Herschel Hardin (born 1936) is a British Columbia-based writer, playwright, commentator and political activist and consultant best known for having contested the leadership of the New Democratic Party of Canada in 1995.
[1] In the late 1970s, he worked as a Vancouver-based editorial page columnist for The Toronto Star writing on politics and economics.
[1] He also wrote a number of non-fiction books, his first being A Nation Unaware: The Canadian Economic Culture (1974), which explored the key role of public enterprise in the development of Canada's economy and the country's distinctive interregional redistribution.
A subsequent major work, The New Bureaucracy: Waste and Folly in the Private Sector (1991), detailed the bureaucratic character and excesses of the corporate world (including finance and marketing) and how this "new bureaucracy" had become entrenched behind what he called an "ideological screen," in this instance, the ideology of free enterprise.
The only candidate in the four-person race who had never been an elected politician, Hardin ran a grassroots campaign that emphasized democratic socialist themes.