Socialists Blocked by the NDP Launch a Fighting Movement

A fighting socialist movement launched in Toronto on May 24, built by activists the NDP refused to let speak inside its own walls.

You do not win socialism by working with capitalists. You win it by working against them. That principle — blunt, unfashionable, and increasingly rare in Canadian politics — was the organizing idea behind the Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed conference, held in Toronto on Sunday, May 24. Organizers called the goal a “fighting socialist movement,” and the word fighting was doing deliberate work. It marks the line between a left that bargains for concessions inside the system and a left that means to confront the system itself.

Organizers said more than 350 people took part, roughly 100 in the room and 250 online. The day ran on panels, breakout sessions, and the formation of working committees. It was not a rally and not a speech series. It was a working conference, and what came out of it was a plan.

A Movement Built From a Door Slammed Shut

This did not start as a breakaway. It started as an attempt to work inside. The NDP Socialist Caucus recruited author Yves Engler to run for the party leadership on an anti-imperialist platform, a campaign this publication covered when it tested the party’s values. The party answered by failing the test. Engler was vetted out, his replacement Bianca Mugyenyi blocked as a “proxy,” and his membership ultimately terminated.

That answer radicalized the question. If the only mass labour-based party in the country will not permit an anti-war socialist to so much as appear on a leadership ballot, then the argument that the left can be renewed from inside it starts to collapse on contact. The conference is what the campaign became once that door was shut. As this publication has argued, social democracy in this form does not carry the left forward — it manages and absorbs it. The people in that Toronto room had now lived the thesis.

More Than a Caucus, Not Yet a Party

It is worth being precise about what was and was not founded on May 24, because the temptation to overstate is real. No new party was launched. What launched was a movement and the scaffolding to sustain one: working committees on outreach, fundraising, education, and actions, with regional committees to follow and a founding convention still ahead. The Socialist Caucus had already named the shape of the thing in a December motion — more than a caucus but not yet a party, possibly running candidates for municipal, provincial, or federal office down the line.

That sequencing matters. The plan runs from infrastructure to elections, not the other way around: build the pamphlets, the social media, the branding, and the local committees first; contest municipal races once the base exists; consider a party only much further out. It is the unglamorous order, and it is the correct one. Left formations in Canada have a long history of declaring a party before building the movement that could sustain it, then collapsing when the founding enthusiasm runs out.

Two Mobilizations on the Calendar

The clearest products of the day were two concrete mobilizations. The first is an anti-war push timed to the summer, as NATO heads of state gather in Ankara on July 7 and 8 for the alliance’s annual summit. Organizers want an anti-NATO alliance built around that moment — a direct answer to a Canadian political class that has increased military spending while no mainstream party questions the country’s web of bilateral military accords.

The second is sharper still. On September 14 and 15, Mark Carney’s government hosts the first-ever Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, convening the world’s largest investors to chase a trillion dollars in capital. The guest list is not abstract — it reportedly includes asset managers like Blackstone and sovereign funds such as Singapore’s GIC. The movement intends to meet that summit with a counter-mobilization it is calling Carnival Against Capitalism.

The name is not decoration. It reaches back twenty-five years, to the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, when tens of thousands marched against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Convergence des Luttes Anticapitalistes staged a Carnival Against Capitalism that became one historic mobilization against corporate globalization. Reviving the name is a claim of lineage: that the fight against corporate globalization in 2001 and the fight against Carney’s investment summit in 2026 are the same fight, against the same class, at a later stage.

The Anti-War Line Is the Dividing Line

What separates this movement from the party it left is not a tax bracket. It is war. The conference platform states plainly that the militarization of society is no solution and that Canada’s role in supporting U.S. imperialism must be countered. That is the position the NDP’s own leadership contest treated as disqualifying — and it is the position around which this new formation is organizing first.

Engler has been specific about the stakes. While Carney raises military spending in line with Washington’s demands, he has pointed out, an NDP premier in British Columbia and the mayor of Toronto have been positioning their cities to host a new global war bank — and the federal NDP leader has not so much as questioned whether a Canadian city should be turned into a hub of militarism for decades. When the nominal opposition will not contest that, the contest moves outside the party. That is the whole argument for the conference in a sentence.

International by Necessity, Not Slogan

The internationalism on display was not ceremonial. Among the invited speakers was Kshama Sawant, the former Seattle councilmember now contesting U.S. office, and her presence carried a strategic claim rather than a symbolic one: that no socialist victory in Canada is winnable without the American working class, given how thoroughly the two economies and the two states are fused. The lineup ran alongside lawyer Dimitri Lascaris, anti-war organizer Tamara Lorincz, Palestinian scholar Ghada Sasa, and Indigenous campaigner Clayton Thomas-Müller — anti-war, anti-colonial, and labour currents brought under one analysis of capital and empire rather than kept in separate activist lanes.

The Real Test Is Whether It Survives the Year

None of this guarantees anything. The Canadian left is littered with formations that began at a hopeful conference and fragmented before the second one. Independent socialist projects here have always struggled against thin funding, hostile media, the long decline of organized labour, and a political culture that rewards moderation and punishes anything that names the system by its name. A movement that leaves the NDP gives up the ballot line and the infrastructure that came with it, and gets in return only what it is willing to build from nothing.

But the deeper shift is already visible, and it does not depend on this particular movement succeeding. For decades the assumption inside Canadian progressive politics was that real change had to flow through the NDP, the unions, and the NGOs tied to them. That assumption is weakening, because the institutions built to contain the left’s energy are visibly failing to contain it.

Whether or not Carnival Against Capitalism fills the streets in September, the more important question has already been asked out loud in a Toronto hall: not whether the NDP has drifted too far right, but whether the machinery that absorbed left opposition for half a century can still hold it at all.

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