After its worst election result ever, the NDP needs to relearn a tradition it once knew well: fusing love of country with social democracy

I. The Canadian Left and Nationalism

The 2025 federal election was the worst result in the history of the New Democratic Party, including that of its forebear, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. It was also an election where Canadian nationalism was explicitly on the ballot. In the face of economic war and annexation threats from the unruly second Trump Administration, patriotic sentiment came to the fore during the election campaign to an extent unseen in decades. It is by now well established that this dynamic played a major role in Mark Carney carving out an unlikely fourth consecutive election win for the Liberals. When nationalist concerns formed a chief ballot question, voters fled the NDP. For the duration of the 43rd and 44th parliaments, the NDP had hovered consistently between 17 percent and 20 percent of intended voter support. In the April 2025 election, this cratered to just over 6 percent of the popular vote. Given the key ballot question, it is notable that on the issue of nationalism, Canada’s federal social democratic party was largely absent. In campaign messaging and positioning, this ground was mostly ceded to the default party of the flag, the Liberals. Beyond this, in battleground ridings in Ontario and the West, the failure of the NDP to mount a constructive nationalist vision likely contributed to the bleeding of votes to the Conservatives’ blend of right-wing populist cultural appeals with their brand of nationalist messaging.

Here I wish to make the case that a clear lesson must be learned by the NDP and the broader left in Canada from this historic defeat: to build a broad progressive coalition, the NDP cannot eschew nationalism. There are examples from UK history and even the party's own past about how this fusion can generate a winning formula of social patriotism.

II. The Progressive Dilemma

In the early 1990s, the British academic and former MP David Marquand published The Progressive Dilemma. From his vantage point on the radical intellectual left, Marquand sought to address the persistent failures of the Labour Party both at the ballot box and in office from 1951 onwards. The titular dilemma, for Marquand, was how to build a broad and capacious electoral coalition to house both traditional socialist and union concerns alongside the liberal-left intelligentsia. The former supplied the moral core and organizing muscle of the movement, while the latter brought scholarly heft, a robust propaganda arm in the mainstream media, and a credible governing program. 

In accounting for the failure to build this coalition, the book makes clear the necessity of a party of government—or a natural governing party, a title we in Canada have apparently become mandated to ascribe to the Liberals—to be able to “shape values.” In assessing how Canada’s Liberals have themselves been expert at doing this, the political scientist R. Kenneth Carty has published extensively on the by-now-familiar fusion of Canadian values with achievements or policy preferences of Grit governments, not least the Charter, the flag, bilingualism, multiculturalism, etc. So important is this capacity, says Carty, that a natural governing party must be the natural national party. This means that the party asserts itself as the vehicle for a nation- or state-building mission. Carty argues that the historical dominance of the Liberal party in Canada from Laurier onwards is rooted in its successful implication of itself in the project of Canadian nation-building. This self-identification and, in today’s terms, branding as a party of a genuinely national vocation have been critical to the Liberal Party’s ability to dictate the terms upon which Canada’s national conversation occurs. 

In other words, to return to Marquand, to “shape (the) values” that underlie the political order they have created and maintained. In the UK context, Marquand believed that the glue to hold together a liberal-socialist alliance under the banner of social democracy was a moralistic discourse that spoke to the common heritage of the two traditions. He saw both the liberal intellectual and union socialist tendencies as having roots in communitarianism, decentralism, and participatory radicalism. To speak to both variations of this value set at once, according to Marquand, was Labour’s repeated failure. In particular, it repeatedly stumbled when confronted with the need to give voice to the idea of “common citizenship” that ought to be at the heart of the social democratic project.  Marquand believed that both liberal intellectuals and union socialists could be swept up into a language of “fraternal solidarity” and “communal loyalty.” 

It is my contention here that the most rousing and romantic but also the most politically expedient means to craft a discourse of morally charged common citizenship bound by fraternity and loyalty is a fusion of Canadian nationalism with a capacious social democracy that can build bridges across the two core constituencies identified by Marquand.

