Isaac Phan Nay
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Tyee
[Editor’s note: This is the fourth Q&A in a series on labour issues with NDP leadership candidates. Read the previous interviews with candidates Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis and Rob Ashton.]
Heather McPherson wants to win.
The MP for Edmonton Strathcona has been splitting her time between the House of Commons and the campaign trail. At the start of December, she flew to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to speak with MLAs about health care, before heading to St. John’s to meet with labour leaders and student unions.
McPherson ended the week back home in Edmonton, Alberta, where she sat down for a virtual conversation about her campaign.
“We have an obligation to Canadians and to our democracy to try to win,” she said. “It’s not my goal to be the conscience of Parliament. It’s not my goal to stand in the corner yelling into the abyss. I want to get more New Democrats elected.”
Now in the race to lead the party, she’s up against labour leader Rob Ashton, social worker and Campbell River Coun. Tanille Johnston, organic farmer and eight-time Huron-Bruce NDP candidate Tony McQuail and activist and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.
McPherson is the only candidate running for the NDP leadership who won a seat in the last federal election.
“I’ve got some experience beating Conservatives,” she said. “I’ve got some experience as a member of Parliament. What I bring to the table is the ability to win.”
She has represented Alberta’s Edmonton Strathcona riding since first being elected in 2019. In more than six years in government, McPherson has served as the NDP’s deputy House leader, party whip, critic for international development and dritic for foreign affairs.
Since winning her seat in this year’s federal election, she’s called on Ottawa to recognize Palestine as a state, sponsored an act to address attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and introduced a bill to make it more difficult for provinces to leave the Canada Pension Plan.
Just before the holidays, McPherson joined The Tyee to discuss rebuilding the NDP, standing up for workers’ rights and her campaign.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: You mention you have experience beating Conservatives. Do you see that as a big part of the NDP’s role?
Heather McPherson: Yeah. The path for us has got to be to win more seats. We lost a lot of votes in this last election because people were afraid of either a long-in-the-tooth Liberal government or Pierre Poilievre. I think Pierre Poilievre took some of those votes away from New Democrats.
He has done nothing, in the decades he’s been in the House of Commons, to protect workers’ rights or to make life better for working-class Canadians. He stole some of those votes from us, but we’re taking them back because Conservatives are not in it for working-class Canadians. They are in it for the wealthy. They always have been.
So I think that beating Conservatives is something that we need to do as New Democrats. We need to do that by talking to people about the issues that are most important to them, like affordability, jobs and housing. And in a way that’s simple and progressive, and doesn’t lose our values but still meets people where they are at.
Tyee: With seven MPs from the NDP currently sitting in Parliament, what do you see as the party’s current role in government?
HM: We get more done with seven members of Parliament than I think the Conservatives will get done with more than 100. They’re not in it to get things for Canadians; they are doing this for power.
We have got some really good wins already. I think about Leah Gazan and her bill to repeal Section 107 of the labour code, which is back-to-work legislation by another name. That’s a good piece of legislation that will be able to be moved forward. I think about Jenny Kwan and the work she has done to stop loopholes in our arms trade. I think about Gord Johns and the incredible work he does.
Our caucus is incredibly strong. There’s only seven and they are still achieving and punching so far above their weight. Backbenchers on the Conservative and Liberal side couldn’t dream of being able to be as effective as our caucus has been.
Tyee: Those private member’s bills about Section 107 and closing arms embargo loopholes — how will they fare in today’s House of Commons?
HM: Private member’s bills are always one of the tools that we have as members of Parliament. I have a number of private member’s bills that I’ve put forward. One is to protect the Canadian pension plan from Danielle Smith and her threat to take Alberta out. Another one is to stop company unions, like the Christian Labour Association of Canada [CLAC], from existing.
These bills are very effective tools. One of the bills that I tabled in my very first Parliament was to stop coal mining in the Rocky Mountains. It was a really elegant, simple bill. It just said all coal mines needed to adhere to the Impact Assessment Act, and at the time, that wasn’t the case. Jonathan Wilkinson, who was at the time the minister of environment, put it into policy. We can get things done with private member’s bills.
One of the things I like best about the anti-CLAC legislation is, if Pierre Poilievre really wants to show himself as being opposed to company unions, if he’s really on it for the side of workers, his folks will support that bill. Otherwise, his cards are on the table and it’ll be pretty clear that’s not who he’s here for.
Tyee: How do you think that the NDP’s relationship with labour has changed over the past decades?
HM: We’ve got to rebuild our relationship with labour. We have to be talking to folks about the issues that are important to them. We’ve got to be talking to workers. We need to liaise with labour leaders, but we also need to be talking to folks in union halls, on shop floors. We have got to be talking to workers that aren’t unionized yet. We’re going to be talking to folks that are working in the gig economy.
Workers who are in the most vulnerable positions are some of these folks working gig jobs. They have no protections. They’re not able to access the employment insurance system. Those are workers we should be reaching out to. We should be finding ways to ensure that they can have good, family-sustaining jobs.
