CANADA’S NDP AND THE LESSON FOR MALTA SPIRALING DOWN THE SAME PATH
By Maltese Canadian
Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP), which suffered its worst result in history in last year’s general election, plummeting to just 6.3 per cent of the national popular vote, thereby losing official party status for the first time since 1993, gathered in Winnipeg this weekend in search of renewal. What delegates found instead was a fresh helping of self-inflicted ridicule.
At the leadership convention held at the Manitoba Convention Centre from 27 to 29 March 2026, participants were issued coloured “equity cards” — https://youtu.be/U4tNLgn3sKY?si=yfj-nsRPpw60d_5x&t=31 — designed to prioritise speaking order according to identity categories. Pink for race, green for gender, yellow for LGBTQ+ status, with bonus points seemingly awarded for Indigenous ancestry or disability. The noble intention was to amplify “marginalised voices.” The result was more akin to a game of competitive grievance, with grown adults waving laminated rectangles in the air and bickering over whose laminated suffering granted them line-cutting privileges.
Video footage that spread rapidly across social media captured the spectacle in all its glory. One clip showed a delegate brandishing a green “gender equity” card, insisting she had been next in line, only to be countered by a woman with a pink “race equity” card declaring that her own card had been “used inappropriately” and that, in any case, cards belonging to Black women “have no value outside of this space.” The non-binary chair, visibly perspiring, attempted to referee the row while explaining the fixed rotation rules. It did not go well. Elsewhere, a trans delegate sporting a keffiyeh earned a sharp rebuke from the non-binary chair after addressing them as “ma’am”; the correction came with a stern lecture on pronouns and the violence that misgendering can supposedly unleash.
The convention had gathered to elect a new leader following the electoral debacle. Avi Lewis, an antisemite, duly won on the first ballot with 56 per cent of the vote. Yet when Mr Lewis took centre stage for his victory speech, the only flag prominently visible was a large Palestinian one being waved enthusiastically behind him; there was no Canadian flag in sight on the stage. Reminds me of the last gay parade in Valletta as described by Charlie Zammit in this blog. By Sunday morning the story dominating the airwaves was not Mr Lewis’s address but the spectacle of grown adults squabbling over whose intersectional suffering entitled them to the microphone first. Social media, never slow to spot comedy gold, christened the proceedings the “Oppression Olympics” and a “clown show.” One widely shared post simply read: “Canada is cooked.”
Party officials insisted the cards were a long-standing internal tool to ensure equitable representation. Delegates who had hoped to discuss inflation, housing or health care found themselves instead watching colleagues explain why their particular laminated rectangle outranked everyone else’s. Even some within the NDP were unimpressed. One frustrated attendee was filmed muttering that the exercise had become “more interested in why they were holding the cards than in what they were saying with them.”
Malta, with its colourful parades that have featured Palestinian flags fluttering alongside the rainbow, might usefully seek inspiration from the NDP’s masterclass in blending identity pageantry with foreign causes. Outside the convention centre, the rest of Canada went about its business: paying mortgages, waiting for doctors, and wondering how a party once associated with prairie populism and steelworkers had arrived at laminated victimhood poker. Inside, the NDP appeared cheerfully oblivious. As one wag on X put it, “They came for the leadership race. They stayed for the hierarchy of suffering.”
By the time the final gavel fell, the equity cards and the flag choices had achieved the one thing no policy resolution could: they had made Canada’s gay politics undeniably hilarious. At least in Malta, the gay lobby has realized that its program is not worthy of a new political party. Instead, the program has wormed itself into the established parties.