Amid genocide in Gaza and NDP silence, Yves Engler launches a disruptive leadership bid to confront the party’s drift from justice, clarity, and courage.
In the shadow of mass death and destruction in Gaza, and with Canada’s political class complicit in the ongoing genocide, the federal NDP finds itself in a leadership vacuum, bereft of moral clarity, strategic vision, and connection to the movements that once formed its spine.
A generation of politicized youth has taken to the streets, organizing for Palestine, demanding climate action, and challenging Canadian militarism. But inside Parliament, these demands find no echo.
What was once a party of principled opposition now appears increasingly captured by consultants, bureaucrats, and NATO-friendly moderates.
Into this moment steps Yves Engler, not as a career politician or a cautious insider, but as a blunt instrument of confrontation. Nominated by the NDP Socialist Caucus, Engler is not running to win in the conventional sense. He is running to force a choice: Will the NDP be a vehicle for structural change or a mechanism for co-opting and containing dissent?
Whether Engler is allowed to officially enter the race or is blocked by party elites, his campaign is already functioning as a stress test—exposing contradictions the party has spent years burying beneath performance politics and technocratic liberalism.
In a political culture that rewards silence on empire and punishes those who challenge Zionism, Engler’s bid is a political provocation. It demands the party confront what it has become—and what it might still be, if it dared to listen to its base.
The Candidate: Who Is Yves Engler?
Yves Engler is not a conventional politician—and that’s precisely the point. For over two decades, he has been one of Canada’s most relentless and unapologetic critics of its foreign policy, publishing more than a dozen books that expose the contradictions of Canadian liberalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism.
From his early activism during the Netanyahu protest at Concordia University, where he confronted Canada’s complicity in Israeli apartheid, to his later critiques of military interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan, Yves Engler has built a body of work that dismantles the comforting myth of Canadian benevolence.
Through detailed investigations into corporate power, resource extraction, and foreign aid, particularly in Africa, Engler reveals how Canada consistently acts in service of empire, not justice.
His writing shows that behind the peacekeeping façade lies a legacy of exploitation, militarism, and support for regimes that serve Canadian interests.
He’s been dragged out of official events for interrupting warmongers, denounced by the press for his anti-Zionist stance, and blacklisted by political elites for refusing to play respectability politics.
But for a growing cohort of disillusioned activists, organizers, and young people radicalized by climate collapse and the genocide in Gaza, Engler represents something different: clarity, consistency, and confrontation.
His nomination for NDP leadership comes via the NDP Socialist Caucus, a grassroots formation committed to reviving the party’s working-class, anti-imperialist roots.
Engler has pledged to run a rebellious, insurgent campaign—not to win power at any cost, but to build a movement inside and beyond the party. He is blunt about the odds, clear-eyed about the institutional hostility he faces, and unafraid to name names.
In a leadership race expected to be dominated by cautious centrists and foreign policy hawks, Engler’s entry marks a radical departure: a campaign that sees elections not as endpoints, but as battlegrounds for politicization, mobilization, and rupture.
The Vision: Platform and Political Goals
Yves Engler’s campaign is not centered around vague platitudes or empty reforms. It is rooted in a clear, unapologetically radical program aimed at confronting the material engines of violence, exploitation, and ecological collapse in Canada and beyond.
His platform advances five core pillars that together represent a systemic challenge to Canadian liberalism, militarism, and settler capitalism.
Anti-Imperialism
Engler calls for a complete reorientation of Canada’s foreign policy. Central to this is withdrawal from NATO, a military alliance he characterizes as a vehicle for U.S.-led aggression and war profiteering.
He opposes the $1 trillion increase in military spending to meet NATO’s 5% GDP target, calling it a theft from healthcare, housing, and social services.
His platform demands the dismantling of Canada’s war machine and the repurposing of military infrastructure toward peaceful, cooperative international development grounded in solidarity, not empire.
Palestine
At the heart of Engler’s campaign is a fierce denunciation of Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He proposes ending all government support—financial, political, and diplomatic—for Israeli war crimes.
This includes revoking the charitable status of Canadian organizations funding the IDF or illegal settlements and prosecuting violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act that allow Canadians to fight in the Israeli military.
He calls for removing Hamas and other Palestinian groups from Canada’s terrorism list and explicitly supports the right of Palestinian resistance under international law.
