Introduction:

During the August long weekend, a Canadian politician sat in a Smitty’s diner, recording a selfie video. He talked about a waitress he met who worked at least sixty hours a week but still finds that her money “vanishes into thin air.” This, he noted, is “what I see everywhere. People telling me that they’re working harder and harder, and their money just evaporates.”

It sounds like something the leader of the New Democratic Party might say. The story is about ordinary Canadians stretched thin. It’s a story of the working class. But no, the kitchen-table parable was delivered by Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader. Canada, Poilievre said in the video, should be a country “where hard work pays off.”

Just over a month later, former journalist and left-wing activist Avi Lewis released his own YouTube video, a hype trailer for his bid to lead the federal NDP—a race to replace former leader Jagmeet Singh that will culminate in a vote at the party’s conference in March. (Lewis’s grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founders of the party.) Canadians, he said, are living “an everyday emergency of just trying to get by in an impossible economy,” and he lamented that “working hard doesn’t earn you a living.”

You see the problem for the NDP. At a time when the rent is devouring paycheques, wealth is pooling at the top, and economic nationalism is resurgent, right wingers are beginning to sound like Canada’s leading social democratic party. A closer listen reveals important differences in the solutions they propose—more on that later—but the topline narrative is the same.

You’d be forgiven for assuming this is strictly about branding. It’s not. What the NDP is up against is much more structural, more deeply cultural. The real challenge isn’t just the language it uses; it’s semantics. The shared understanding of what words mean has shifted dramatically under the party’s feet. This fundamental change, driven by a new kind of political and ideological identity, has left the NDP struggling not just to communicate but to understand its mission as a social democratic party.

Now, with just a handful of seats left in the House of Commons and a leadership race underway, the NDP finds itself at a critical juncture. It can reclaim its mission by giving new meaning to its message, or it can keep misunderstanding the cultural landscape and fade into nothingness. Evolve—or die.