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With the New Democratic Party in a desperately weak state following the 2025 election, the correct path to renewal will be hotly contested as the party moves to select a new leader in the spring.

Big-picture ideological questions of principle over pragmatism will rage, with illustrative examples from centrist provincial counterparts in western Canada played off against the unabashedly socialist success story of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to clinch the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor.

In charting its path forward, the NDP should place a bold, unequivocal opposition to artificial intelligence at the heart of its political agenda. This stance must go beyond tepid calls for regulation or ethical oversight. It should reject the prevailing centrist narrative: that governments must embrace AI uncritically or risk being left behind in the presumed march of technological progress.

This fatalistic framing ignores a crucial truth: technology is never neutral. As historian Melvin Kranzberg famously put it, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Philosopher Shannon Vallor builds on this, arguing that technologies are polypotent and polyvalent—they can take on many forms and meanings depending on the social and political context in which they are embedded.

The NDP must be willing to contest not just how AI is used, but whether and why it is being pursued at all.

There is a clear opening for the NDP to get ahead of the curve and oppose—or at the very least demand extensive regulation of—the unchecked growth and encroachment of AI into our lives.

While there may be a narrowly defensible role for tightly controlled AI in specific domains like medical diagnostics or scientific modeling, the party should make it unmistakably clear that the AI slop increasingly polluting public discourse and eroding individual intellectual capacity is an intolerable affront to human dignity.

Opposing AI is a critical component of a broader strategy the NDP can use to carve out a clear and compelling progressive identity in Canadian politics—a challenge the party has wrestled with for decades. By opposing AI, the NDP can anchor itself in a renewed politics of humanism, rejecting the hollow promises of techno-solutionism and reclaiming a communitarian ethic that has been gutted by the isolating, market-driven logic of the digital age.

Opposing AI is perfectly in line with the values of leftism. The energy demands and environmental effects of AI are

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