Multiple sources have confirmed to multiple news outlets that NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice is about to pull the plug and make the jump to provincial politics, running for Québec Solidaire in the upcoming election. Boulerice is the sole survivor of the 2011 “Orange Wave” that swept Quebec and made inroads into metro Toronto, but in many ways, Boulerice has been a reminder of the party’s failure to capitalise on the gains they made in that election, particularly in Quebec.

The most obvious failure was the party’s inability to cultivate grassroots in the province. Riding associations in most of the province existed on paper only, and they had a habit of running paper candidates for the sole purpose of being able to say they ran candidates in every riding so that they could maximise their spending caps. In the 2011 election, you had a group of McGill students who were placed as paper candidates in several ridings they had never visited, as well as a bar manager from Carleton University, and because of the fluke of Quebec voting emotionally for “Le Bon Jack” after Jack Layton had his bout of cancer and he would wave his cane everywhere, these paper candidates won. But did they do the work of actually building grassroots organisations at this point? Nope. Because the NDP is a party where they consider their federal and provincial wings to be the same organisation, they tend to leave their provincial wings to do the grassroots organising, and well, there isn’t a provincial NDP in Quebec, and so they didn’t, and they paid for it when Quebec’s mood shifted.

The party did try to start up a provincial wing at one point, running candidates in a provincial election, but they failed miserably and got nowhere with it, in part because the NDP didn’t know what it wanted to be in Quebec, where there is already a crowded field that is complicated by federalist, separatist and (ethnic) nationalist convictions, and I seem to recall there was a whole issue of trying to discern just which Quebec NDP MPs were actually separatists. Suffice to say, that provincial failure still wasn’t enough of a lesson for them, and their only anchor in the province was Boulerice, and now he’s leaving. Avi Lewis has ruled himself out of running in that riding (which they will likely lose), and in Beaches—East York once Nate Erskine-Smith steps down in the coming weeks, meaning he is going to make himself irrelevant much the way that Jagmeet Singh did when he won his own leadership contest. If anything, this makes the job of rebuilding the party’s fortunes even harder, and there aren’t enough Zohran Mamdani gimmicks in the world that they can imitate to fix that.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone attack on Odesa early Friday killed an elderly couple and wounded more than a dozen others. There was a prisoner exchange yesterday, swapping 193 captured personnel on each side. President Zelenskyy was in Saudi Arabia to develop their new security agreement. Here is a look at the problems facing Chernobyl after drone strikes in the area.

Good reads:

• Mark Carney had a call with Claudia Sheinbaum to coordinate NAFTA talk strategies ahead of negotiations with the US.
• The federal government has approved the expansion of the Enbridge Sunrise natural gas pipeline in BC, with Indigenous co-ownership thanks to loan guarantees.
• The Fiscal Monitor shows a deficit of $25.5 billion for April to February of the last fiscal year.
• Veterans Affairs is ending the Commissionaires Corps’ contracting rights, likely because the corps is no longer a primary employer of veterans.
• Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff has had to help calm Ukrainian allies about the possibility that the Americans will break up NATO (not that she believes that).
• It’s not just CSIS that’s not eligible for the early retirement incentives—RCMP, CSE and front-line CBSA officers are also ineligible.
• The chair of the CRTC says it’s taking so long to implement the Online Streaming Act because it’s complex work and they want to get it right.
• A report calls on Parliament to let members of the military and spy agencies to fall under federal whistleblower protection laws.
• Trump says he’ll give tariff relief to steel and aluminium companies that promise to expand into the US. (Don’t believe him!)
• There are calls for Canada to take an international leadership role on LGBTQ+ issues, given that the US and other countries have abandoned their activities.
• There is an odd Netherlands connection to the fake YouTube accounts spreading slopaganda about Alberta separatism and calls for American annexation.
• Oil and gas companies, believing they now have leverage, are trying to push back against the industrial carbon price, whinging that Americans don’t have one.
• The Manitoba Métis Federation and the Assembly of First Nations are squabbling over the Métis self-government legislation.
• Here is a deeper dive into Danielle Smith’s plan to gerrymander her next election.
• Justin Ling posits that Carney will need the assistance of friends like Finland’s Alexander Stubb if he wants to rally the middle powers of the world.

Odds and ends:

For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s very short Supreme Court of Canada decision on why the Crown doesn’t need to prove specific timelines.

Just amazing.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-04-25T03:15:12.760Z

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