Socialist Action Canada and the Left’s Accountability Problem

Socialist Action Canada accountability failures aren’t internal drama — they’re a documented case study in how left organizations reproduce the power structures they claim to oppose.

This Pattern Repeats. It Needs to Be Named.

About a year ago I posted a thread about what happened to me inside Socialist Action Canada. I’ve since deleted it. Not because I changed my mind about what I witnessed — I haven’t — but because a thread isn’t the right format for what needs to be said. Threads get screenshotted out of context, clipped, and recirculated as drama. What I’m describing is not drama. It is a documented pattern of organizational failure, and it deserves a full account rather than a chain of posts that can be easily decontextualized. This is that account.

I’m aware of how easily this kind of piece gets dismissed — as score-settling, as the kind of thing that makes the left look fractious and self-absorbed. I may not have considered all of that before I posted the thread, but I’m considering it now.

What happened inside Socialist Action Canada is not unique to that organization.

I’ve seen versions of it across the Canadian left, and the reason it keeps happening is partly because people in my position keep deciding it’s not worth documenting. The logic is seductive: bigger fights are out there, internal conflicts distract from them, airing this publicly gives ammunition to people who already want to dismiss the left. I understand that logic. I think it’s wrong. The pattern I’m describing shapes who gets to organize, whose analysis gets legitimized, and whose dissent gets managed out. Left organizational power is still power. The cost of protecting it from accountability is paid by the people who were already least protected. That is the problem. This is the case study.

I also want to say upfront: most of the people I organized with inside Socialist Action were people I considered close comrades. That’s actually part of why this matters. The way people were acting — the protection extended to someone who should have been unambiguously accountable, the speed with which legitimate grievances got reframed as disruption — was so out of character for the people I knew that it demanded an explanation beyond bad politics. It took time to understand what that explanation was.

I’ll get there.

It Started With a Political Disagreement

In November 2022 — about eighteen months ago — I wrote a piece called How I Learned to Decolonize Socialism. The argument wasn’t complicated: socialist organizing in Canada can’t remain trapped inside Eurocentric frameworks while ignoring settler colonialism and the lived realities of gender diversity. It wasn’t a provocation. It was the kind of analysis I would have expected a socialist organization to engage with seriously, maybe even to have already internalized.

A senior member, John Orrett, responded. Orrett is not a peripheral figure — he has been a central part of the NDP Socialist Caucus ecosystem for well over a decade, appearing alongside Barry Weisleder at SA events, running for NDP Treasurer as a Socialist Caucus candidate, and listed in NDP Socialist Caucus materials as a steering committee member. He carries real institutional standing in both spaces. His response used that standing plainly. He rejected the idea that he was a settler. He framed non-binary identity as marginal to human development. He positioned himself throughout as supportive and reasonable while systematically undermining the legitimacy of the people he was speaking about.

This was reactionary politics stated plainly, from someone with real influence inside the organization — and it wasn’t the first time. Prior to this conflict, Orrett had been pushing anti-mask positions inside Socialist Action that leadership had largely accommodated, a pattern that should have been a signal about what kind of protection he was operating with.

Jemma Lambert and I were both active in the group chat where this happened. We are both queer. Orrett’s comments landed on us directly — not as abstract political disagreement but as the specific experience of having your existence treated as a marginal concern by someone with authority in your own political home. We pushed back. Other trans, non-binary, and Indigenous comrades joined. The conversation escalated. Orrett was removed from the group chat. That should have been the beginning of accountability. Instead it revealed the structure underneath — and something more specific than I understood at the time.

Containment Dressed as Moderation

After Orrett was removed, senior member Julius Arscott entered the discussion. He didn’t engage with the harm. He didn’t address Orrett’s politics. He questioned the removal and redirected toward process — suggesting the conversation be moved out of the general chat, handled through proper channels. When we pushed back, the accusations shifted. We were dominating the space. We were being disrespectful. Our conduct was abusive. The original issue disappeared. Tone became the subject. Our response became the problem.

What made this particularly disorienting was that these were people I knew. Julius, Barry, Elizabeth — comrades I had organized alongside, people whose politics I broadly respected. The speed with which they moved to protect Orrett and redirect against us was jarring precisely because it didn’t match who I thought they were. That dissonance was actually informative, though I didn’t have the full picture for it yet.

This is not conflict resolution.

It is containment — the move that repeats across left organizations whenever informal power is challenged by people who have the substance of an argument but not the institutional standing to simply be ignored.