Economic Democracy
Engler rejects the capitalist logic of “one dollar, one vote” and instead calls for a democratic economy organized around collective need, not profit.
His vision of economic democracy is built on public ownership, workplace democracy, and wealth redistribution. It includes dismantling corporate subsidies, ending tax breaks for the wealthy, and transforming key sectors, such as housing, energy, and transit, into democratically controlled public goods.
Climate Justice
A lifelong environmentalist, Engler’s platform demands an immediate end to tar sands extraction, one of the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel projects.
He advocates for a degrowth-oriented transition that prioritizes ecological survival over GDP growth. This means rapid decarbonization, green jobs through public investment, and rejecting false solutions like carbon markets and “net zero” greenwashing. Ecosocialism is not a slogan here, it’s the operational blueprint.
Decolonization
Engler calls for the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) across all levels of government.
He supports expanding Indigenous jurisdiction, returning land, and breaking with the paternalism that still defines Canada’s relationship to First Nations. Decolonization, for Engler, is not symbolic; it requires material transfers of land, power, and resources.
Palestine as a Central Divide
The genocide in Gaza is not just one issue among many for Yves Engler’s campaign—it is the moral and ideological fulcrum around which the entire leadership race turns.
While Canadian politicians across party lines issue carefully worded statements or display symbolic gestures, like NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson’s widely circulated watermelon pin, Engler calls the Israeli assault on Gaza what he believes it truly is: a “holocaust.”
This framing is not rhetorical provocation. It reflects Engler’s conviction that Canada is materially complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through arms exports, diplomatic cover, and a refusal to hold Israel accountable under international law.
He has condemned the Canadian government’s refusal to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act against IDF recruitment, the CRA’s charity status for groups financing illegal settlements, and the listing of Palestinian organizations as terrorist entities.
Engler’s position exposes what he sees as a deep contradiction in the NDP’s self-image as a party of justice and solidarity. While tens of thousands marched in pro-Palestine rallies across the country, the party leadership remained muted, offering little in the way of political risk or mobilization.
In this context, Palestine becomes the litmus test—not just of foreign policy integrity, but of whether the NDP can confront the forces of empire and settler colonialism in its own backyard. This divide marks a fault line between performative solidarity and a politics willing to act.
Targeting the Establishment: McPherson and the Party Machine
For Yves Engler, Heather McPherson represents everything wrong with the modern NDP: a consultant-vetted, NATO-friendly politician who performs progressive values while actively reinforcing the imperial status quo.
His critique of McPherson is not simply ideological—it is structural. She is framed as the embodiment of a party machine that has drifted far from its roots in democratic socialism and anti-imperialist internationalism.
McPherson’s record as the NDP’s foreign affairs critic is Exhibit A. She has supported NATO expansion and arms shipments to Ukraine, reinforcing Canada’s alignment with Western military objectives.
On domestic issues, McPherson defended the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as necessary for protecting Alberta jobs, a position that Yves Engler has condemned as greenwashing support for what he calls a “carbon bomb” (Engler, Left, Right, 2022; Edmonton Journal, 2020).
As Yves Engler argues in Stand on Guard for Whom?, her foreign policy statements often mirror the rhetoric of Global Affairs Canada, distancing her from the grassroots anti-war activists calling for demilitarization and a just foreign policy.
Then there are the symbolic moments that, for Engler, reveal deeper loyalties. McPherson applauded Yaroslav Hunka, the Waffen-SS veteran honored in Parliament.
McPherson has participated in events alongside Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister who Engler and others have described as a leading apologist for Israeli apartheid due to his decades-long defense of Israeli policies and role as Canada’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism (Engler, Canada and Israel, 2010; CJPAC, 2021).
Engler connects this critique to broader concerns voiced by the NDP Socialist Caucus: that the party is no longer a vehicle for transformative politics. Instead, it has been hollowed out by lobbyists, branding professionals, and staffers more concerned with messaging than mobilizing.
The party leadership’s silence in the face of the Gaza genocide—its failure to call for mass mobilization, to condemn arms shipments, or even to take political risks—is not, in Engler’s framing, just political cowardice. It is a moral collapse.
This is the line he draws in the sand. McPherson and her backers represent the technocratic, NATO-aligned center that manages dissent without ever challenging power. Engler’s campaign, by contrast, exists to rupture that illusion—and to ask the base: who is this party really for?
