New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh addresses supporters at his campaign headquarters on election night, in Burnaby, B.C. on April 28.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
Predictions of the demise of the federal NDP, and the return of a two-party system, may be a titch premature. But it’s not too soon to start gathering notes for an obituary: the party has just turned in its worst showing in both popular vote, and seat count, since its founding in 1961.
The party has had a near-death experience before, in 1993, when just nine NDP MPs were elected. It inched back from the brink then, helped along by a divided right in the 1990s.
But this time is different. The Conservatives are busy swiping key parts of the NDP coalition. Exhibit A: the riding of Windsor West, the kind of working class poll that should – and was – an NDP redoubt. That ended on Monday, when incumbent Brian Masse, who won in 2021 by nearly 17 percentage points, placed third, about 12 points behind the first-place Conservative.
The story was the same in the rest of Ontario; the NDP was shut out of the province, including in Hamilton, another former stronghold. It could be the start of a Saskatchewan-like realignment that further whittles away at the NDP’s electoral base. The party routinely won a healthy number of seats in the province, including 10 of 14 in 1988.
But the NDP presence in Saskatchewan withered after that; in the 2004 election, it won no seats in the province. In 2015, the party won three seats, but has since been shut out.
Failure bred failure. A lack of Saskatchewan MPs meant the concerns of those voters did not have a direct voice in caucus. The party aligned itself increasingly with the concerns of urban progressive white-collar voters, further damaging its prospects of electing Prairie members.
On Monday, the NDP ran (an often distant) third in every riding in Saskatchewan. A party whose roots were deep in the Prairies, whose predecessor was founded in part to give voice to farmers, is an irrelevancy. Saskatchewan is a two-party race at the federal level.
Similarly, this week’s results are a clear indication that another key part of the NDP coalition, blue-collar voters, are drifting out of reach. Part of the explanation may be Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. Perhaps the party needs a charismatic leader, and all will be well.
But two inconvenient facts point in the opposite direction. First, Jack Layton, for all his historic success in bringing the NDP to Official Opposition status, did not manage to bring rural voters back into the fold. Second, the NDP’s weakness is not only at the federal level.
The last two Ontario elections have seen the provincial Progressive Conservatives also make inroads into traditionally NDP ridings. Conservatives are not winning those ridings on a lucky split in the left-leaning vote: working class voters are migrating to them.
That points to a major realignment that will leave the NDP mostly dependent on vestigial support of urban progressive white-collar voters. Indeed, the vote is already polarized, outside of Quebec. In the rest of Canada, the Liberals and Conservatives together received 90.6 per cent of votes.
That two-party ecosystem, were it to persist, could be a positive force in Canadian politics, by pushing the two big parties to broaden their coalitions, and detoxify their tactics.
The Conservatives have depended on vote splits to win government. The stronger the vote for the NDP, the more favourable the chances for the Tories. Stephen Harper’s won a majority in 2011, with just 39.6 per cent of the vote.
Fourteen years later, Pierre Poilievre lost an election with 41.3 per cent of the vote. A majority government will require adding new centrist voters to the Tory coalition. They are unlikely to be won over with brash talk about using the notwithstanding clause, and ignoring climate change.
For their part, the Liberals have depended on a small-tent Conservative approach for their electoral success. Recent results in Windsor-Tecumsheh-Lakeshore, in Ontario, are a case in point. In 2021, Liberal Irek Kusmierczyk edged into office with a 1.1-percentage-point margin over his NDP rival.
Mr. Kusmierczyk nearly doubled his vote count in 2025, but narrowly lost to the Conservative candidate. Nationally, that point holds, too. The Liberals won a majority in 2015 with 39.5 per cent of the vote. A decade later, 43.7 per cent of votes only gave them a minority. So much for vote efficiency.
A new force in national politics is emerging – one that could push both the Liberals and the Conservatives to the centre of the political spectrum.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the first name of the former NDP MP for Windsor West, Brian Masse. (May 6, 2025) Previous versions of this article incorrectly stated that since the 2004 election, the federal NDP has won a Saskatchewan riding just once, in 2015. The party won three seats in 2015, but has since been shut out. This version has been updated.