'Just shedding my snake skin': Retiring MP Charlie Angus is Canada's brashest voice against Trump

Charlie Angus, a longtime NDP MP, is set to exit stage left after announcing he will not run in the next election. But in quintessential Angus style, he isn’t leaving without making noise. 

Ever since the U.S. tariff threat, Angus has been publicly railing, seemingly every chance he gets, against President Donald Trump and his cronies, including multi-billionaire Elon Musk. He’s hopped on podcasts, YouTube videos and other print interviews; he’s written op-eds and continues to post on social media at a prolific clip to launch bareknuckle attacks against what he calls a bully to the south. The broadsides against Trump have caught the attention of alternative and mainstream media alike, inciting virality in both Canada and the U.S. 

Over the weekend, he took to Bluesky (his new favourite platform because “people on there seem to be real people,” he tells me) to call on Elections Canada to investigate foreign interference from X and its owner Musk, the world’s richest man and chief far-right provocateur. 

The barrage has landed Angus a new role as the ad-hoc spokesperson against global forces of autocracy, injustice and the newly-emerged Trumpian imperialism. Angus has said yes to a gauntlet of media appearances, landing on American talk shows and op-ed pages deriding the “narcissist in Mar-A-Lago.” 

Angus didn’t expect to find himself as a prominent critical voice against Trump’s second term, landing in an onslaught of news articles and podcasts in both Canada and the U.S. “We just got to start being clear and speaking up for justice, for dignity, for human rights, for democracy,” he said. 

His liberation from the restraints of party discipline and caucus life to a boisterous and punkish, street-politics revolt has led him to launch his own substack, titled The Resistance. 

Despite his exit from electoral politics, Angus is not leaving politics as such.

“No, I'm just shedding my snake skin,” Angus told Canada’s National Observer. 

‘This is not a new role’

Two decades ago, the now-parliamentary veteran for Timmins-James Bay, decided to leave his life as a grassroots campaigner and journalist to run for elected office. His wife Brit Griffin, who co-founded a homeless shelter with Angus in the 1980s, had something to say about the decision. 

“If you ever start sounding like a politician, I’ll suffocate you,” Angus recalls her telling him. 

Those words have been something of a north star for Angus, a maxim to stay true to the grassroots activism of his youth, where politics was done in dingy, cramped punk bars or stuffy church basements.

The 1980s, when Angus cemented his political views, was the decade of Ronald Reagan, when greed was deemed good by both Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in Wall Street and Milton Friedman's Chicago School “trickle-down economics,” perversely began the flow of wealth redistribution straight to the top. 

Angus meditated on that time in his book Dangerous Memory: Coming of age in the decade of greed. But alongside income disparity, Reaganomics also furthered a brand of left-wing resistance Angus wishes was more prevalent today. Angus grabbed onto that thread back then, and to this day is committed to opposing inequality and the ascent of authoritarianism across the Western world. 

There have been ups and downs, but few as low as the most recent U.S. election, Angus said. That night, he was having a couple at the bar, watching the results. When Florida went to the Republicans and the swing states were veering that way too, he knew it was over. He scuffled back to his bed in a depressive stupor. The next morning he didn’t want to get out from under the covers. 

“You have to say something; people are frightened,” Griffin said to him over the phone the morning after. “You have to say something.” 

“I don't know what to say,” Angus responded.

“It doesn't matter — what matters is you have to be strong,” she told him.

“At that moment, I realized that there was no whining, there was no bending, there was no pretending… the resistance had to begin,” he said. 

Angus' path to Parliament’s halls, power and procedure was unconventional. Other political figures may have studied at Harvard and Oxford — both Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney among them. But Angus doesn’t have a university degree. 

Andrew Cash, who has been a political organizer and played music with Angus even before they were legally allowed to drink, wasn’t surprised to see his friend become one of Canada’s most outspoken Trump critics. “I'll tell you a little secret: this is not a new role,” said Cash, who also served as an NDP MP for the Davenport riding in Toronto from 2011 to 2015. “This is the Charlie Angus that I’ve always known … it's totally what he's been doing since the first day I met him in Scarborough.”

The Punk Rock Politician 

Walking into Angus’ office in the Parliamentary precinct, the room feels emptier than usual. Cardboard boxes are beginning to fill near the bookshelves, but posters and photos still hang on the walls. One poster is for his book, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's lost promise and one girl's dream, about the conditions of northern Ontario First Nations and their struggle for equity and dignity in the face of colonial oppression. 

The faint sounds of Bob Marley drift from his laptop speakers and a guitar gifted to him by his French teacher sits beside his desk.

