What the Hell Is Wrong With Carla Beck?

Carla Beck’s public letter to Avi Lewis is a self‑inflicted wound that exposes how confused she is about her relationship with her own party — and how that ambiguity is failing Saskatchewan voters.

No paywall, because the Saskatchewan NDP’s bullshit is failing every single Saskatchewan resident and playing a significant role in driving our province into the ground.

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Saskatchewan NDP leader Carla Beck chose the first weekend of a new federal NDP leader’s mandate to release a formal, media‑ready letter accusing him of being “ideological and unrealistic” and refusing even to meet with him unless he recants his core climate position.

Her letter to Avi Lewis isn’t just “frosty” - it could have been drafted in the Sask Party’s comms shop.

It’s the kind of performative outrage you reach for when you hid from the real fight but suddenly want to pretend, after the fact, that you were in it all along.

Beck wrapped her letter in talking points about 40,000 Saskatchewan jobs and 13.6 billion dollars in economic activity, framing Lewis’s policies as a direct threat to the Saskatchewan economy, rather than the starting point for a hard conversation about transition.

Her words read less like a principled disagreement within a social‑democratic family and more like a permission slip for Scott Moe’s talking points about her party being beholden to “downtown Toronto activists” who “don’t understand the West.”

Because like it or not, Carla, you are a leader of the party you seem to hate so much.

Somebody may as well break that hard news to Trent Wotherspoon too, because lord (and the Sask Party) knows he hates it too.

The fact Beck did all of this while invoking Tommy Douglas and universal health care, as though the author of Medicare built his legacy by refusing to sit down with people until they recanted their policy platforms, reveals just how pathetic her response really is.

Coming from the leader of a party that should be trading on former federal NDP leader’s Tommy Douglas’s legacy, it is stunning that Beck’s first instinct was to insert distance and scold the new one.

What makes Beck’s outrage even harder to swallow is how carefully she stayed out of the federal NDP leadership race when her voice, and her caucus, could actually have shaped the outcome - helped decide what those federal policies would be.

According to insiders, less than half of the Saskatchewan NDP membership bothered to vote in their federal leadership race.

Throughout the entire leadership race, Beck and her caucus stayed completely silent — no public endorsements for Avi Lewis, no public endorsements for Heather McPherson, no sense that the Saskatchewan NDP had any skin in the game at all as the party chose the person who will help decide the fate of, yes, those 40,000 Saskatchewan workers.

Media coverage, campaign materials and endorsement lists from the race are full of MPs, MLAs and former leaders from across the country; what you will not find anywhere is a single Saskatchewan NDP MLA stepping up to say, “This is the leader Western Canada needs.”

That silence mattered, because there actually was a candidate who understood the West.

Heather McPherson ran a campaign grounded in Western realities — backing pipeline projects when they made sense for workers, while still insisting on stronger environmental oversight and limits on coal mining — a balance that would have given Saskatchewan New Democrats a credible federal partner from day one.

McPherson has spent years walking the line between defending the current livelihoods of oil and gas workers, while demanding tougher environmental limits, backing projects like the Trans Mountain expansion while pushing to restrict coal mining in the Rockies and strengthen oversight.

She talked about transition in real‑world terms — training, timelines, what happens to families in places like Estevan and Lloydminster — instead of pretending Saskatchewan can just pretend the climate crisis isn’t coming for us.

Western figures like Rachel Notley stepped up publicly for McPherson, as did sitting MPs like Charlie Angus and former MPs and former Saskatchewan MLAs, precisely because they understood what was at stake for the Prairies.

If Beck truly believed McPherson was the better fit for Saskatchewan, she had every opportunity to say so, campaign for that vision, and give her members a stake in the result.

Instead, she kept her powder dry, kept her caucus leashed, and now wants to light Lewis on fire for winning a race she refused to participate in.

This isn’t just about one letter; it’s about a pattern.

Beck’s public posture throughout the campaign was to talk generically about “rebuilding relationships” with the federal party and highlighting strong provincial oppositions, while keeping an almost studious distance from concrete choices about what her national party should actually look like.

Talking generically while maintaining studious distance from concrete positions is Carla Beck in a nutshell.

Her stance might feel safe inside her caucus - because we all know what her caucus does to leaders it doesn’t like - but has left everyone else guessing who she is, what she stands for and what, if anything, she could possibly do better for the province.

Members of the NDP in the province who want a fighting Saskatchewan social democracy get no clear signal about whether their provincial leader stands with the energy‑only Nenshi wing or the more climate‑forward Lewis wing, or with a McPherson‑style middle that actually reflects how people in Regina and Saskatoon live their lives.

For Saskatchewan voters, the message is worse: the Sask NDP leader will attack her own party and federal New Democrats when convenient, but will not transparently engage in the healthy, democratic internal skirmishes that determine what those federal New Democrats believe.

Beck is telling people that her party wants your vote in 2028, but not your judgment about where it should stand in 2026.

The result is that Saskatchewan New Democrats now face a federal leader whose policies their provincial leaders openly describe as “hurtful” to workers, while those same provincial leaders declined to lift a finger to elect the alternative they claim would have been better.

That is a credibility problem, not a messaging problem.

For organizers trying to convince skeptical workers that the NDP is serious about both jobs and climate, Carla Beck is a nightmare.

She just handed the Saskatchewan Party a ready‑made line: even the NDP doesn’t trust the NDP.

At the same time, it tells climate‑conscious Saskatchewan voters that the party that once pioneered Medicare now defines “unrealistic” as refusing new fossil infrastructure, even as wildfires and droughts trash Saskatchewan residents’ insurance premiums and grocery bills.

There is a way to talk honestly about transition, investment, and security for resource‑dependent communities; calling your own federal leader’s base “ideological” before you even sit down with him is not it.

That’s just failure to lead.

Tommy Douglas didn’t build a national health‑care system by writing stern letters to Ottawa and carefully avoiding any internal fights that might cost him.

He picked sides, made enemies, and trusted voters enough to be straight with them about what he was doing.

Beck is trying to have it all ways at once.

She claims to be above the fray when her own members are deciding what kind of party they want.

She’s aggressively oppositional when that decision produces a leader she doesn’t like.

She won’t shut up about how she’s laser‑focused on affordability and working people, while attacking federal policies on those same grounds without offering a serious public alternative.

That isn’t strategy; it’s evasion dressed up as pragmatism.

And it leaves Saskatchewan voters doing what they’ve been forced to do for far too long: guessing which version of the NDP they’ll get after an election, because the people in charge of their party are too scared to tell them before.

For Saskatchewan voters who want to believe the NDP is capable of more than opposition‑for‑hire, this is exactly the behaviour that keeps them home on election day.

You can’t claim Tommy Douglas’s mantle while treating internal democracy like a minefield to be tiptoed around and then scolding the membership when they don’t deliver the leader you were too scared to fight for.

The problem for Carla Beck isn’t Avi Lewis’s ideology; it’s her own refusal to be honest with Saskatchewan about where she stands, and about who she’s really trying to protect when she routinely parks herself on the fence and hopes someone else will make the hard calls.

Maybe it’s time the Saskatchewan NDP quit babbling about being “government in waiting”, which they are definitely not, and take a hard look at their own leader.

Have a great week,

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