Ryan mulls entering NDP leadership race
Ex-union leader wants to ensure field ‘left’ enough
OTTAWA • Longtime union leader Sid Ryan says he’ll base an NDP leadership decision on whether existing candidates are leaning far enough to the left.
It’s time for New Democrats to harness Bernie Sanders-esque left-wing populism, he said Tuesday, and abandon “mushy middle” centrism that has failed the party.
“I’m still mulling it over. I looked at the debate, obviously, and I’m trying to figure out which of the candidates supports the platform that I’d be running on,” said Ryan, who was president of the Ontario Federation of Labour from 2009 until 2015.
The first leadership debate Sunday featured MPs Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, Guy Caron and Peter Julian. If any of those prove left enough for Ryan, who is a signatory to the controversial LEAP manifesto, he said he’ll consider endorsing them.
Ryan’s platform would include free university tuition, which Ashton and Julian have both committed to, as well as a $15 federal minimum wage; national pharmacare; a social investment bank; 500,000 new units of social housing; brokering between Israel and Palestine; and an exit from NATO, which Ryan called “little more than a war machine.”
“People are thinking, ‘is there really that much difference between the NDP over the last number of years and the Liberal party?’ ” Ryan said.
“Those policies that they’ve been promoting, and moving to the centre with, have not worked. And I think it’s now time to try a Bernie Sanders style of political engagement.”
Ryan said Ashton might fit the bill. “Niki has the rhetoric of the left, for sure,” he said, but not enough policy planks have come out to convince him just yet.
Ryan has long been involved with the New Democrats and ran for office five times — provincially in 1999, 2003 and 2007, and federally in 2004 and 2006 — but has never been elected.
A “Draft Sid Ryan for NDP Leader” campaign lists about 100 endorsements from party members on its website, and has about 350 likes on Facebook. That’s modest in comparison to the more than 3,800 likes for a “Draft Jagmeet Singh for NDP Leader” page wooing the Ontario NDP’s deputy leader.
The idea of Ryan’s candidacy received scoffs from a few NDP insiders. Former Toronto MP Craig Scott, who didn’t reply to an interview request Tuesday, tweeted Monday that he’d see Ryan as NDP leader “over my dead body.”
Ryan’s own Twitter account has recently featured a retweet of an f-bomb about Donald Trump, a call for another U.S. Tea Party movement, but on the left, and a comment that Kevin O’Leary is a “scary guy.”
IT’S TIME TO TRY A BERNIE SANDERS STYLE OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT.