The NDP's share of the popular vote has fallen by two-thirds from 2021, to a record-low 6.3 per cent.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail
Former New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus was being charitable when he called the party’s recent federal election campaign “an unmitigated disaster.” Under Jagmeet Singh, the most unpopular of the three main national-party leaders, the NDP lost three-quarters of its seats and failed to secure official party status in the House of Commons. Its share of the popular vote fell by two-thirds from 2021, to a record-low 6.3 per cent.
For most voters, Mr. Singh was more closely associated with the policies and politics of Justin Trudeau than the person who succeeded Mr. Trudeau as Liberal leader. Mr. Singh had spent most of the previous three years doing everything to avoid an election by propping up Mr. Trudeau’s government long after Canadians had irreversibly lost faith in it. The concessions Mr. Singh extracted in return – a piecemeal expansion of the social safety net – went unrewarded by voters.
As the NDP begins the search for a permanent replacement for Mr. Singh, many New Democrats have concluded that the party needs to draw a sharper contrast between itself and the Liberals. Under Mr. Trudeau, the Liberals and NDP had become largely interchangeable. Mr. Trudeau usurped the progressive mantle, making big government and identity politics the leitmotifs of the federal Liberal brand.
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Yet, in barely six months, Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved the Liberal Party so far to the right that the NDP should not have to worry about distinguishing itself. It could simply pitch itself as a sensible progressive alternative to the unofficial Liberal-Conservative coalition currently calling the shots in Ottawa.
This would mean choosing a leader who would anchor the party on the centre-left without seeking to polarize voters in the process. Former Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley might fit the bill. Or current Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who capitalized on the populist-right shift of the province’s Progressive Conservatives to offer Manitobans a more moderate choice.
Almost two years after winning office, Mr. Kinew remains the country’s most popular premier. His government has so far failed to deliver on its promise to fix the health-care system – surgical wait times and spending on private nursing agencies are up under the NDP. And the province’s public finances remain on a razor’s edge as debt creeps upward.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.David Lipnowski/The Canadian Press
Still, as an Indigenous Canadian who speaks fluent French, Mr. Kinew could be an attractive candidate to lead the federal NDP – some day. He is a bridge-builder, not a flamethrower, a pragmatist unwedded to any doctrine beyond making lives better.
Unfortunately, that might also make him unacceptable to much of the federal NDP’s current base.
A group calling itself Reclaim Canada’s NDP is asking donors to send their contributions to local riding associations rather than the national organization, so that “progressive community organizers can access the resources required to meaningfully and equitably rebuild the NDP without being bureaucratically tangled with the party’s management.”
One of the group’s leaders is former MP Matthew Green, who has long pushed for the NDP to embrace a more radical left-wing agenda. If embracing that agenda was the key to the NDP’s revival, then Mr. Green might still be sitting in the House of Commons.
Instead, he finished third in his own riding of Hamilton Centre – an NDP stronghold for two decades – losing to Liberal candidate Aslam Rana. Mr. Green also backed former Hamilton Centre NDP MPP Sarah Jama, who ran as an independent candidate in this year’s Ontario election, having been expelled from the NDP caucus after making anti-Israel comments in the aftermath of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Ms. Jama finished fourth in the Feb. 27 provincial election.
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The emergence of Reclaim Canada’s NDP is not the only sign the party is headed for a brutal leadership race. In a leaked e-mail announcing her June 23 resignation from the party’s federal council, Quebec representative Samah Khandker complained: “Equity-seeking members – particularly women, people with disabilities, and those who are Indigenous, queer, or racialized – are routinely asked to show up, but not to speak up.”
This kind of obsessive focus on identity politics is partly what drove voters away from the NDP under Mr. Singh. The party was shut out of Ontario in the federal election as working-class voters moved to the Conservatives and centre-left ones to the Liberals.
The federal NDP is now teetering on insolvency. In April, the party surpassed the 10-per-cent vote threshold required to claim expense refunds from Elections Canada in fewer than 50 ridings. The party borrowed heavily to fund its national campaign. Without those refunds, and with Reclaim Canada’s NDP essentially calling for a boycott on donations to the national party organization, the NDP’s very survival is in doubt.
Yet, the party’s flamethrowers seem more determined than ever to play with matches.