This letter is for any current or former member of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party who believes that the issues we care about are moved forward when the Sask NDP and the Federal NDP are in dialogue.

It asks Carla Beck, MLA for Regina Lakeview and the current Sask NDP leader, to meet with new Federal NDP leader Avi Lewis to discuss the future of energy, workers, and public services in Saskatchewan— and to do so as partners in the same broader movement, not as adversaries.

It is unproductive and divisive to our party and movement to announce in public that the federal party or leader must change their positions before our provincial leader will even meet with them.

You can read the full text of the letter below. If you are short of time, it argues:

• Mirroring the Saskatchewan Party's narrative on fossil fuels does not protect Saskatchewan workers— it does the Sask Party's work for them.
• Real energy security means developing publicly owned renewables and stable prices, not dependency on global commodity markets.
• Saskatchewan's tradition of resource sovereignty belongs to the NDP, not the party currently governing this province.
• The federal and provincial NDP are stronger together than apart.

Please note: This letter was not initiated as a show of support for Avi Lewis specifically. Not everyone who initiated this open letter voted for him as leader of the federal NDP. We simply write as members who believe cooperation and honest dialogue within our movement is the best path forward for people in our province.

When signing, there is a field to add your own thoughts at the end.

For feedback or to ask questions of the organizers of this open letter, please write openlettertocarlabeck@proton.me.

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Dear Carla,

We write to you as Saskatchewan NDP members— people who have knocked on doors, donated, phone-banked, and cast our ballots for this party because we believe in what it was built to do: stand with working people, defend public services, and imagine a better future for our province.

When Avi Lewis won the federal NDP leadership on the first ballot, with strong support from Saskatchewan members, many of us felt something rare in this political moment: genuine hope. Within hours, that hope was complicated by your public ultimatum demanding he reverse his "no new O&G developments" position, before you would even agree to meet with him.

We write because we are troubled by this. We want to explain why, and what we are hoping you will do going forward instead.

We are signing this collective letter not as an attack on your leadership, or even as partisans of Avi Lewis— not all of us listed below voted for him in our ranked-choice ballot. We write to you not as a faction or committee, but simply as dedicated members and supporters who want the Saskatchewan NDP to win. 

The federal and provincial NDP are strongest when they work in solidarity, drawing on each other's energy, organization, and volunteers. That does not require total agreement on every issue. It requires a willingness to act like we are part of the same broader movement—rather than treating each other as liabilities to be managed.

Mirroring the Saskatchewan Party's story isn't working

The Saskatchewan Party has spent nearly two decades building a false story about this province: that our identity is inseparable from fossil fuels, that anyone who questions that is an outsider who doesn't understand us, and that Saskatchewan's workers can only be protected by doubling down on oil and gas development.

It's a powerful story. It frames any meaningful environmental and climate action, even something as simple as ‘making polluters pay,’ as an ideological attack on Saskatchewan families. It's also a story that has served the Sask Party far better than it has served people living and working in our province.

When we rush to publicly distance ourselves from a newly elected federal leader using that same narrative, we aren't protecting Saskatchewan workers—we are doing the Sask Party's work for them. Scott Moe has already moved to capitalize on your public announcement, which comes as no surprise to us. The Sask Party's "modus operandi" is positioning themselves as the victim of "all things federal," because it gives them a pass for their own mismanagement and corruption. So conservative and right-wing actors will assign a “radical left-wing label” to the NDP no matter what we do—no pro-pipeline position will change that. No distancing action you take will make them cease these kinds of attacks.

What it can do is alienate the very people we should be bringing closer: grassroots members, volunteers, federal party supporters in Saskatchewan, and people looking for a stronger, more confident progressive movement.

As you well know from your time in the legislature, after 18 years of Sask Party government and multiple oil booms, working people in this province still face a housing crisis, crumbling rural healthcare, underfunded schools, and cost-of-living pressures that rival anywhere in the country. Saskatchewan has the highest child poverty rate in Canada, while billions in resource wealth leave this province every year— extracted from Treaty lands, with neither the Treaty obligations to First Nations nor the promises to Saskatchewan workers kept. Most of the wealth has instead flowed to foreign shareholders and executives, not into the public services that make life livable or more stable.

Our past leaders were well aware of this. It was the CCF and NDP governments of this province who were skeptical of letting outside capital extract and leave. They insisted that Saskatchewan's resources should build Saskatchewan's future.

That tradition of resource sovereignty is ours. It does not belong to the party currently governing this province. That's the case we should be fiercely articulating, and the story that needs telling.

Particularly in the context of the USA's alarming military actions in Iran, real energy security looks like publicly owned renewable generation, stable power prices not subject to global shocks, and an economy whose foundations cannot be pulled out from under us by a war we didn't start.

That is an affordability argument. It is a workers' argument. It is an argument that helps Saskatchewan families. And it is one our party is uniquely positioned to make— if we choose to make it.

On Avi Lewis, and who Saskatchewan members voted for

Avi Lewis's positions on fossil fuels are neither a surprise, an imposition, nor an external threat to Saskatchewan NDP members, the province, or workers here. He and his partner Naomi Klein co-authored the Leap Manifesto in 2015 after years of very public, very consistent advocacy. Saskatchewan NDP members knew exactly who they were voting for, and many of us voted for him precisely because of those values.

We also need to set the record straight on The Leap Manifesto. Though an effort that took place more than 10 years ago, it was primarily concerned with how provinces and workers who live in them would transition to a cleaner energy economy, rather than letting it all crash down on us in downturns (as single-resource and O&G-based economies are prone to do). We see the attempt to align NDP policy with economic and ecological reality as basic due diligence, and aligned with the interests of all Saskatchewan workers and families. 

And far from being a document of vague “ideological” aspirations, it came with detailed economic analysis of how to pay for it— and its descendants have gone even further in showing how a worker-first transition could practically be realized.

Treating these concerns, and Lewis’s positions, as something to be publicly repudiated rather than negotiated, conveys to the members and the public that our own values as Saskatchewan NDP members are indefensible, and liabilities to be managed.

We wish to be clear about this: we are not asking you to endorse federal policy. Neither are we saying The Leap Manifesto is above criticism (as a 10-year-old document, it shows its age). Provincial and federal NDP parties have always maintained distinct platforms, and we support that autonomy.
What we are asking is that disagreement happen at a table, not in a press release. We want you to trust the membership and your voters enough to know that many of us do not experience Avi Lewis's vision as a threat— we experience it as an opening.

What we're asking for

We ask you to meet with the federal NDP leader, your counterpart Avi Lewis, promptly and without preconditions. Disagreement is resolved in conversation, not in public ultimatums.
We are encouraged and excited by what we see in the Saskatchewan NDP's recent electricity plan announcement, and we believe that plan gives you and Lewis even more to talk about— a made-in-Saskatchewan vision of energy's future that deserves to be part of a national conversation, not kept at arm's length from it.

We ask you to resist the frame that reduces Saskatchewan's identity to fossil fuels. This province is its people: their healthcare, their housing, their children's schools, their right to a livable climate future.
We ask you to make the affirmative case for what the NDP actually stands for: afforability, publicly owned energy, stable prices, good unionized jobs that don't boom and bust, and services that people can count on—and navigating our environmental and climate challenges at the same time.

That case can be made here, in this province, on our own terms, without borrowing the Sask Party's language or their manufactured grievances.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that this letter is itself a public act of disagreement, and we don't take this step lightly. We would have preferred this conversation happen internally. But when our leader's public statements don't reflect our values or our votes, public response is the only serious tool members have.

We believe in the Saskatchewan NDP. We still believe in you. That is why we are writing.

In solidarity,

Saskatchewan NDP members

CC: 


Trent Wotherspoon, MLA Regina Mount Royal;
Aleana Young, MLA Regina South Albert