This guy sounds like a fucking tankie to me. From this article on his blog:

Additionally, Ottawa’s unnecessarily aggressive posture has stoked tensions with Russia. Despite knowing that NATO enlargement eastward and into Ukraine threatened Russia and risked a conflict, Canada promoted it. With 100,000 Russian troops amassed on the border, Canada’s then foreign minister Mélanie Joly went to Kyiv in mid-January 2022 reiterating that “We believe that Ukraine should be able to join NATO.”

Blaming the expansion of NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just parroting Kremlin propaganda. Countries in Eastern Europe want to join NATO due to the extremely justified threat of being attacked by Russia.

In 2014 Canada also backed the ousting of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who sought neutrality and good relations with both Europe and Russia. As Owen Schalk and I detail in Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy, Ottawa played a significant role in destabilizing Yanukovich and pushing him out. At the height of the anti-government Maidan protests, opposition forces, including the far-right C14, used the Canadian Embassy in Kyiv, which was immediately adjacent to Maidan square, as a staging ground for a week in their bid to topple Yanukovych.

It's called the Maidan Revolution, and it was the Ukrainian people exercising their collective power to prevent their country from falling back into Russia's orbit. I would recommend reading about the event from people who actually lived through it: EuroMaidan Revolution.

The coup spurred right wing violence, Russia’s intervention in Crimea and a war that left 14,000 dead in the east.

Calling the illegal invasion and occupation of Crimea "Russia’s intervention in Crimea" tells you everything you need to know about this guy. If he cannot call unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country what it is, then he is not fit to run the NDP or have any role in the Canadian government. Having a Kremlin bootlicker lead the NDP would be a complete embarrassment and would ensure their failure in the next election.

I encourage anyone who's interested to read about these events from the perspective of Ukrainians: The 2014 annexation of Crimea — How Russia stole Ukraine's peninsula

I think most Canadians are more interested in housing and cost of living issues ATM. Sure, cutting back spending on war stuff seems good, but that's not the thing to lead with.

If you want my vote, tell me that he's going to lower the cost of housing, increase the availability of housing, make it easier for my kids to find jobs, make job security more of a thing, and lower the cost of food. What's he gonna do about the gap between rich and poor?

Cutting back on military spending is fine to pay for that, but that isn't going to grab most people's attention.

The 2025 defeat was crushing. The party lost official status, was reduced to seven MPs, saw its support collapse. This creates two possible responses: ****Option A: Incremental adjustments. ****New leader, better messaging, more focus groups, refined advertising. Essentially, keep doing what hasn't worked but try to do it better. Option B: Fundamental transformation. Acknowledge we lost our way, reclaim our radical roots, become something genuinely different. Which candidate supports Option B? It's a clean break with decades of drift, a declaration that everything is on the table, an invitation to reimagine what the party could be. Psychologically, this offers: **Hope: **We're not managing decline but beginning renewal Purpose: Clear mission to build cooperative commonwealth **Identity: **Members know who they are and what they stand for Energy: The excitement of building something new (that's actually old) ***For younger people especially—consigned to "lives of permanent precarity" with "so little faith in the party"—a genuine socialist alternative might inspire engagement that incrementalism never will.

This is a big fight. The only way we can get a chance against the double whammy of neoliberalism making life worse and degraded material conditions fueling neofascism is with a true democratic socialist NDP leadership.

I don't know much about him, but we need a true democratic socialist on the left.