III. The Leftist Case against Nationalism

Although there is a storied tradition across the globe of marrying nationalism with socialist and social democratic politics, for Canada’s contemporary left, a certain orthodoxy on the gaucheness of nationalism (pardon the pun) reigns supreme. In essence, many leftists take the view that nationalism is something fundamentally and intractably chauvinistic. In this reading, it is tethered to, at best, conservative ideas about organic hierarchical communities defined by indefensible traditions and, at worst, explicitly exclusionary racist and nativist blood-and-soil understandings of national belonging. A certain kind of vulgar orthodox Marxism also plays a role in crafting this negative perception of nationalism. This position holds that nationalism is one of the opiates imposed upon the working masses by the ruling class as part of the effort to maintain false consciousness. Alongside racism and sexism, the inculcation of tribal national affiliation (and hatreds) becomes a central means to prevent a mass revolt of the international proletariat against the forces of capital. Nationalism, then, is situated in the wider superstructure of ideas that the ruling class uses to divide and rule under a capitalist system for which there is no alternative. The antidote, from this leftist perspective, is international solidarity among all working peoples and the fundamental rejection of any form of prejudice or discrimination on the basis of invented national borders or differences. But solidarity with working people beyond one's borders need not preclude or eliminate a politics of national pride and purpose. Indeed, I argue that nationalism can be used to overcome a persistent problem in leftist electoral coalition-building.

IV. Canadian Nationalism

To begin with, however, the major problem with the position referenced above is that it is profoundly unpersuasive and unpopular. National identity and affiliation—socially constructed as it may be—remain a source of profoundly meaningful identity for the vast majority of Canadians. In the spring of 2025, 78 percent of Canadians reported being proud or very proud of their national identity. Even Quebec, with its own powerful nationalist tradition that expresses itself in opposition to Canadian identity for some of its adherents, showed 72 percent of respondents to the poll expressing pride in Canada.

In his 2024 book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of National Identity, Raymond Blake of the University of Regina expertly parsed the nationalist rhetoric of the country’s postwar leaders. Although there is, of course, notable variance across the particular historical moments and guiding ideologies of the different PMs, Blake nonetheless found “several recurring principal themes” across their rhetoric. From King to Harper, major attention was paid by all to questions of “national unity” and “social citizenship.” This is exactly the blend that I am advocating for the NDP to adopt in the current context.

For Blake, PMs from Tory to Liberal have presented Canada as a “modern, progressive liberal state—even a unique one—that embraces the values of caring and sharing, equity, and fairness for all, a strong commitment to inclusion coupled with a deep respect for differences, and a fundamental belief in universal rights and freedoms.” 

What Blake shows is a bipartisan tradition of Canadian national identity built across eight decades that is firmly coded along the progressive sector of the ideological spectrum. From the partisan perspective of the left, it is imperative that the Liberal party of Canada, in particular, not be allowed to grab hold of this terrain without significant contestation from the New Democrats.

Blending social democratic ideology and nationalism is in no way fraught and conflicting: At the provincial level, since its foundation in 1968, the Parti Québécois has intermittently pursued what David McGrane called a seamless merger of the two concerns. In his survey of social democracy in Saskatchewan and Quebec, Remaining Loyal, McGrane makes the point that in both provinces, social democracy found a fruitful ally in regionalist grievances. In Quebec, long-standing nationalist concerns found that the statism of the social democratic ideology offered a vehicle for their emancipatory project of self-determination. In Saskatchewan, feelings of Western Alienation were turbocharged by the economic immiseration of the great depression. And so, in its advocacy for social democracy, Tommy Douglas's CCF did not shy away from putting the boot into the financial, industrial, and political establishment of central Canada. 

