The Red Review | Issue #32 (May 2026)

A Socialist Action Journal

NDP Turns Slightly Left

By Barry Weisleder

A split on the upper deck of the New Democratic Party bureaucracy led to a win for film-maker Avi Lewis over MP Heather McPherson. Lewis captured the leadership on the first ballot with 56 per cent of the 70,934 votes cast. The emergent new majority testified to the weakness of the party establishment – the officials chiefly responsible for the electoral disaster in April 2025. The federal tally reduced the NDP to 7 seats (now 6, soon to be 5). With the loss of party status in Parliament, the NDP was instantly deprived of scores of paid staff positions and state subsidies. The party remains saddled with a $13 million debt. Under these conditions, the left social democratic forces of Lewis also captured the top three positions on the party’s federal executive: President, Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer. No longer impeded by the erstwhile powerful right wing, Lewis will have few excuses to fail to advance his campaign promises.

After the NDP Convention - Prospects for Socialists

By Gary Porter

On April 28, 2025, the federal election results signaled a sharp defeat for the labour-based, but pro-capitalist New Democratic Party. After two years-plus in a class collaborationist “supply and confidence” pact with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, the party had won a privately operated, very limited, income-tested dental program, and subsidized birth control and insulin medications. In exchange, the 24 NDP members of Parliament voted to support Trudeau’s budgets, which included major increases in military spending, huge subsidies for oil and gas billionaires, Trudeau’s strike breaking measures, and more. Faced with polls showing Pollievre’s anti-labour Conservatives in the lead as the election campaign commenced, and an NDP offering no working-class agenda, many workers, including traditional NDP supporters, plumped for Trudeau as a “lesser evil”.

The Story of Ginger Goodwin, a Martyr of Canadian Labour

By Gary Porter

Albert Edgar Goodwin was born on May 10, 1887, in the small mining village of Treeton in Yorkshire, England. He was the son of a coal miner, and his future was etched in stone from the start. The life of a miner in late 19th-century England was one of brutal hardship, defined by long hours, constant danger, and meager pay. At the tender age of 12, Albert followed his father into the pits, his formal education cut short by the family’s economic necessity. Another version of his story says he started in the mines at 15 because his parents wanted him to learn to read and write. It was in these dark, cramped tunnels that he earned his nickname, “Ginger,” a moniker derived from his fiery red hair and, as those who knew him would later attest, an equally fiery temperament.

CUPW Leadership at a Cross Road

By Kiri Vadivelu

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) leadership is sending mixed signals on the tentative agreement with Canada Post. A minority of the National Executive Board (NEB) urges members to vote “No” on a deal reached in December 2025. The NEB majority believes the time to fight for a better deal is over. The high stakes vote is scheduled to occur between April 20 and May 30, 2026 where members are expected to vote on the tentative agreement -- and simultaneously vote on whether to grant a new strike mandate if the deal is rejected. Key aspects of the CUPW split arises from conflicting strategies and unresolved working conditions in the agreement. CUPW President Jan Simpson and four other NEB members are encouraging a “No” vote, arguing that the deal does not resolve key issues, despite protecting some rights.

Reflections on European Jewry’s Trek from Socialism to Fascism – and Back?

By Hans Modlich

Avi Lewis’ sweeping first ballot victory in the NDP leadership race has put socialism squarely back on Canada’s political agenda. His anti-Zionist slate swept all the key executive posts in the party. He recalled his great grandfather as being a Bundist, as were the majority of Eastern European Jewry at the birth of the 20^th century. The Jewish Labor Bund was secular, socialist, and profoundly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live”. Molly Crabapple’s just released book “Here Where We Live Is Our Country” chronicles the lives of the Bundist internationalist and socialist leaders and their heroic resistance from Czarist times to the Warsaw ghetto’s worst depravities - a time when the world’s elites were just as indifferent to the genocide of Jews as they are today to the Palestinian holocaust.

DRIPA’s Deadlock. ‘We Will Not Back Down’

By Andrew MacLeod

First Nations leaders are condemning Premier David Eby’s plan to suspend parts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA, as a step backward that will increase uncertainty for all British Columbians and create political problems for the NDP. “To say we are frustrated or angry would be an understatement,” said Robert Phillips, First Nations Summit leader, at a Friday news conference. “This is a historical moment for First Nations and we will not back down.”Eby has said suspending sections of DRIPA before the legislature breaks for the summer is necessary because of litigation risks the province faces. Huy’wu’qw Shana Thomas, Lyackson Hereditary Chief and a member of the First Nations Summit Task Group, accused the premier of fearmongering and making unilateral decisions.

Socialist Action’s May Day Statement on Defeating U.S. Imperialism’s Wars

By Socialist Action USA

The world’s people in the main declared US President Donald Trump a war criminal when he announced on April 7, 2026 that, “The whole [Iranian] civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Trump’s threat of yet another US genocide, this time against the Iranian nation of 90 million, follows the Biden administration-Zionist Israel’s genocidal slaughter of 70,000 Palestinians two years ago. That horror is ongoing. That the US imperialist beast, whose annual military and CIA-plus “national security-” related expenditures, at nearly $3 trillion, exceed the world’s combined total, has already destroyed over the past 40 days much of Iran’s industrial, economic, energy and above ground military infrastructure.

The Socialist Character of Our Revolution is Not a Phrase from the Past; It is the Shield of the Present and the Guarantee of the Future!

By Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez

Sixty-five years ago, women and men who were as young or younger than all of us filling these streets today—possibly many grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, or fathers of some of us—gathered here to write a truly epic chapter in contemporary world history. That day changed history, and not just for Cuba. With an invasion on the verge of our shores, with no certainty yet as to where they would land, but aware that behind the invaders stood the full backing of the powerful United States government, the voice of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, nearly broken by the strain of hours of sleeplessness and tension, rose above the crowd overflowing this historic corner to declare that we were what we continue to be: a socialist revolution right under the empire’s nose!