Isaac Phan Nay
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Tyee
[Editor’s note: This is the fifth Q&A in a series on labour issues with NDP leadership candidates. Read the previous interviews with candidates Heather McPherson, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis and Rob Ashton.]
Tony McQuail prepared for the holiday break by traversing a snowy, icy pasture by sleigh, tractor and horse, putting out hay for his family’s cows to eat over Christmas.
The cattle help fertilize the organic farm, McQuail said, which is also home to pasture-raised pigs and chickens, a cut-flower business, a small apple orchard and a personal vegetable garden.
McQuail has worked on the farm near Lucknow, Ontario, a small community close to the eastern shore of Lake Huron, since he first bought it in 1973. Now semi-retired since his daughter bought the farm in 2016, McQuail says he’s still working to ensure it’s regenerative — meaning it heals the land and supports local ecosystems.
He says his experience learning to manage the farm has taught him to manage complex systems and work towards a holistic vision.
“When it comes to things like politics or the ecosystem, these are complex,” McQuail said. “When you’re managing complex systems, you need to observe it. You need to monitor what’s going on, and you need to be able to adapt and change.”
Now, McQuail has a holistic vision for Canada. And he wants to lead the NDP towards it.
In the race to lead the party, McQuail is up against Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, labour leader Rob Ashton, social worker and Campbell River Coun. Tanille Johnston and activist and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.
He’s no stranger to the party. McQuail has run as the NDP candidate for the Huron-Bruce riding several times since 1980, in both federal and Ontario provincial elections. He hasn’t won a seat yet.
He sat down with The Tyee to speak about his vision for Canada, his fight for a green, progressive NDP, and the challenges that come with running for leadership as an ordinary person.
When we spoke last month, McQuail said he wasn’t sure if he’d raise enough money to meet the party’s end-of-year fundraising deadline. On Dec. 30, 2025, he’d need to fork over the third of four $25,000 payments the NDP requires as an entry fee from candidates.
Two weeks later, McQuail is still in the race.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: You’ve labelled yourself a ‘progressive green’ candidate for NDP leadership. What does that mean?
Tony McQuail: We’re going to have to focus on regenerating the damage that we’ve done to the planet, and we’re going to have to redesign how we do things as a society so that we use much less energy and much less resources.
I happen to believe that by using less but sharing more, we can actually have a much wealthier society in terms of the things that make life good for human beings. Not wealth in terms of ever more material consumption, but wealth in terms of time with family, time to spend in your community.
A lower-energy, lower-resource economy could be a much healthier place for human beings, particularly if we focus on what human beings have done for most of their existence, which is caring for each other and sharing with each other.
We come into this world helpless and naked, and if people weren’t prepared to care for you as an infant, you wouldn’t have lasted. If people didn’t care and share in prehistoric and pre-industrial societies, people wouldn’t have survived.
We’ve had 500 years of colonialism and 100 years of corporate capitalist consumerism that has been focused on taking and taking and with an individualistic, me-first attitude being preached by our economic priests, and it’s not working out real well from my perspective.
Why not run as a Green Party candidate?
I’ve been a New Democrat all my life, and what I’ve been saying is the two have to figure out how to work together to beat the first-past-the-post system. First-past-the-post has been keeping ordinary people from having a truly proportional representation in Parliament.
It has handicapped the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation [the party that became the NDP] and has certainly been a handicap for the NDP and the Green Party over the years.
For me, the NDP has been the green and progressive party. With the secondary Green Party in the picture, it’s basically added additional confusion and vote splitting, which then over time leads to people voting strategically. They don’t think either party can win in their riding, so they vote for somebody who’s next-least acceptable, because they don’t think who they would really like to vote for has a chance. That’s been very destructive.
At its best, democracy lets us find our collective wisdom, and it also lets us as a society change somewhat gradually. People are much more concerned about the environment than they were, but they’ve in many cases just given up hope that anything’s going to happen.
That’s why I’m arguing for regeneration and redesign. Part of my campaign is that instead of putting a whole lot of money into a few big energy and mining projects that are not going to be beneficial across the country, we should put the money out into communities and ask, “How would you regenerate something in your area? How would you make something better environmentally?”
You’ve previously said the New Democrats should work with the Green Party. What would that look like?
If they don’t, they’re going to continue to be viewed as unlikely to win. People write you off. There are all these great ideas out there, but unless you actually are in government, or have a strong position in the minority government, you’re never going to get anywhere with them. Even if you do, the next phoney majority Liberal or Conservative government can trash it or just let it wither on the vine.
We see that in health care at the moment, across the country. Various provinces’ health-care systems are starved, and that’s tragic, because that’s one of the really good distributive things that we currently have as Canadians, is universal health care.
If by some fluke the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc Québécois held 51 per cent of the seats in Parliament, they’d have to sit down and figure out what they can agree on. What I’m saying is, don’t wait until after an election to do that, because you aren’t ever likely going to see that. We need to do that before an election.