Angus' path to Parliament’s halls, power and procedure was unconventional. Other political figures may have studied at Harvard and Oxford — both Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney among them. But Angus doesn’t have a university degree. 

Instead of studying in Ivy League libraries, Angus was selling out biker bars and punk venues with “L’Etranger,” the band he formed with Cash. Their music was political from the beginning, writing about apartheid in South Africa and other struggles. “We weren't interested in writing love songs; we weren't interested in participating in the great lullaby of Western society,” Cash said.

“We wanted  to punch through and talk about social justice and awaken people to the injustices of the world,” Cash added. 

Those punk beginnings: jamming, postering and organizing (Cash and Angus were involved in the initial chapter of Rock against Racism in Toronto and would later be in the same NDP caucus after the NDPs Orange Crush in 2011) can be traced through to his time in Parliament. 

Angus says he was dubbed the “punk rock politician even though I haven’t worn Doc Mart—” he stops himself midsentence. “Well, I did wear Doc Martens in the House for a long time.” 

Angus took a DIY approach to his role as an MP. His outspoken nature sometimes ruffled feathers with the NDP brass, and he had occasional run-ins with the party’s disciplinary wing. But Angus stuck to grassroots organizing, which he believes is the soul of politics.

“The [punk] ethos, it's DIY, and if you talk to my staff, DIY was how we did everything,” he recalled . “We didn't wait for permission, we just did it; it got me in trouble a lot of times but whatever.” 

Liberation theology

Angus avoids talking about his faith. 

“I don’t trust any politician that talks about God. It makes me want to run,” he said. 

But he comes from a tradition of social-justice-oriented Catholicism that took the gospels as a call to service. “We were taught as young kids that our job was to help the less fortunate,” he says. Angus and Cash took their political cues from Marxist-influenced Liberation theology, which was catching fire in Latin America in the 1980s, and the rage-infused protest music of the day.

“So, when I see this gospel of Donald Trump and his f*cking Bibles … that's not something I recognize,” he added. 

“Politics is life; it doesn't necessarily have to have someone sit in the House of Commons — they can be out on the streets.

Cash and Angus lost respect for their own religion because of the sex scandals that have surfaced in the decades after. “I think the church has to be in the doghouse for that,” Angus said. 

The same, he says, could go for the church’s role in residential schools. 

Walking the path of reconciliation 

Angus turns to the portraits on his bookshelf, which include faces of First Nations youth that have died in the suicide crisis of the North. On the shelf is also a braid of sweetgrass, a medicine for healing. 

First Nations priorities have always been top of the agenda for Angus. He served as an Indigenous critic for years, and worked with Shannen Koostachin, a youth leader from Attawapiskat First Nation, to build a new school. 

Koostachin died in a vehicle accident before she could see the shovels break ground in Attawapiskat in 2012. Her death was cause for immense sorrow for Angus.

“Shannon made me see politics through the eyes of a child who was deprived of her basic rights,” he said. “So, when I’d go in and see these ministers, and I'd see these politicians, and it was all, you know, classic political gobbledygook about doing the right thing — but kids only have one childhood, and once it's gone, it never comes back.”

Koostachin changed Angus’ view of what Indigenous children need to succeed. “Once I understood how she was watching her own life disappear in front of her because of lack of opportunity, it changed how I approached it, and I'll admit, I threw a lot of politicians over the boards,” he said. 

Things have changed dramatically since then, Angus says. When he first joined politics, Angus spoke on issues related to Indigenous affairs. Today, he seldom feels the need. 

“There's a generation that's come up of confident, smart Indigenous youth who formed into leadership, who are driving what reconciliation means, and that's an exciting thing to see. 

“I feel really blessed to have been a witness to how much it's changed, but it hasn't changed enough — it has to change faster.” 

Angus doesn’t know where he’s going next. He’s digging through archives, researching a new book about fascism in the 1930s within the mining towns of northern Ontario, while his roots-country band the Grievous Angels works on a tenth album. 

But most of all, he wants to return home to the North. He wants to spend more time with his town of Cobalt, Ontario, continue with his summer mining tours and return to his work with Indigenous communities like he did before his foray in electoral politics.

He will never shut up in his fight against the currents of authoritarianism. 

“Politics is life; it doesn't necessarily have to have someone sit in the House of Commons — they can be out on the streets.

“So who knows where I’m going? I have some pretty good ideas, but I’m open.” 

Matteo Cimellaro / Canada’s National Observer / Local Journalism Initiative