It’s a bit of a dirty little secret: while there is plenty of homegrown political talent to offer advice to Ontario politicians, all the major parties at Queen’s Park seek help from beyond our borders.
After Dalton McGuinty became Liberal leader in 1996, the party secured the services of Barack Obama confidante David Axelrod to help the new Opposition leader find his voice.
Similarly, in the 1990s, the Progressive Conservative party hired Republican adviser Mike Murphy (now co-host of the Hacks on Tap podcast) to help new leader Mike Harris hone his tax-cutter message.
If you really want to get into the way-back machine, we could point out that, 50 years ago, the PCs put American pollster Robert Teeter on the payroll to train their new party leader, Bill Davis.
So it’s hardly unprecedented, but still noteworthy, that the Ontario NDP has appointed 35-year-old David Clark to be the party’s new campaign director. Clark, who’s British, got his start in politics working with the Labour Party, which just enjoyed one of its greatest-ever triumphs earlier this month, sending the Conservatives packing. Labour candidate Chris Bloore, who'd been a close adviser to Stiles before moving back to the U.K., became an MP in the riding of Redditch. That constituency had been considered a safe Conservative seat. Instead, Labour leader (now Prime Minister) Keir Starmer visited the riding in the dying days of the campaign — a sign of Labour’s confidence that there were no more safe Tory seats.
“It showed that a lot of seats you never thought were in play, could be,” says Clark.
Clark moved from Salisbury to Canada 12 years ago on a student visa, loved it here, and stayed. A friend introduced him to Ontario NDP politics, and he caught the organizational bug. He returned to his homeland to work on two national elections and to help Sadiq Khan become mayor of London in 2016. In 2017, he came back to Toronto and met a local school-board trustee — the two hit it off.
That trustee’s name was Marit Stiles.
Clark joined Stiles’s successful campaign for MPP in 2018. She asked him to run her leadership campaign, but it turned out his efforts were ultimately not needed — Stiles was acclaimed in February 2023 when no other candidates jumped into the race to succeed Andrea Horwath.
NDP leader Marit Stiles (left) with David Clark. (Courtesy of the NDP)
“I was ready to run a big operation, and, ultimately, the acclamation was a little disappointing because we were raring to go,” Clark says. “But, ultimately, we got the result we wanted.”
Acclamation day was also memorable to Clark for another reason: he swore his citizenship oath that same day and became a Canadian.
But back to Labour’s smashing victory for a moment — what lessons did Clark learn from that election that might be relevant during Ontario’s next grand consultation with the people?
“I learned how to be careful with resources,” he says, noting where Labour campaigned and where they didn’t bother wasting their efforts. “We have to be realistic and honest about the path to change because no one is winning all 124 seats here. Plus, the need for a disciplined message and avoiding missteps.”
For much of the Ontario NDP’s nearly 63 years of existence, the party simply has not been competitive. There have been 17 elections during that time, and the NDP has only one victory to its credit: Bob Rae’s surprising majority win in 1990. It has come second four times. It has 12 third-place finishes.
But Clark notes the NDP has formed the official Opposition in the past two consecutive elections, which is unprecedented for the party. And it’s been the Liberals who have been uncompetitive over those two campaigns.
“The big piece for us now is to make the case that the NDP can win next time,” Clark says. “We have a new leader who’s an excellent communicator and can focus the campaign on what people need.”
While Clark would love the last U.K. election to be a template for Ontario’s next one, he realizes you can’t push those comparisons too hard. The British Tories had been in power for 14 straight years with five increasingly unacceptable prime ministers; the Ontario Tories, so far, have been in power for only six years and had just one reasonably popular premier at the helm for all of it.
But the NDP intends to keep learning from its British counterparts. Labour holds a party conference every year, and someone from the Ontario NDP now attends (it was former NDP MPP Gurratan Singh at the conference In Liverpool last September). Clark also knows Labour’s general secretary David Evans, whom he’d love to get over to this side of the pond to speak at a future NDP convention.
Clark has also met Starmer, although, given his new job, Clark’s not holding out any hope that the new PM will be speaking at an NDP convention any time soon.
“But we’ll be having a convention in January, and Labour officials will be there,” confirms Clark, who’s hoping the British Conservatives won’t be the only Tories to suffer defeat at election time.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that David Clark did not campaign for the Labour Party during the last election. TVO Today regrets the error.
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