” Johnston explains. “And we saw crime rates go down. We saw poverty go down across the country.
She jokingly describes her GLBI plan as “the NDP’s tough on crime approach, because it does have a dramatic impact on lowering crime rates.”
As a wealthy G7 country with vast political and economic resources, Johnston is highly critical of Canada’s poverty rates (Canada’s child poverty rate is particularly high at 18 per cent.)
“Why are we sitting here allowing that to continue day over day, when there is a very easy, simple mechanism that can look at families across the country and offer support where support is needed?”
Johnston suggests that fighting poverty with universal programs can actually save the country money, as well.
“When people aren’t living in poverty, they’re not showing up in our healthcare system as much. They’re not showing up in our child welfare systems, our child services systems. They’re not appearing in our criminal justice system,” she remarks.
Johnston has made Indigenous reconciliation and empowerment a major plank of her campaign, with calls to bring basic services and infrastructure into remote communities,
She also wants to see a greater commitment to the principle of free, prior, and informed consent practiced by all levels of government in their dealings with Indigenous communities.
“We often show up to nations with our big projects and our big ideas and say, ‘hey, we want to do this with you, and we want to do it on your land,’ versus approaching nations and saying, ‘hey, where are you at? What are your major projects? And where do you need us as partners in that work?”
Johnston acknowledges a need to develop, for example, critical mineral mines and other infrastructure, but questions the way they will be used.
“If we’re not using those opportunities to bring forward a renewable industry, then what are we doing?”
She also suggests that critical resource projects of national economic importance ought to be treated more as public projects, rather than privately owned enterprises to enrich a select few — especially when billions of dollars are made extracting resources from First Nation territories.
