ob Ashton feels like the campaign just started yesterday.
“It’s a lot of work. I haven’t felt this energized in a very long time. I’ve loved every moment of this… The best part is being able to get out there and meet new people, but it’s also been tough, or tough and rewarding, because I get to go meet my fellow Canadians, but I also hear their stories — and some of their stories, man, I’m telling you, some of their stories are just gut wrenching. And then you listen to their stories, and there’s nothing you can say that’ll help them. And so, you just keep on going.”
When he announced his campaign in October 2025, Rob Ashton was a dark horse in the NDP leadership race. His background as a strong union voice, the national president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Canada, has placed him as a top contender in the contest for the soul of the New Democratic Party, alongside progressive journalist Avi Lewis and Member of Parliament Heather McPherson.
While the remaining two candidates, Tanille Johnston and Tony McQuail, have had to use creative tag-teaming to vault over the $100,000 in donations required by party HQ, the Ashton campaign cleared $231,095 by the end of December, a number which is well short of Lewis’ $778,869 and McPherson’s $415,490, but more than double the necessary threshold.
He admits that the fundraising is also something that takes him out of his comfort zone. “In the beginning for me, you can ask any of my team members. I was horrible at asking people for money, because I know people’s financial strains, constraints…I know people are struggling to make mortgage payments or rent payments or food or medicine. But we have to do it, and we’ll continue to have to do it.”
Ashton’s team comes from the labour movement rather than the NDP headquarters. His campaign manager is Dave Hare, a principal at Alopex Insights whose last listed role with the NDP was in 2018. Another key Ashton organizer is Orion Irvine, a director at the Canadian Labour Congress — and there are a number of other CLC organizers on the staff. Running over the list of team members, I saw student union leaders and grassroots organizers — and far fewer party functionaries or media-savvy types whose careers live and die by the electoral cycle.
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We held our interview at the United Steelworkers legislative office. The USW, North America’s largest private sector union, is also Ashton’s biggest endorsement to date and the clearest external signal boosting his working-class credentials. But it didn’t take long in my conversations with Ashton to recognize that that wasn’t just a brand — the authenticity came from somewhere deeper.
Mere months after graduating from Burnaby North Secondary School in the spring of 1994, Rob Ashton was woken up by his father, himself a longshoreman and an ILWU local vice-president, and taken to the union hall to wait for a lottery draw to decide if he would get to work on the docks. That draw ran for 11 years of work before he first got his union membership. Just one year later, he was nudged by his new brothers to run — first for the local executive, then for business agent, vice president, and finally, for president of the ILWU.
Every step along that journey Ashton described as a tap on the shoulder, as being called to serve by people who saw something in him. He mentions how he was in the room when Jagmeet Singh resigned, how he first laughed it off when asked if he was interested in running.
Eventually, the next tap was from a machinist on Vancouver Island who invited him for a coffee, who told him not to say yes or no, but just to think about it. The next thing the machinist sent him was my 56-person-long NDP March Madness bracket, which featured Rob Ashton as a heavy underdog 12th-seed compared to Heather McPherson’s 1st and Avi Lewis’ 2nd.
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Rob Ashton sat across from me in a light salmon-coloured dress shirt that displayed his left-arm tattoo sleeve and hinted at additional tattoos on his chest. He joked that one of the two ways the campaign had changed him was that he had to use the top button — the other was that they had been encouraging him to swear less.
Those weren’t the only changes I noticed. His team has also steered him away from spending a large chunk of the campaign in Quebec, as he originally planned to do to bolster his French. Nonetheless, it was remarkable that, apart from the occasional bit of message control to restate “If I become leader” as “When I become leader,” there wasn’t any hint of artificiality.
With politicians, there is a crucial difference between being earnest and being raw. When I listened to Ashton speak, I could hear that these were his raw words and emotions just below the surface. The youngest brother of two older sisters, Ashton is a man who lost his mother eight years ago and whose voice still catches at the thought that she is missing him — in this moment, on this stage.
When we talked about fighting social battles in blue-collar spaces, he bristled at the idea that a union sister would be treated more poorly for sharing her opinion than a brother. I asked him what masculinity meant to him, and it was the only question that initially caught him off-guard.
