The New Democrats
In Canada, brothers Jagmeet and Gurratan Singh are redressing the stereotype of “image-conscious” politicians.
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It’s during a break in our photo shoot at the Toronto Reference Library with Jagmeet Singh, the newly minted leader of Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party, and his brother Gurratan, that it dawns on me—Jagmeet has the job I wanted when I was nine years old.
As a supernerd in the late ’70s, I played NDP leader in my school’s model parliament, winning our mock election in a landslide. I idolized the party’s leader at the time, Ed Broadbent, a former academic from a family of auto workers. This despite the fact that he would never be described as telegenic, dashing or blazingly eloquent—at least not when compared with his rival, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father to current PM, Justin. Rather, Broadbent was often criticized, as his Wikipedia entry notes, “for his ...
