If you’ve seen the website saying Edmonton Strathcona Member of Parliament Heather McPherson is considering running to lead the federal NDP and thought the wording seemed oddly ambivalent, there’s an explanation.
The website at Heather4Leader.ca (with a French-language mirror site at appuyonsheather.ca) was put together and published by a group of Ms. McPherson’s supporters, former colleagues, and friends who would like her to run, the MP’s constituency assistant said yesterday.
But while Ms. McPherson is pondering running to replace Jagmeet Singh, said Gale Davy, it wasn’t her who floated this particular balloon. “They did ask if it was OK to do a site and Heather said sure,” she explained. “That was a while ago, so we were taken a bit by surprise when it showed up.”
“Pretty much everyone for whom she’s ever worked, everyone she’s ever worked with, and everyone who’s ever worked for her are supporting her and urging her to run,” Ms. Davy added. “My understanding is that the group that did this website include all of the above.”
“So, yes,” she said, “Heather is seriously considering a run for leader, but she’s been a bit busy with all her critic roles – foreign affairs, defense, international trade.” She was also in Toronto yesterday for the Pride parade as part of her duties as heritage critic.
“She’s also was doing work on Bill C-5,” Ms. Davy added. “People are very worried about it.” She predicted Ms. McPherson won’t make her decision about seeking the leadership until after the party publishes the rules and the timeline for the contest.
Ms. McPherson has been the Member of Parliament for Edmonton Strathcona since 2019 and is at the moment once again the only NDP MP in Alberta.
She proved her staying power in the 2021 and 2025 federal elections, and if you’re of the view that at this critical juncture in its history the federal NDP needs to choose a leader with a seat in the House of Commons if it hopes to stay relevant, Ms. McPherson would only have five potential competitors, if you don’t count Interim Leader Don Davies.
The website has a photo of Ms. McPherson in her favourite denim jacket, as befits an Alberta politician, and doesn’t say much beyond that “Heather McPherson is considering a run for party leader — and a growing number of us already know she’s the leader our party needs. Sign up now. Let’s make it happen.”
There’s a form you can fill out and a button you can press to “Join Team Heather.”
A heading above the form says, “Support New Leadership,” which one way or another the NDP was going to have to do anyway since Mr. Singh announced he was quitting on April 28 after losing his own seat in Burnaby South and watching the NDP’s seat count in Parliament plummet from 24 to 7. His resignation took effect on May 5.
“Heather knows the NDP’s best days are still ahead,” the website says. “She understands the party’s job isn’t to replace grassroots movements. It’s to be worthy of them.”
Whether or not what’s left of the NDP movement, such as it is, would go for a New Democrat who backed the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project in 2019 remains to be seen.
More recently, Ms. McPherson has staked out positions calling for Canada to recognize Palestinian statehood and end all trade in military materiel and technology between Israel and Canada. As the NDP’s defence critic in Parliament, she boldly proclaimed earlier this month that the F-35 program “has become a boondoggle.”
With the cost of the controversial U.S. designed and built aircraft nearly doubling, construction of facilities in Canada way behind schedule, a shortage of pilots, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Canadian sovereignty, she said in a June 10 news release, “it’s evident the F-35 is no longer the right choice for Canada.”
Since by now it’s painfully obvious that just propping up the Liberals and trying to get them to push through a few vaguely progressive policies wasn’t a great strategy for the NDP, staking out some positions that are dramatically different from both the Liberals and the Conservatives isn’t going to hurt the party.
And if Prime Minister Mark Carney and other NATO leaders are serious about spending 5 per cent of their countries’ GDPs to prop up the U.S. arms industry, there won’t be any money for social programs anyway. So that’s a pretty good argument for what’s left of the NDP to set out a progressive platform that defends health care and other programs. No one else is going to do it.
Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have a national party in Parliament led by a leader from Alberta who’s not just another cookie-cutter conservative, a category that arguably includes both Mr. Carney and seatless Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the Stornoway Squatter.
Meanwhile, speaking of Edmonton Strathcona, that riding’s last Conservative MP, Rahim Jaffer, says he wants to run to be mayor of Edmonton in Alberta’s October 20 municipal elections.
Mr. Jaffer was Edmonton Strathcona MP from 1997, when he was elected as a member of the Reform Party of Canada at the age of 25, until 2008, when he was defeated by Ms. McPherson’s NDP predecessor as the riding’s MP, Linda Duncan.
During that time he was a Reform, Canadian Alliance, and Conservative MP – although we all understand that was the same crowd and the same party, just different branding.
Mr. Jaffer’s time in Parliament and some of the things he got up to afterward were colourful and controversial, including having an aide impersonate him in a media interview, facing drunk driving and cocaine possession charges in Ontario (later controversially reduced to careless driving), and attending a notorious business meeting in Toronto said to have included “busty hookers” on the guest list.
But that was then and this is now. Mr. Jaffer, now 53, told The Edmonton Journal on Wednesday that “I don’t have any skeletons in the closet. They are all out there if anybody wants to look at them. We all make mistakes, and I stumbled.”