In a follow-up email, Ashton noted: “It’s about expectations. How boys and men are expected to act, how they are “supposed” to behave. What happens is that there are these folks out there online who push a toxic version of masculinity and I 100% reject that. They create online spaces that draw boys and men in and then turn that into division and hate. This kind of ideology leads to harassment, intimidation, and violence.”
When asked about something he has learned since becoming an adult, Ashton points to his work on his temper. “It took me a long time to get it under control, to the point where I don’t have a temper anymore. Yeah, I get upset, but I don’t have a temper…I can be upset, but I don’t lose control.”
“If you only get upset every once in a while, that one time that you do get upset and you let them know, they now know you’re for real.”
Ashton spoke about his desire to stand up for others often in our conversation. In grade seven, Ashton transferred to a new school where he didn’t know anybody, and he saw another child from the “assisted class” being bullied and intervened:
“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size? Ah well, guess who was his own size.”
The bully was eventually expelled, but it made Ashton’s transition to the new school more difficult and isolating. “But I realized then that I could handle it… knowing that I’m OK deflecting and by helping somebody, that really shaped who I have become.”
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I asked him how he handled natural divisions in movements. The kinds that might come from a scattering of 12 autonomous local unions all loosely grouped under a national ILWU, or from provincial NDP branches with agendas that cut against the federal party’s plans. His responses prioritized the need to keep disagreements in-house, and the value of making direct contact to have personal dialogues to resolve them.
Ashton was quick to focus his aim on his real targets: the governing Liberals, the Conservative opposition, and the ruling class. Whether it was on electoral reform (he backs proportional representation), section 107’s back-to-work legislation (he wants to repeal it) or immigration (he wants to end the temporary foreign worker program), he always found his way back to identifying the class struggle that he saw running underneath it all. When I asked him about how to respond to the rising anger that some Canadians feel towards immigrants, he called it “one of the most important conversations we can have in the world today.”
“Look, somebody wants to come to Canada for a job and a good life, or they want to come on this program to be with their family, whatever reason they want to come to this country for, but they come on this temporary foreign worker program that the Conservatives and Liberals over the years have made worse and worse and worse and worse, and yet we villainize the workers, because that’s what we’re taught to do.”
“The system is set up by the ruling class to split up the work, to divide and split the working class, and it’s working to a T, and so that’s why we have to get rid of it and build something that works for people.”
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Another thing that Rob Ashton believes doesn’t work for people is automation and artificial intelligence. In our followup interview, he mentioned how in his industry, “all that we see is the ruling class and employing class bringing in automation to do away with workers’ jobs. We see the Liberal government and Conservative governments allowing corporations to bring in artificial intelligence with zero regulation on it, and I am tired of it.”
This follow-up call came a week after our first interview with some policy questions crossed off my list because I knew that there was an impending Reddit AMA that would cover a number of those topics. That AMA was then overshadowed by the use of AI-generated responses – and although he stressed that it was only one volunteer who “got a little overwhelmed,” the result was an immediate blowback on the NDP subreddit.
“It sucked, like it really, really sucked that that happened. So we put out a reminder to everybody that ChatGPT and AI and stuff like that, we don’t use it on this campaign. We owe people a human response, because ChatGPT and any kind of AI equipment that drafts stuff for you, especially responses to Canadians…that’s not what we’re here for.”
I asked him if he had ever dabbled in AI for personal use. “God, no.” No making a meal plan or travel planning? “No, no, not even – the thing on the email where it says like, use AI or on Google or Word I think it is, we’ll help you understand or summarize – the Copilot? I’m like, get fucked. Sorry, I shouldn’t swear.”
It was another moment of rawness — another rough edge that might have been sanded away by a team of professionals or a more robust campaign machine. These flaws might cost him a vote, change the tenor of an article, or even upend his whole run. They are also evidence that, whatever you might think of him, Rob Ashton as you see him today is as real as it gets.
Editor’s Note: This article appears in a series of interviews with NDP candidates by The Leveller.
