By barring Bianca Mugyenyi, NDP shows it’s not interested in renewal |
Bianca Mugyenyi is an author and activist and former co-executive director of The Leap. She currently directs the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. Photo courtesy Council of Canadians.
On January 19, the unnamed, three-person NDP vetting committee disqualified Bianca Mugyenyi from running for the party’s leadership.
Mugyenyi, they say, is a proxy candidate. She acknowledged that she decided to run after her husband, Yves Engler, was denied entry into the race. The committee argued that this constituted a breach of “honesty, professionalism and integrity” and therefore disqualified her.
Mugyenyi has been clear about her intentions and has not misrepresented why she is running, directly contradicting the vetting committee’s claim that she was dishonest or lacked professionalism and integrity. In a press conference announcing her rejection, she said, “We did exactly what a democratic party asks candidates to do.” She added that the committee rejected her for vague reasons, “including the suggestion that I am not my own candidate.”
If the “democratic” part of the New Democratic Party meant anything at all, the party brass would have recognized they had no real basis to reject her, approved Mugyenyi, and perhaps crossed their fingers that she would lose. Instead, they invented a reason to keep her out of the race.
The Engler-Mugyenyi campaign has exposed the deep democratic rot that plagues the party—and exposing it is treated as a capital crime by the party brass.
This leadership race is about far more than choosing the next leader of the NDP. After the so-called Red Wave allowed the Liberals to cling to power, the party has been effectively dead in the water. The race has become a conduit for members to express their desire to rebuild the party—to renew and transform it.
And yet, the decision to bar Mugyenyi suggests the opposite: this is not a party genuinely interested in renewal. By preventing a candidate from even clearing the vetting stage, the NDP leadership constricts who is allowed........