The everyman
‘It has to be focused on the people on the ground’
Sometimes, the milieu is the message.
Such was the case when Charlie Angus chose to launch his campaign for NDP leader: This was no old-school suit sprouting out from behind a podium to make an announcement. Angus turned up at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, a fabled venue that has hosted Stompin’ Tom and the Rolling Stones, to pump his fist in the air and proclaim his candidacy.
The intended takeaway is that Angus isn’t out to be taken for your stereotypical politician.
“I think he’s got that kind of ability to connect to just — sort of everyday, working people in Canada in a way that is vitally important,” said Andrew Cash, Angus’s long-time friend and a supporter in the campaign.
Cash is also one of the NDP MPs to lose his seat in Toronto when the Liberals under Justin Trudeau swept through the city in the 2015 election.
Angus argues that the best way to win those seats back is to reorient the party’s culture. Rather than chasing the issue of the day in Ottawa, Angus thinks it needs to be intimately connected to “people on the ground” — workers and supporters of the NDP who felt unenthused by the 2015 campaign under Thomas Mulcair.
“We have to rebuild that trust with people,” Angus told the Star this week.
“We became a very centralized, leader-focused party,” he said. “We can be a modern political machine, but it has to be focused on the people on the ground.”
The former punk rocker — he was in a band with Cash in the 1980s — likes to describe his journey into politics as having two prongs. The married father of three got his start as an environmental activist, protesting a garbage dump development near Kirkland Lake in northern Ontario. But he also comes from a working-class family, and represents a riding where mining and other industries are big employers.
As such, he feels he’s uniquely positioned to mend conflicts within the party, such as the debate over the Trans Mountain pipeline that has the NDP governments in B.C. and Alberta at loggerheads. He opposes the pipeline but recognizes the need to create new industries, in renewable energy for example, for workers that are transitioning out of a declining oil industry.
“It’s an important question because I represent a blue-collar region and I came into politics for environmental justice,” he said.
Angus has also spoken about supporting “the new working class” — people working part time or on contracts without benefits, who have trouble paying for a place to live or finding a new job after getting laid off. Among his platform policies are pledges to create an ombudsperson in Ottawa for Indigenous children, enforce a legislated cap on greenhouse gas emissions, and provide new funding for affordable housing.
In the waning days of the campaign, he sees Singh as his biggest rival, but believes that he has the second-choice support from voters of other candidates that could bring him the victory.
“My strategy is an open door,” he said, adding that the next leader should be someone with a seat in Ottawa — Singh has said he won’t run federally until 2019 even if he wins the race — with solid parliamentary experience.