It certainly would be nice if the NDP could learn to speak convincingly about economics, that's for sure. Understanding how things work is a prerequisite to making the right changes.

The Green party sometimes finds itself in the general area of what I had in mind. Take a look at their plan for housing for example. In my view though, broader changes are required to break the stranglehold that entrenched oligopolies have on most of the Canadian economy. Concentration of market power is reaching new extremes, and it's going to take serious changes to correct that. Keep in mind that "using money" and "having markets" do not necessarily mean capitalism at all, let alone capitalism as we know it.

There's a whole world of ideas about how to run things differently that get talked about elsewhere and get no play in mainstream Canadian politics. All the usual social democratic stuff but also wilder things like MMT or variants of Georgism for instance. There are many possibilities and I don't claim to know exactly which ones are best, but I wish the Overton window wasn't quite so absurdly narrow as it is when it comes to this stuff. Maybe a competent manager of the status quo is the best we can hope for out of electoral politics for now, but sooner or later we're going to need someone with big new ideas.