The challenge gets absorbed, reframed, and redirected until the people raising it either exhaust themselves or leave. Both outcomes serve the same institutional function.

Informal Hierarchy Is Still Hierarchy

Socialist Action presents itself as democratic and horizontal. That claim collapses under pressure. There is a hierarchy inside the organization — it is simply informal, which makes it more durable, not less. Authority is concentrated in long-standing members, enforced through tenure, proximity to leadership, and control over internal processes.

None of this is written down anywhere. It operates through the texture of every significant decision: who gets listened to, whose concerns are treated as legitimate, who gets to define the terms of a conflict.

Jemma documented this directly in a public statement she sent to all Socialist Action chats last May and subsequently shared on social media.

She described “a toxic social hierarchy” in which central committee members tone-policed discussion and were then defended by other central committee members — creating “a deeply unsafe environment for socialist organizing, especially for marginalized members who will often have dissenting opinions.” She named Julius specifically. She described the complaints process as “a classic HR silence the victim technique” that forced victims to wait months before being allowed to speak about incidents harming them. She called it “extremely damaging to one’s mental health.” She stated plainly that she could not exist in that space.

Tone Policed. Harm Debated.

At the height of the conflict, a trans comrade told Julius to “fuck off.” That became the issue. Senior leader Elizabeth Byce intervened to demand an apology — not for Orrett’s original comments, not for the dismissal of every marginalized member who had spoken up, not for the institutional redirection of a legitimate grievance into a conversation about process. For the language used by a trans person who had watched their existence get debated and then been told they were the problem for reacting.

Jemma named this directly in her statement: “Respectability politics is not revolutionary, nor is it socialist, cut the crap.” She also noted that she had an open complaint against Julius for “tone policing and abusive overreach of his power as a member of the central committee, co-signed and attested to by other members of Socialist Action” — and that she was not allowed to discuss it whenever Barry, Elizabeth, or other members called her out for the “fuck off” exchange. The complaint existed. The silencing of it was enforced by the same people being complained about. That is the structure functioning as designed.

The Funding Question Nobody Could See

Here is where I have to explain why people I respected were acting so out of character — because the behavior did not make sense as ordinary politics, and it didn’t make sense until I understood what was operating underneath it.

Socialist Action accepts anonymous donations. Members have no visibility into who is funding the organization. Jemma named this explicitly in her public statement: “an allowance for anonymous donations, and a lack of transparency regarding fundraising. Members should know in real time, every person who has donated to the party.” She also named the treasurer’s position as opaque and unaccountable to members. These are not abstract structural criticisms. They describe the specific conditions under which an organization can be financially dependent on someone whose influence members have no way to see or contest.

From my own direct experience inside the organization: Orrett was not just a member. He was a significant donor. I am stating this as my first-hand account. The membership — including me — had no way to confirm or challenge that relationship, because the financial structure was deliberately opaque. What we could see was the outcome: well over a year of institutional protection for someone with explicitly reactionary politics, sustained through what Jemma described as “a personal relationship this individual seems to have with some central committee members.”

That framing — a personal relationship sustaining over a year of protection for someone whose positions on settler colonialism, non-binary identity, and anti-mask politics were not remotely defensible on socialist grounds — describes exactly the dynamic that financial dependency creates and financial opacity conceals.

The organization was not defending Orrett because his politics were good. The people defending him knew his politics weren’t good. They were defending him because a financial relationship operating behind the scenes created an obligation the membership had no visibility into and therefore no ability to contest. That is what financial opacity does inside a political organization. It creates loyalty structures that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with money, and it makes those structures invisible to everyone except the people managing the books.

The Pattern Has a Name

I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming. I am not asserting that Orrett set out from the beginning with a deliberate, coordinated plan to infiltrate and destabilize Socialist Action.

What I am saying is that the pattern of what actually happened — a donor with reactionary politics receiving sustained institutional protection, pushing those politics from a position of financial leverage, eventually generating enough internal conflict that the organization publicly imploded — is a pattern that has a name.

It is a dynamic that has been exploited inside left organizations for as long as left organizations have existed, whether by bad-faith actors, by intelligence services, or simply by people with money who understand that financial dependency creates political influence that members can’t see.

When you map Orrett’s documented history across NDP and socialist spaces, what you see is not a committed organizer who drifted into bad politics. You see more than twenty years of documented presence at the most divisive possible flashpoints inside these organizations — consistently, and at precisely the moments most likely to generate public damage.