That’s the basis of our economy. Workers build this country, and we should be protecting them. That’s where our party came from. We’ve got to get back to that. I think we stopped connecting with them.
I’m in Alberta. It is ground zero right now for attacks on workers’ rights.
The use of the notwithstanding clause pre-emptively to stop teachers from striking, before any attempt had been made to negotiate, is an attack on workers’ rights the likes of which we’ve not seen. If it’s allowed in Alberta, it will spread. There is no chance that Conservative MPs and Conservative premiers aren’t looking at that and thinking about how they would use that.
It is the move of a bully and tells every single Canadian worker, “We can take your rights away any time we want.”
The federal government is not blameless either. You saw how fast they stood up with Air Canada against the flight attendants asking for better working conditions and better pay. Using Section 107 of the labour code to end that strike is shameful.
Clearly, workers’ rights are being attacked across the country. That’s why New Democrats need to rebuild those relationships with workers, so that we actually can work together to protect the rights that all Canadians should have.
Tyee: I’m glad you brought up Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s use of the notwithstanding clause to pass legislation. What can the federal government do to respond?
HM: The federal government has a role to play here.
This is the biggest attack on our public health-care system since it’s been put in place. Danielle Smith is basically saying that we are going to have an American-style, two-tiered health-care system. It’s non-stop attacks on our democracy, on our rights, by her government.
The federal government has a role to play in standing up. The teachers are taking Danielle Smith to court over her use of the notwithstanding clause, and the federal government must intervene in that court case. With regards to the health transfers, with regards to using the notwithstanding clause against trans people, the federal government should be stepping in.
The federal government has the ability to withhold health transfers until the United Conservative Party and Danielle Smith are in compliance with the law.
Instead of Mark Carney saying something, or being opposed to these extraordinarily dangerous steps that Smith is taking, he’s rewarding her with a memorandum of understanding to build a pipeline. He’s doing photo ops instead of his job, protecting Canadians.
Tyee: Tell me about that MOU — how do you plan to respond to the plan to build a new oil pipeline from Alberta through BC?
HM: Here’s the problem. If we believe — and I fundamentally do — in the rights of Indigenous people, that pipeline can’t get built. That pipeline cannot get built against the wishes of Indigenous people on the north coast of British Columbia. They are land title holders. They have the right to say no, and they have clearly said no.
This is a pristine part of our coast. This is unceded territory, unsurrendered and without support by the Indigenous people upon whose land this project impedes. This project cannot go forward, and Mark Carney either knows that and is lying to Canadians, or he doesn’t care about the rights of Indigenous people in this country.
Both of those things are wildly problematic. Obviously we could not support something that goes against the wishes of the owners and the guardians of the land.
Tyee: We’ve spoken a lot about stuff that you’re fighting against but I’m now wondering about the opposite. If you are to become the leader of the NDP, what are some policies that you would fight for?
HM: I love this part. One of the first policies that we put out was our housing policy. It’s based on the idea that we declare a housing emergency, that we use that to mobilize the resources that we need to build more homes, and that we get investment out of housing.
The commodification of housing has led to housing being unaffordable for working-class Canadians. We insist that the federal government play a better role in building the number of homes that we need, including non-profit, co-op and below-market housing.
We need an Indigenous housing strategy that’s developed by Indigenous people for both urban and reserve housing. We need supportive housing for people who are unhoused right now that brings in mental health supports and wraparound supportive services.
These are the pieces that, if we did them to scale, we could solve the housing crisis in this country. When I go door knocking anywhere in this country, I don’t hear Canadians say they want to spend five per cent of GDP on defence, but I sure do hear them say that they want us to make sure there’s housing for their neighbours and that people can afford a place to live.
We’ve got a jobs plan that I’m really excited about as well. I was thinking about this when I first decided to run. I’ve always been a big believer in free post-secondary education. It’s something that we should have in Canada and something that is available in several countries around the world.
But I realized that not every young person wants to go to post-secondary education. So we should have a process where young people can have access to grants and funding to go into apprenticeships and be involved in the trades, or buy tools in remote communities.
We’re also looking at the Canada Summer Jobs program — let’s expand that to be a yearlong program. It’s a way that we can stimulate support for small businesses in our communities and help young people get a foot in the door.
Whether it focused on a Climate Corps or the care economy or the trades or the arts, it would be an excellent way to get young people working. We can link that to a mentorship program so that people have support and a pathway to full-time employment.
It’s an exciting time for us to think about what the party should look like going forward.
Tyee: You also mentioned on your Substack you want to see high-speed rail across the country. Tell me more.
HM: How many times have you gone to another country and seen a rail system that actually works? We don’t have that here. I understand that there are parts of the country that have a higher population, and where it’s easier to justify a rail system.
But if we’re looking at nation-building projects, if we’re looking at ways that we can invest in our infrastructure and into our communities, high-speed rail and an electrical grid across the country make so much more sense as investments than a pipeline that has no proponent.