Disability Rights and Movement Gaps
One of the first critiques of Yves Engler’s campaign came during an episode of Blueprints of Disruption, hosted by former NDP candidate and disability justice advocate Jessa McLean, who raised concerns about the campaign’s lack of explicit policy or messaging addressing the struggles of disabled people.
Rather than dismiss the critique, Engler acknowledged the gap directly. He admitted that disability justice is not an area of expertise for him, but committed to making it a core part of the campaign by listening to and working alongside disabled organizers.
Engler has specifically criticized Canada’s expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying, describing it as a dystopian signal of systemic ableism, where the combination of poverty, neglect, and lack of services is effectively coercing disabled people toward death.
He also connects the issue to broader critiques of capitalism: the marginalization of disabled people is a feature, not a bug, of a system that only values productivity and profit.
In contrast to what he describes as the NDP’s tokenistic gestures or silence, Engler has been outspoken, aligning himself with disability justice advocates rather than positioning himself as a savior.
He openly seeks counsel on how to confront these injustices, echoing calls from the Canadian Human Rights Commission that MAiD cannot serve as a substitute for accessible services, dignified housing, or community-based care .
A Disruptive Strategy, Not a Traditional Campaign
Yves Engler is not running a traditional campaign, and he’s not pretending to. His leadership bid is less about winning votes than it is about shifting the terrain of political discourse, what’s often called the Overton window.
Engler’s goal isn’t to cozy up to the NDP establishment or to secure a future in party politics. It’s to repoliticize a generation numbed by spectacle and betrayed by politeness.
His message is clear: this is not a loyalty test, it’s a stress test. For Engler, the NDP is a tactical battlefield, not the endgame. He’s running not because he believes the party will allow meaningful change from within, but because forcing the question, is this even a viable vehicle for the left? can spark something larger. A movement. A realignment. A rupture.
Engler’s style reflects this philosophy. He is openly rebellious, comfortable calling out the military-industrial complex, naming Canada’s complicity in imperialism, and breaking the norms of party decorum.
He is willing to say what others won’t: that the NDP’s silence on genocide, militarism, and climate collapse isn’t just inadequate, it’s morally bankrupt.
This is not a career move. It’s a provocation with purpose. Whether or not Engler makes the ballot, the campaign is already a success if it ignites debate, exposes contradictions, and arms a new generation with sharper political tools.
Obstacles and Gatekeeping
From the outset, Yves Engler has made clear he expects resistance—not from opponents in other parties, but from within the NDP itself.
His campaign faces steep, likely intentional, institutional barriers: a $100,000 entry fee that dwarfs past requirements, vague and discretionary vetting criteria, and a political culture that pathologizes dissent as “harassment” or “extremism.”
These mechanisms, Engler argues, aren’t about maintaining standards—they’re about maintaining control.
He contrasts this crackdown with the unchecked elevation of figures like Heather McPherson, whose record includes applauding a Waffen-SS veteran in Parliament, supporting NATO expansion, and backing carbon megaprojects like the Trans Mountain pipeline.
Her alignment with Irwin Cotler, a staunch apologist for Israeli apartheid, draws little internal scrutiny, while Engler’s anti-Zionist positions draw immediate accusations of toxicity.
For Engler and his supporters, this is the real litmus test: not just whether the party allows him to run, but whether the NDP can tolerate any challenge to its cozy relationship with the military-industrial complex, the fossil fuel lobby, or pro-Israel advocacy groups.
Beneath the surface, the question is not one of decorum, it’s about whether the NDP fears democracy when it comes from the left. Gatekeeping, in this case, is less about rules and more about preventing any meaningful ideological contestation.
Public Reactions: Polarization and Momentum
Yves Engler’s leadership bid has already stirred strong and polarized reactions, precisely what his campaign intended.
On the left, the campaign has drawn early endorsements and enthusiasm from the NDP Socialist Caucus; Green Party of Quebec leader and outspoken ecosocialist Alex Tyrell, who was expelled from the federal Greens over his anti-war stance, as well as activist-lawyer Dimitri Lascaris, a former Green Party leadership contender who was sidelined for his support of Palestinian rights and critiques of Western imperialism.
Many supporters see the run not only as a necessary intervention in a hollow party but as a rare opening to put anti-imperialist and eco-socialist ideas into national circulation.