The timeline is worth laying out in full. In the 2003 Ontario provincial election, Laurie Orrett ran as the NDP candidate in Thornhill — the riding with the highest Jewish population in the province, and one of the most politically charged terrains in Ontario NDP politics on Middle East issues.

By 2009, John Orrett was speaking at NDP Socialist Caucus panels on economic democracy, embedding himself in the SC apparatus alongside Weisleder.

In 2010, he was named in the Toronto Star as the organizer of a debate that publicly split the Ontario NDP over Middle East policy and Catholic school funding — generating a headline about NDP division in a major newspaper at precisely the moment those fault lines were most damaging to the party.

In 2011, John Orrett was President of Thornhill NDP when Barry Weisleder won the riding association’s nomination — and had it rescinded two days later by party brass in what the Globe and Mail covered as a major internal democracy crisis. Orrett then chaired the CREDO forum at the University of Toronto, publicly positioning himself as the democratic defender of Weisleder’s reinstatement — while presiding over the very riding association that had just become the center of one of the most damaging internal NDP stories in years.

In 2013, CBC News named Orrett as the public spokesman for the SC group “causing a ruckus” at the federal NDP convention in Montreal — drone banners, confronting party officials over Obama’s field director speaking, Weisleder nearly losing his credentials. He ran for NDP Treasurer at the same convention, winning 28 percent of delegates. In 2015, he was quoted in the Globe and Mail criticizing Mulcair’s centrism alongside Weisleder.

In 2019, he was a featured speaker at the Ontario NDP SC Conference. In the years immediately preceding 2022, he was pushing COVID denialism, anti-mask, and anti-vaccine positions inside Socialist Action’s internal chats. This was not a new thing and was not unknown to leadership — in one documented exchange, Barry Weisleder told him directly: “John, give your Covid hobby horse a rest for a few months, please.” That message was visible to the membership. Leadership knew the pattern. They managed it rather than addressed it.

Then in November 2022, the comments that triggered the conflict documented in this piece. His exact words, posted to the SA/LAS General Discussion at 2:20 AM: “I am not a settler… My ancestors came here 5 or 6 generations ago. I live here and I’m not going anywhere.”

On non-binary identity: while claiming to support those who identify as non-binary, he argued it was “abundantly clear” that human civilization “has been through the copulation and child rearing of human beings who in the overwhelming majority were consciously binary.”

He closed by noting he was reading a book on eugenics in Canada to improve his understanding, signing off as “a 70 year old white male.” When pushed back on the settler question, he doubled down: “I am not a settler nor take on any psychological baggage from any sins of my forefathers.”

These are his words. They are documented. And even in the aftermath, within the chat itself, another member named Daniel stated plainly: “The conversation instigated by John earlier today distressed a lot of people. And not for the first time.” Julius responded: “I understand that.” The pattern was acknowledged inside the organization. It was not acted on.

That is more than twenty years of documented presence at flashpoint moments across NDP and socialist spaces in Canada. Every instance generates internal division, public press coverage of organizational conflict, or both. The 2010 Toronto Star story. The 2011 Globe and Mail and CBC coverage of the Thornhill crisis. The 2013 CBC convention ruckus story. Each one lands in a major outlet. Each one frames the NDP or the socialist left as fractious, internally consumed, or organizationally dysfunctional. Whether that was the intention or not, it is the consistent outcome — and it is exactly the kind of outcome that makes it harder to build durable left organizations in Canada.

Barry Weisleder — who I believe was genuinely acting in good faith throughout — would not necessarily have recognized what Orrett’s role was across all of this, because the financial relationship was invisible to the members around him, and because Orrett had been embedded in these spaces long enough to look like furniture. That is the function of sustained institutional presence combined with financial opacity. It makes the dependency invisible to everyone except the people managing the money, and it makes the resulting behavior look like bad politics or bad character rather than structural capture.

I was told last summer by another member who left Socialist Action because of this conflict that Orrett had been removed from the organization at convention. The public record tells a more complicated story. In Barry Weisleder’s own account of the October 2023 NDP federal convention — published on the Socialist Action website just seven months ago — Orrett is listed by name as one of the people moving referrals on the convention floor alongside Arscott and other SC members. That is months after the conflict, months after Jemma’s public statement, and after whatever internal Socialist Action convention action supposedly took place. What that tells you is that the “removal” was narrow in scope: Orrett lost his formal Socialist Action membership while retaining his active role in the NDP Socialist Caucus — the external political platform that Socialist Action directly operates and directs. The organizational separation between Socialist Action proper and the SC became the escape hatch. He was removed from the internal structure while keeping the public-facing one. For an organization whose primary political activity runs through the Socialist Caucus, that distinction is close to meaningless in practice.

What I can say clearly from my own experience: the conflict that Orrett’s comments generated — a genuine, justified conflict over reactionary politics, raised by queer and Indigenous comrades with every right to raise it — was precisely the kind of conflict that discredits an organization when it surfaces publicly. And it did surface publicly. Jemma and I made it public, as one does when internal processes fail. That public airing produced exactly the kind of reputational damage and internal flame war that leaves a small socialist organization looking incompetent and consumed by identity politics drama. Whether that was design or consequence, the result is the same. And given the twenty-year documented history of Orrett appearing at exactly these moments, across exactly these organizations, the question of design versus consequence is one I leave to the reader.

The Structure Makes This Outcome Inevitable

None of what I’ve described was anomalous. It was the logical product of how Socialist Action is built. Membership requires dues, creating a material barrier a genuinely socialist organization should be the first to eliminate. Finances are not transparent — anonymous donations flow in with no member visibility, creating conditions for influence without accountability. The complaint process mirrors corporate HR: members raising concerns are silenced from speaking publicly, resolution is delayed across months, and at every stage the institution’s continuity is treated as more important than member safety.

Jemma proposed specific structural reforms in her statement: real-time transparency on donations and donor identities; abolition of the federal secretary position and rotation of those tasks across the central committee; a treasurer’s position openly accountable to members; a complaints process that does not silence victims; single-issue conventions callable by member petition; and an organizational structure made legible and accessible to all members. These are not radical demands. They are the minimum requirements of an organization that actually means what it says about democracy. None of them were implemented. Instead, Jemma was removed.

Public Voice Gets Erased Too

When Jemma subsequently raised these issues publicly at an International Women’s Day panel — in a space explicitly designed for this kind of testimony — the response was not engagement. It was interruption. The footage exists: a senior leader cutting off a trans speaker mid-testimony at an IWD panel. The video was taken down and reuploaded with her contribution removed entirely.

This is an organization that formally opposes the silencing of trans voices. At an International Women’s Day event, a trans woman was cut off mid-sentence while describing what had been done to her, and her testimony was then edited out of the public record. Raise issues internally: be contained. Raise them publicly: be erased. That is not the behavior of an organization that believes in democratic accountability. It is the behavior of one that treats accountability as a threat.

The Evidence Exists. What’s Missing Is Accountability.

A year ago I posted a thread. I deleted it because I thought a more complete account was owed — to Jemma, to the other comrades who were pushed out, and to anyone currently inside Socialist Action or considering joining it. This is that account. The easy move now would still be to let it go. People have told me that. There are bigger fights. This is internal. Airing it publicly makes the left look bad. I’ve heard every version of that framing, and I understand the instinct. The problem is that the same instinct is operating inside organizations like Socialist Action every time someone raises a concern and gets told it’s not the right time, not the right way, not the right place. The reason this pattern persists is precisely because it is always successfully reframed as too small to matter.

It is not small. Left organizational culture is where the habits of the left get formed. The people moving through these organizations are learning how power operates, what accountability looks like, how conflict gets handled, whose voices carry weight. If what they’re learning is that anonymous donor relationships shape institutional decisions members can’t see, that informal hierarchy protects itself through procedural redirection and tone policing, and that the selective application of solidarity language is the primary tool for managing dissent — then they are learning the wrong lessons, and they are going to reproduce those lessons in every space they move into after this one.

The messages exist. The chat logs exist. Jemma’s public statement exists. The video of her being cut off at the IWD panel exists, even if the version that circulated had her contribution removed. The pattern I’ve described is documented, witnessed by multiple people, and consistent across multiple incidents over more than a year. What is missing is not evidence. What is missing is an organization willing to examine itself honestly enough to recognize what it has built, name what it has done to the people who challenged it, and implement the structural changes required to be what it claims to be.

That willingness has not emerged from inside Socialist Action Canada. I no longer expect it to. What I can do is put this on the record so that people currently inside that organization — or considering joining it — have access to a documented account of what accountability looks like when it is systematically prevented from happening. The left doesn’t have a shortage of socialist organizations. It has a shortage of organizations that can hold themselves accountable to the people they claim to organize with. Until that changes, the structure that failed Jemma and every other marginalized member who raised concerns inside Socialist Action will keep producing the same outcomes. Different people. Same result. Same silence after.

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