Both of these case studies show how social democratic ideology can logically and easily be moulded around a nationalist (or, ceteris paribus, a sub-national regionalism that functions in a similar fashion) cause.

V. A Model of Leftist Nationalism: The Social Patriotism of Clement Attlee

Clement Attlee’s Labour government in the United Kingdom from 1945-1951 achieved some of the most stunning social democratic policy successes of any country of the era. None other than the seminal historian of the British premiership, Sir Anthony Seldon, ranked Attlee as the most successful and impactful non-wartime Prime Minister, crediting his government with “the biggest one-ministry social revolution in British history.” This glowing review primarily derives from the Attlee government’s successful entrenchment of a robust and resilient welfare state. This included the establishment of the National Health Service, the passing of the National Insurance and Children Acts, and the nationalization of major infrastructure and resource sectors. In short, a laundry list of moonshot goals of the socialist movement was delivered and embedded with widespread public approval in one term.

According to John Bew’s biography of Attlee, entitled Citizen Clem, nationalism was a critical ingredient in generating the capacity of his government’s success in achieving such generational changes to Britain’s political and social structure. Bew describes Attlee as someone who was unwaveringly hostile to blood-and-soil nationalism, something that fueled the futile and brutal conflict of World War I in which he served. He was, nonetheless, a deeply committed patriot who was wedded to a certain set of British values, a particular blend of radicalism tempered by bourgeois sentiment. In other words, precisely the kind of big-tent, coalition-building frame that Marquand saw as necessary to bring together the union left and liberal intellectuals. Attlee’s blend included public-spiritedness, the duty to serve, and a belief that “love of country could be a noble and unifying theme.” Edwardian progressivism fused with Victorian moralism and the stout work ethic to match: This, to Attlee, was what made Britain cohere. And so, his striving for a more just and equal Britain came from a foundational faith in the coherence of the blending of the nationalism of the common Briton with the lofty constitutional and societal ideals of his fellow socialists in the Labour ranks. Bew calls this Attlee’s “social patriotism”—socialism pursued because of love of the country, in line with the aspirations and identity of ordinary working people.

Bew argues that Attlee’s ethical and political code rested on “the idea that the commonweal was the first goal of government.” This connected to an appreciation of citizenship—understood as “an interchange of rights and duties and responsibilities”—as the glue that kept societies together. In keeping with Marquand’s hypothesis regarding the progressive dilemma, Attlee used nationalism as the means through which to bring this glue into ordinary people’s lives. Bew makes the case that “above all, it was a sense of patriotism that underpinned Attlee’s socialism.” To put a fine point on it: Attlee was a socialist because he was a patriot, rather than being a patriot despite being a socialist. In Bew’s account, this produced an “unobtrusive progressive patriotism”, in the sense that there was a pragmatic compromise not to purge the establishment or overturn the foundations of British identity even whilst building a sort of radical new contract between the state and its citizens.

VI. Canadian Social Patriotism

There is pedigree for the kind of social patriotism referenced above in the Canadian context. In prior eras, notwithstanding commitments to international solidarity, the CCF and NDP were comfortable and confident in espousing a Canadian nationalism that dovetailed with social democratic ideology tailored to Canada’s specific conditions and concerns.

In 1961, longtime CCF MP Stanley Knowles published The New Party. In it, he documented the progress made to date in developing what would become the NDP from the ashes of a disastrous 1958 federal election result for the CCF. His manifesto for the new party contains several distinct notes of social patriotism in line with what has been discussed here. 

The opening paragraphs outline the value and importance that Canadians place in the parliamentary system as the country’s primary democratic vehicle. Leftists are often divided on the value of parliamentary democracy. For example, the influential British Marxist Ralph Miliband published the seminal Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, which excoriated the British Labour Party for pursuing primarily parliamentary means of achieving social democratic change. In The New Party, however, Knowles offers a Canadian perspective that tethers “the political institutions we have inherited” to the country’s national identity. This kind of proud institutionalism is an important facet of Canadian social patriotism. 