Engler’s campaign has rallied enough digital momentum to bring disillusioned activists and former NDP members back into the party—some explicitly to back his bid—evidenced by a surge in volunteer signups and petition signatures, particularly from pro-Palestinian, anti-war, and climate justice networks.
As he celebrated online traction, Engler noted: “My odds … have significantly increased … Zionist fanatics and rightist media have turned the extreme long‑shot bid into a mere long‑shot” .
But pushback has come quickly and predictably. Right-wing Zionist activists like Meir Weinstein and conservative columnists like Brian Lilley have called for Engler’s disqualification.
Former Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has joined the chorus, invoking concerns about “extremism.”
More chillingly, Engler has already faced legal repression for his speech, most notably in February 2025, when he was arrested and jailed for five days after publicly criticizing pro-Israel commentator Dahlia Kurtz on social media.
The charges, which included harassment and intimidation, stemmed not from direct threats but from Engler labeling her a genocide supporter for defending Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Critics described the arrest as an act of lawfare, an attempt to criminalize anti-Zionist expression and intimidate those who voice support for Palestinian resistance.
This polarization is no accident—it marks engagement with the “third rails” of Canadian politics. Coverage from Jacobin framed the arrest as symptomatic of a crackdown on discourse surrounding empire, Zionism, and Canada’s international complicity
Building a Volunteer Base and Movement Infrastructure
Unlike traditional campaigns built around centralized messaging and donor class appeasement, Yves Engler’s leadership bid leans into a decentralized, movement-based strategy.
The campaign’s Supporter Toolkit serves as both a mobilization guide and a declaration of intent: this is not a passive petition drive but a collective organizing experiment.
The toolkit lays out low-barrier, high-impact tactics, posters in cafes, teach-ins and film nights, local meetings, WhatsApp group sharing, Discord outreach, testimonial videos, and DIY content creation.
It’s less a top-down operation than an invitation to autonomy: “If it aligns with our values and builds visibility, go for it.” That ethos underscores the deeper purpose of the campaign, not just to win, but to politicize, radicalize, and repopulate the left ecosystem gutted by technocratic centrism.
Engler’s team is recruiting volunteers now, well before the official leadership race opens. The strategy is clear: build infrastructure and momentum ahead of time to withstand party pushback and force a public confrontation on issues like Zionism, militarism, and climate collapse.
The campaign’s outreach is sharply targeted. Disillusioned Greens alienated by Elizabeth May’s centrism and the party’s drift toward NATO-alignment.
Youth activists radicalized by Gaza, climate disasters, and economic despair. Longstanding anti-war and pro-Palestinian organizers searching for a political foothold.
This isn’t a campaign asking permission, it’s creating the conditions for confrontation. And every poster hung, every Zoom call hosted, and every new volunteer onboarded is part of a broader wager: that even in Canada’s stifled political landscape, grassroots power can still be built.
Final Stakes: Win or Lose, The Fight Continues
For Yves Engler and the NDP Socialist Caucus, the campaign is not just about winning a leadership race, it’s about making visible the invisible fences that hem in the Canadian left.
Whether Engler is allowed on the ballot or blocked through party machinations, the result will be revealing. His candidacy serves as a test: can the NDP be a vehicle for meaningful transformation, or has it been permanently captured by technocrats and foreign policy hawks?
Exclusion would be mobilizing in its own right. It would confirm the party’s hostility to dissenting views on Zionism, NATO, and economic democracy. But even a brief window of legitimacy, if Engler were permitted to appear on stage, in debates, and on the ballot, could spark organizing far beyond the confines of this race.
While the odds remain steep, recent breakthroughs, like Zohran Mamdani’s insurgent win in New York City and Sean Orr’s upset in Vancouver, show what’s possible when movements force their way into the mainstream.
These victories don’t erase the structural barriers, but they offer a glimpse of what can be built when principled candidates connect with organized bases.
The campaign urges supporters to attend NDP Socialist Caucus meetings or organize local coalitions of their own, with the broader aim of building the capacity for struggles that will continue well beyond the leadership vote.
Win or lose, the confrontation has already begun. This is not a conventional campaign, it’s a direct intervention in a party grappling with a crisis of purpose.
To get involved, visit yvesforndpleader.ca today!
Spark Solidarity 