22-year-old thrust into NDP leadership
Before he goes to bed, six nights a week, between 5 and 7 p.m., Mackenzie Thomason sets two alarm clocks in the bedroom of his small apartment in uptown Fredericton. The first, the conventional, old-fashioned kind, goes off with a standard, grating beep at 12:55 a.m. The second, on his iPhone, starts chiming five minutes later. Thomason, who turned 22 at the end of July and lives alone, is terrified of oversleeping. He’s terrified of missing work, of showing up late, of not getting everything done.
By 2:30 a.m., every Monday through Saturday, Thomason is usually sitting in the driver’s seat of his silver Ford Escape at the yard outside the old Daily Gleaner building on Prospect Street. Depending on the day, he’ll pick up somewhere between 250 and 350 newspapers there. He’ll spend the next four hours driving out to New Maryland and back, dropping papers on doorsteps and in mailboxes before continuing on to one of his three other jobs.
Thomason has bright, rosy cheeks. In pictures, he’s always smiling. He looks even younger than he actually is. Still, it’s rare he gets recognized when he’s out delivering. Part of that is the hour. Not many customers are awake before 6 a.m. But part of it is the incongruity of it all, too. People see what they expect to see. And few expect to see the interim leader of the New Brunswick NDP tossing their Telegraph-Journal across the grass several hours before dawn.
On Tuesday, 14 prominent members of the NDP in New Brunswick publicly abandoned the party to join the federal Greens. Nationally, the story was played as a sign of federal leader Jagmeet Singh’s organizational weakness in the Maritimes. And it was that, to an extent. But the New Brunswick NDP has its own peculiar history and flaws, too. Organizers, ex-candidates, and even one former leader have been fleeing the party for years. So what happened Tuesday wasn’t much of an aberration; it was the acceleration of a long trend, one that helps explain how a 22-year-old newspaper delivery man ended up running the party in his spare time.
“What we’re seeing right now is the party coming apart at the seams,” said Mario Levesque, an associate professor of political science at Mount Allison University. “They can’t get along right now.”
New Brunswick, more so than almost any other province, has always been a two-party state. “There’s not a lot of folks in New Brunswick who are genetic New Democrats the way you get Liberals and Tories who pass on party affiliation between generations,” said Dominic Cardy, who led the provincial NDP from 2011 to 2017.