Knowles argues that “Canadians hold fast not only to their belief in democracy, but to the conviction that through the workings of our parliamentary system we can build a society that will preserve freedom, achieve a high level of economic development, establish security, and provide for the educational, social, and cultural development of our people.”

For Knowles, Canadian nationalism is intimately connected to the country’s relationship to and self-identification vis-à-vis the United States. He is clear-eyed in recognizing that “Canada is a North American country”, even going so far as to list several shared sporting, cultural, and historic touchstones across the continent. “We accept all of this”, he says, “yet (…) we possess no more abiding characteristic than our desire as Canadians, both English-speaking and French-speaking, to remain a distinct nation and a distinct people.”

As we will also see in an analysis of the Canadian social patriotism of Tommy Douglas below, Knowles also takes aim at Liberal and Tory politicians who bask in anti-American rhetoric merely for the short-term sugar high of the applause it generates. “A legitimate and desirable Canadian nationalism has”, in his estimation, “been exploited by political and other leaders who offer nothing but shallow and unrealistic claptrap.” Knowles seeks to disaggregate “a healthy Canadian nationalism” from mere anti-Americanism alone, arguing that this is “not a sufficient creed for the people of this country.” Instead, what Knowles proposes is the investment of social democratic purpose and meaning into the symbols of Canadian nationalism. “We will establish a Canadian identity, only as we do a job in the social and economic field (…) Our nationhood will be real, and the symbols of that nationhood (…) will have meaning because of what is behind them.” This is the essence of social patriotism.

In surveying the manifestos of the NDP from 1962-1988 as well as a particularly representative speech from the party’s most famous and influential leader, Tommy Douglas, several over-arching themes related to a Canadian social patriotism can be identified. 

The first is the presentation of Canadian values as being in league with the project of social democracy. Canada, in this articulation, embodies a distinctive moral, social, and political ethos, the tenets of which are egalitarianism, cooperation, and the representative traditions of parliamentary democracy. This chimes with the themes of national identity that Blake identified in his survey of the nationalist rhetoric of postwar PMs. 

The next is a left-leaning form of anti-Americanism, which I have argued here and here to be a sine qua non for Canadian national identity. Canadian social patriotism must rest on a negative contrast with the United States, especially its buccaneering capitalism, unmoored individualism and materialism, and the prominence it affords corporations in public and political life. 

Cultural and economic sovereignty are the next key pillars. These entail assertions of the necessity for Canada to preserve autonomy from US cultural influence, capital penetration, and political pressure. 

Lastly, there is the linking of Canada’s national vocation to social democratic goals such as social programs and public services, redistribution of wealth, nationalization of key industries and public ownership. As with all versions of Canadian nationalism, a persistent concern for national unity and the fragility of Confederation is threaded through these key pillars of the ideology.

To offer but a few examples of what this discourse looks like in practice, discursive excerpts from NDP manifestos from 1962-1988 that articulate pride in the heritage and institutions of Canada have been collected. The party's founding platform from 1962 contains a policy to adopt a "distinctive Canadian flag and anthem" in order "to give expression to Canadian nationhood." This demonstrates an appreciation for Canada's need to have its own set of symbols to provide a means toward the expression of patriotic nationhood, uniting different constituencies under one banner. 

A year later, the manifesto for the 1963 election proclaimed that "Canada was created and strengthened by a voluntary and renewing act of will on the part of both our founding races and of all those who have shared with them in building this country." The language of an act of will is notable as it demonstrates a distinctively left-wing version of nationalism: the nation is voluntarily built and renewed by the deliberate thought and deeds of its people, rather than it being an eternal or even primordial entity divined beyond political agency. 

In the context of continuing economic hardship and an impending sovereignty referendum in Quebec, the 1980 NDP election platform tied its economic nationalist message to a faith in Canada as "a land rich in the strength of its people and vast natural resources." 

