Jacobin spoke with Rob Ashton, a candidate for the leadership of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP), about where the party — and the country’s politics more broadly — have gone wrong, and what he plans to do about it.

A veteran longshoreman, Rob Ashton is president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada, where he already presses elbows with power. But the kind of political competence he wields is qualitatively different from the polished insider class that dominates Parliament.

The Canadian legislature is disproportionately drawn from the backgrounds of law, business, and bureaucratic management — professions deeply embedded in the country’s elite strata. A Statistics Canada profile of legislators shows that the House of Commons looks less like the country and more like a boardroom. In this rarefied air, Ashton would be an outlier: someone who has spent decades on the docks and in union halls, listening to workers’ daily struggles.