RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, MARCH 23, 2026. This coming weekend, in particular Saturday, March 28, 2026, will see the third No Kings protest in Donald Trump’s wild and crazy USA, part deux — one expression of the progressive impulse in the historic Democracy in America, currently under siege.

As the No Kings website explains : “When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option. We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence. America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.”

Meanwhile, another expression of the progressive impulse north of the formerly undefended border in Canada will be taking place over the same weekend in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

On Friday, March 27, 2026 the leadership convention of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) will begin at the RBC Convention Centre in Winnipeg, not far from the Manitoba Legislative Building. Saturday, March 28 will mark the final day of leadership voting by party members (which began electronically on March 9). Leadership election results will be announced on the last day of the convention, Sunday, March 29.

(1) Power to the people in the USA today

Personally I hope the March 28, 2026 No Kings protests in the USA achieve all the profile and success fervently wished for and hopefully projected by the likes of Robert Reich.

(Mr. Reich, former President Bill Clinton’s old friend and labor secretary, is still unofficially hanging out to good effect at UC Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco in anti-Trump Governor Gavin Newsom’s Golden State of California — fourth-largest economy in the world today, behind only the USA at large itself, China, and Germany).

At a time when many complain — with much if not quite full justice — about the decline of effective checks and balances in American government and politics, the ultimate residual power of the people in half organized/half spontaneous popular protests like No Kings has a strong real-world place in the traditional Democracy in America.

In the even wilder and crazier second coming of Donald Trump, the progressive people and the lower courts are at least doing almost their best to check and balance right now. Meanwhile, there is some serious prospect that the potentially more effective checking and balancing power of Congress will acquire some new lease on life this coming November 3, 2026.

(2) Fate of the federal New Democrats as “democratic socialists” in Canada?

Meanwhile back in Winnipeg the federal NDP leadership convention this coming March 27–29 is a quite different kind of progressive event from the No Kings protests.

Anyone wanting to boast about the NDP in Canada today would focus on the party’s two provincial premiers at either end of Western Canada — Wab Kinew in Manitoba and David Eby in BC on Canada’s Pacific coast.

Federally, the NDP won only 7 seats in the last election last year. And this has now fallen to 6 seats with Lori Idlout’s recent floor crossing to the Mark Carney Liberals. This is all a major departure from the summer of 2015, when for at least one brief moment it seemed that Tom Mulcair’s New Democratic Party, with serious support in Quebec, just might become the next Government of Canada at last.

Had the deeper truth of 2015 not finally proved to be the Liberal revival under Justin Trudeau, son and heir of the late great Pierre Elliott Trudeau, father of the Constitution Act, 1982, the Mulcair New Democrats might actually have replaced the Liberals as the voice of serious progressive government in Canada. (Just as, eg, the Labour Party in the UK had apparently once replaced the Liberals in the model “Westminster” parliamentary democracy across the Atlantic Ocean.)

In fact this is what has more or less actually happened provincially in Western Canada. In the four provinces of BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the New Democrats can reasonably claim to be the party that speaks for serious progressive government in the 21st century.

Yet even provincially the Liberals are still hanging on in one degree or another in virtually all of Ontario, Quebec, and the four provinces of Atlantic Canada. (Where Susan Holt’s Liberal Government of New Brunswick is the provincial Liberal upbeat note at the moment.)

Reading a recent New York Review of Books’ piece on the North American “democratic socialism” of Bernie Sanders, and its fate in the real world of the present era, has made me wonder about the longest-term advantages of the NDP’s long (if sometimes understated) association with North American democratic socialism in Canada.

And this finally plugs into the current federal NDP leadership race in Canada. Here Avi Lewis, the leading candidate in fundraising, is “the son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, and grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis.” Back in deeper mists of time David Lewis (Avi’s grandfather) also appeared in a semi-famous photograph of “Federal Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) delegation attending the September 1944 Conference of Commonwealth Labour Parties in London, England.”

The old CCF was the 1930 s/40s/50s precursor of the NDP, which succeeded the CCF in the 1960s. The CCF’s greatest achievement was to form the provincial Government of Saskatchewan under Tommy Douglas in 1944. Over the next two decades this “first socialist government in North America” did much to pioneer the provincial welfare state in Canada, that went on to become a successful federal-provincial model in the 1960s.

All this, alas, now really does seem to be in a different kind of past than the political and economic (and beyond|) universe we are living in right now, in Canada as elsewhere. And in current Canadian federal politics Liberal PM Mark Carney does seem to many the strongest voice progressive values can have at this exact historical moment.

Meanwhile yet again, the contestants in the federal NDP race this coming weekend are Avi Lewis (with his Justin-Trudeau-like ancestral pedigree), Edmonton MP Heather McPhersonm union leader Rob Ashton, southwestern Ontario organic farmer Tony McQuail and Vancouver Island social worker Tanille Johnston. According to one reading : “Avi Lewis leads in fundraising, but experts say Heather McPherson and Rob Ashton are still in contention.”

But does it really matter at this point in time???? Many observers of various persuasions are quietly saying no, backed up by recurrent opinion polls. Even if the policy platform of Avi Lewis, whose family history tells much of the story of Canadian socialism since the 1930s, is proposing a quite serious democratic socialist future for his home and native land. (Of course all democratic politics are radically unpredictable, especially today. In principle Avi Lewis just could be the Lewis family activist who finally does become prime minister … but not many Canadians actually paying attention are entertaining that thought right now.)