Such emotional notes were further amplified in the 1988 federal election campaign, which was almost a proxy referendum on Mulroney's proposed free trade agreement with the United States. As the party was on the anti-free trade side of this debate, the NDP campaign manifesto contains several strident messages of social patriotism. The free trade agreement is cast as undermining Canadian sovereignty and even a threat to "the very future of our country." These are classic expressions of Canadian economic nationalism in contradistinction to the United States. In sentiments so simple they would be redundant to point out if they weren't hard to come by in the contemporary era, the document proclaims that "Canadians look at Canada with confidence and pride. We are proud of our unique achievements of the past and we look forward with confidence to the challenges of the future." The achievements of the past are identified elsewhere in the document as the social democratic pillars of the Canadian welfare state. In the cultural nationalist mode, the 1980 manifesto further makes it clear that "New Democrats are proud of the unique cultural and linguistic character of Canada and the distinct society of Quebec. We are proud of the past achievements of our peoples."

This brief sampling of social patriotism from NDP manifestos of the past indicates that there is a direct channel for the party's continued commitment to social democratic ideology to be expressed in terms favourable to a pride in Canada's people and achievements.

VII. The Social Patriotism of Tommy Douglas

On April 21, 1971, Tommy Douglas delivered an address entitled “Canada, 1971: Danger from Within, Danger from Without” to the NDP national convention in Ottawa. Douglas was a famous orator. As recounted in Vincent Lam's biography, Douglas learned to structure and formulate a great speech at Brandon College in the 1920s under the tutelage of Professor John R.C. Evans. His formula was simple but effective: identify and ask the correct questions, offer concise analysis of a problem relevant to the lives of one's audience, and synthesize key perspectives in delivering the critical takeaway message. Following this formula, the 1971 speech contains a masterful synthesis and expression of the critical elements of a Canadian-inflected social patriotic message. Douglas finds Canada at a moment of particular vulnerability: The threat of separatism in Quebec was palpable in the wake of the October Crisis. A weakening Canadian economy with growing levels of capital penetration from the United States summoned a fresh wave of the age-old fear of economic absorption by the superpower next door. In response to these threats from within and without, respectively, Douglas's message is one of national unity through economic and cultural sovereignty, delivered by democratic socialist means.

Douglas signals an awareness of the often-pejorative way in which leftist audiences perceive a message of patriotism by cautioning that his over-arching message is “not based on any cheap jingoism or phoney nationalism.” We might take his meaning here to be that indulging in a patriotic register is possible without slipping into blood-and-soil ethnonationalism or triumphant chauvinism. Nonetheless, Douglas is strident in expressing a nationalist vision for a Canada that respects and uplifts the traditions of both English Canada and Quebec. Without shying away from cultural and linguistic differences, he identifies the "desire to build a society free from social injustice and economic exploitation" as a "common goal" across these two expressions of Canada. "Together," he continues, "we can build a great country." Douglas's vision for how to do so contains twin cultural and economic nationalist messages. 

In a quintessential expression of Canadian cultural nationalism rooted in concern for the potentially harmful effects of American influence, Douglas says that "no country can have a sense of national identity unless it knows and appreciates its own culture and the value system with which it is associated." This offers a concise example of the social patriotic goal of fusing social democratic ideas to the achievements and goals of Canada, in line with Canadian values. Here, Douglas does not shy away from the responsibility to explicitly speak to and even "shape values" that Marquand identified as vital for a leftist party seeking to surmount the progressive dilemma. 

In terms of the national unity question, I suspect that in making such a conflation, Douglas was also seeking to reach the social democratic wing of the Parti Québécois, which had just contested its first election the prior year. Douglas makes it clear that both "national identity" and "national purpose" are needed, with the former offering fuel to the latter. Economic independence from the United States and the political capacity to pilot a distinctly Canadian policy direction are, per Douglas, what can make these possible. National unity, however, is a paramount concern: "A united Canada is the best guarantee against our absorption from without.”