A fairer tax system, where offshore tax loopholes are closed and there’s a more progressive income tax and a progressive wealth tax, might be something that they could agree on. That way, we could actually have the money to do these things that we want to do for the environment and for the community.
We need to build a coalition that reaches out and brings those together. We could get the Green Party and NDP to decide in each riding who would be their best candidate to represent a shared platform, then take that to the people.
If we do that strategic work ahead of the election, people won’t have to try to vote strategically. Then you might actually get in a position where you could form a government, or where you were in a very strong position in a minority government.
The New Democrats are traditionally a labour-focused party. How do you plan to balance climate and labour priorities?
In our riding, the NDP hasn’t been a labour political organization. It has had labour people participating in it. It has had farmers, small-business people, homeowners and moms. The 99 per cent have been involved. It’s not just a labour thing.
When I talk about workers, I’m talking about unionized workers and non-unionized workers. I’m talking about waged workers and non-wage workers. A whole lot of people who are part of families and communities are doing critical work, but they’re not getting paid for it, because they’re looking after kids and aged parents. They’re helping out in the community. They’re doing stuff at the local soup kitchen. They’re coaching the local hockey team or the local softball team or soccer team. These are all things that are absolutely essential to a healthy community, but in our particular economic system, they aren’t waged. That doesn’t mean they aren’t workers.
Everybody in the 99 per cent — and even the folks in the one per cent — are doing some kind of work in society. We need to define labour and work as broadly as we can, and recognize that everybody’s contributing in some way.
How would you say the NDP’s relationship with people who work has changed over the past decade?
My sense is we haven’t helped people understand how the NDP has helped ordinary people. We’ve been too focused on specific policies and not helped people understand the vision that we have of a society where everybody contributes, and people get their fair share of what society creates.
A society is the net aggregate work of all of us together. But if you have some people siphoning off a bigger share all the time, then you end up with a situation where people are unhappy with the tax system because it is unfair, and people are being asked to carry more than their fair share.
That’s one of the challenges we face. How do we create a fair system that ensures that everybody has enough and nobody is taking way too much?
My dad was an accountant, and he used to say, “Money’s like manure. It does the most good if you spread it around.”
The problem with money is you can always want more. If you’re sitting at the table and you’ve had your third piece of pie, you’re probably going to be full. But if you’re counting money, you can always have more money. You don’t get full with money in the same way.
In terms of the NDP, the leadership campaign in some ways illustrates this. The leadership campaign was structured, from my perspective, to make it very difficult for an ordinary person in the party to participate.
The $100,000 entry fee is pretty hefty for somebody who wasn’t already a star candidate or nationally known, and that’s certainly been a challenge for our campaign.
In November you urged your supporters to also donate to Tanille Johnston’s campaign. Why?
I got involved in this in part because of the screwy electoral system that we have in Canada with first-past-the-post, and because the electoral process that the NDP developed makes it very hard for an ordinary person to participate.
So as we were coming up to the fundraising deadline, we were talking to Tanille’s campaign. We realized they were struggling, and we knew that we were struggling. It didn’t make sense for both of us to struggle.
What we said is, if only one of us is going to get over the next $25,000 hurdle, we’re going to stop our fundraising so that hopefully Tanille will make it. We did a livestream on Nov. 30 to try and raise money, and we not only raised enough for Tanille, but we also raised enough that our campaign could carry on.
It’s questionable whether we’re going to be able to do that for the Dec. 30 deadline, so our campaign has pivoted again, and I will be doing fundraising phoning for her campaign. [On Jan. 5, McQuail’s campaign staff confirmed he was able to meet the deadline and is still in the race.]
Our feeling is it’s important that at least we have one ordinary, working hero person who’s from a rural riding in the leadership race, and don’t want to knock each other out by both trying to raise money at the same time.
That’s interesting —
Well, if you’ve got electoral systems that aren’t designed to help you succeed, you’ve got to figure out strategies that let you at least try and work around them.
The New Democrats lost a lot of seats last election. How would you plan to win back voters in the next election?
My belief is that we first have to have a vision that resonates with people. We have to work across small party lines to develop a clear program, and then help educate people and help them understand how it would work for them in the years before an election. We have to work to rebuild and value our riding associations and our electoral district associations across the country.
My perspective, as a rural New Democrat, is that our first-past-the-post system encourages all parties to look at where they have existing seats and what they would call a swing riding. They tend to focus their attention and energy on those areas and ignore what they think are safe seats, or places where they think they don’t have a chance.
That weakens the connection of all the political parties to the whole country. That’s very destructive toward creating a national political party or a good broad base for governing. It certainly means that we don’t have good communication and connection with people across the country.
With the NDP, we need to get serious about valuing and rebuilding our connections with riding associations, rural and urban, all across the country.
