Is Jagmeet Singh The Right Person To Lead The NDP?

As the media hails Jagmeet Singh as some social democratic messiah, is he the right choice for a party that seems to want to move in a more progressive direction?

On Monday night the Ontario NDP's deputy leader Jagmeet Singh became the sixth candidate to join the federal NDP leadership race. Singh has represented his suburban riding of Brampton since 2011, the first NDP anything to represent Ontario's peel region. If he won the leadership, that in and of itself would be a major, historic achievement, as he would not just be the first Sikh, but the first non-white person ever to lead a major political party in Canada. His speech focused on social justice,  inequality, indigenous reconciliation, climate change,  and made a direct appeal to Quebec, saying he has a unique understanding of Quebeckers because of his own struggle to maintain his language and identity, which he said in fluent french. He attacked the Liberal government for their comments on precarious work for young people & for breaking their promise on electoral reform. As an MPP, Singh responded to activist pressure on carding by helping to ban the practice, which many have found disproportionately affects black & indigenous peoples. In his speech he said "Police [were] stopping people just because of the colour of their skin. 

When Queens park was debating an anti-BDS motion, condemning the movement as "anti-semitic" he voted against it, saying "We can't be distracted by conflating criticism of a governments policies with anti-semitism. That distracts us from the real problem of anti-semitism." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DZGvFlNNTU&t=83s)

Even before he entered the leadership race Jagmeet Singh was clearly the most talked about NDP leadership candidate in the Canadian media, already considered an automatic frontrunner. He has been described by both supporters & opponents as the NDP's version of Justin Trudeau, because of his youth, talk of diversity & his charisma. 

However, there are real, legitimate questions about how progressive an NDP lead by Jagmeet Singh would really be. He has rarely spoken, if at all, on issues of Re-nationalization, or bringing privatized sectors or services back into public ownership, or on the NDP's commitment to a balanced budget through austerity, which many activists credit as allowing the liberals to run to the left of them in the last election. 

While he did call for a transition to renewable energy in his speech, he struggled to answer when asked by Rick Mercer whether he supported or opposed pipelines, and his position ended up sounding very similar to that of Justin Trudeau. In contrast, leadership candidates Niki Ashton, and to a lesser extent Peter Julian, have been much clearer & outspoken on these issues. 

Given that the overwhelming consensus of the NDP membership is that the party lost the 2015 election because it moved to far to the centre and lost sight of its left-wing principles, and as critics point to the NDP's rightward shift as going back to Audrey McLaughlin's leadership in the 1990's, and even Jack Layton to a certain extent, is Jagmeet Singh the right person to lead the party right now?

So far thats not quite clear. 

I, and I hope people around the country, will be waiting to see if Jagmeet Singh truly is the social democratic messiah people have made him out to be, or if he is just another centre-left, neoliberal unwilling to take on the economic status quo.