On the matter of cultural nationalism, Douglas notes the risk to Canadian identity that comes when "more and more our people are exposed to American magazines, movies, TV shows and school textbooks.” Far from ambivalence with regard to the value or utility of cultural products from one jurisdiction or another, here Douglas is confident in asserting that the distinctly Canadian perspective must be protected and promoted if we are to remain ourselves both internally and in the form of our political association. It is notable that he speaks positively about the parliamentary system and the institutions of Canada as conducive to achieving harmony across the French-English cultural divide and delivering a social democratic future. He further declares that the blend of culture and political institutions possessed by Canada already proves a means through which Canadians can further their distinct vision: “We are convinced that with the English and French cultures, and with our free institutions and our parliamentary system, we can build a way of life that is peculiarly our own.”

VIII. Conclusion

Douglas's social patriotism expresses pride in the political and cultural institutions of Canada, pride in the country's people and achievements to date, and mobilizes a rhetoric that would be apt in the present moment. 

Pride in Canada necessarily involves a hard look at the country’s history and can provide the energy and motivation to right the wrongs of the past. The hard and vital work of reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people is worthwhile because we love Canada and want to continue to make it the best country it can be. Wallowing in the mire of past shame saps the energy to build a better today and tomorrow. Reconciliation is a crucial part of the project of social patriotism. 

As the example of Clement Attlee's Labour government in the UK shows, when deployed in a time of crisis, this kind of fusion of socialism and patriotism can be used to build a broad electoral and governing coalition to achieve and embed transformational economic and cultural structural changes.

The failure of the NDP to craft coherent and persuasive nationalist messaging during the Trump-dominated 2025 election was a catastrophic error. Only the most Panglossian among us believe that Canada's relationship with the United States will return to the status quo ante anytime soon, even post-Trump. Canada's patriotic awakening is thus unlikely to wane, either. And so, it is high time for this renewed sense of national identity and purpose to merge with social democratic values and policies. 

A badly defeated NDP cannot expect meaningful renewal to come so long as it acts ignorant of or even defiant toward the growing popular spirit of Canadian national renewal. Attlee understood that righteous British patriotism forged in the Blitz could be an engine for both Labour’s electoral victory and a license to pursue a radical policy agenda. The NDP is in much, much worse shape as it seeks to regroup from a historic low ebb. Yet the same principle of social patriotism as the antidote to the progressive dilemma in a time of stirred nationalist sentiment transfers across time and jurisdiction.

Ceding the ground to the Liberal Party on the issue of nationalism has always been an unnecessary own goal for the NDP. As George Grant wrote in the foreword to a 1977 book called The Liberal Idea of Canada by James and Robert Laxer, Canadian liberalism and nationalism are not natural bedfellows. Grant decried the Liberal Party as “the chief political instrument of continental integration”, a process that could only contribute to eroding Canada’s distinct identity over time. He further noted that then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, despite being held up as a champion of Canadian nationalism, “always scorned nationalism as a retrograde force. This has been basic to his political ideology, and necessarily so, because the capitalist politics of cybernetics which he admires so must inevitably work against national identity.” In this context, Grant uses the term “cybernetics” in a way broadly similar to how we would use technocracy today: the idea being that both society and government are best understood as machines to be wielded and controlled by those most technically equipped to do so. 

For Grant, this is fundamentally connected to modern liberalism and its claim to dilute and dissolve “ideology in the name of cybernetics as rationality.” This is an intractably continentalist and internationalist agenda that is “itself a powerful ideology and one that speaks against the survival of nation states such as Canada.” 

I argue that the contemporary manifestation of what Grant is referencing here is found in the Californian ideology on steroids of the Silicon Valley AI-boosters. Opposing this tech-determinist vision of further continental integration on Silicon Valley’s terms is the frontier of Canadian nationalism in the latter half of the 2020s. A social patriotism rooted in distinctly Canadian humanist values can offer an excellent ideological and nationalist contrast with the contradictions of technocracy and continentalism of the Liberal party.

In practical terms, what I am advocating here is that the more strident and confident socialism of the NDP under Avi Lewis be framed as warranted, justified, and necessary because this approach is in line with Canadian values. The party should situate its arguments for leftist policies in a historical consciousness of the trials and successes of working people and their advocates in this country’s past. Canadian leftists are often hopelessly presentist, sometimes to the point of being poorly informed as to the heritage and pedigree of their movement. Dave McGrane’s “Social Democrats of the North” podcast series through the Broadbent Institute provides an excellent, accessible overview of the diverse cohort that took on the struggle for greater equality and fairness in this country’s past. Rhetorically recentring this history as a point of nationalist pride can add additional levels of persuasiveness to contemporary arguments for taxing the rich, an ambitious infrastructure agenda, achieving digital sovereignty, treating housing as shelter rather than as a speculative asset, self-sufficiency in national defence, and a tougher economic nationalist stance on CUSMA.

Back in 1961, Stanley Knowles wrote in The New Party that “Canadians in all walks of life are looking for a positive way to affirm our national identity. They are at the same time looking for a movement that will give leadership in terms of translating the highest social ideals into the practical politics of this country.” It remains so today in our environment of heightened patriotic sentiment and trade war with the Trump Administration. No longer can the NDP divorce the social democratic mission from the deep and broad desire across Canada for national affirmation. It is time to reconnect with the party’s lost tradition of social patriotism. 

This article was made possible by research conducted by Ryan Mohtajofazl and Esmettin Gokce-Dray during their graduate studies in Political Science at Concordia University.

SOURCES

Books

Bew, John. 2016. Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee. London: Riverrun.

Blake, Raymond B. 2024. Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of National Identity. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press / Vancouver: UBC Press.

Carty, R. Kenneth. 2015. Big Tent Politics: The Liberal Party's Long Mastery of Canada's Public Life. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Grant, George. 1977. Foreword to The Liberal Idea of Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Question of Canada's Survival, by James Laxer and Robert Laxer, 9–12. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company.

Knowles, Stanley. 1961. The New Party. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Lam, Vincent. 2011. Tommy Douglas. Extra Extraordinary Canadians Series. Toronto: Penguin Canada.

Marquand, David. 1991. The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Kinnock. London: William Heinemann.

McGrane, David. 2014. Remaining Loyal: Social Democracy in Quebec and Saskatchewan. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Speeches and Addresses

Douglas, Tommy. 1971. “Canada, 1971: Danger from Within, Danger from Without.” Address delivered at the New Democratic Party National Convention, Ottawa, ON, April 21, in Lovick, L. D., ed. 1979. Tommy Douglas Speaks. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books.

Political Party Platforms, Manifestos, and Historical Documents

New Democratic Party. 1962. Founding Platform of the New Democratic Party. Ottawa: New Democratic Party.

New Democratic Party. 1963. Federal Election Manifesto. Ottawa: New Democratic Party.

New Democratic Party. 1980. Federal Election Platform. Ottawa: New Democratic Party.

New Democratic Party. 1988. Federal Election Campaign Manifesto. Ottawa: New Democratic Party.

All accessed via "Electronic Manifestos Canada." n.d. Poltext. Centre d'analyse des politiques publiques, Université Laval. 

https://www.poltext.org/en/part-1-electronic-political-texts/electronic-manifestos-canada.

Dónal Gill is tenured faculty in the Political Science department at Dawson College and part-time faculty at Concordia University, where he teaches Canadian politics. Dónal regularly contributes political analysis in the Quebec media and has been published in The Walrus, Maclean's, The Dial, Canadian Dimension, and the Montreal Gazette. He wrote the chapter on Canada-US relations in the recently published book How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump.