The leaders in focus
This is part of a series of election-season profiles of the main party leaders: Mark Carney of the Liberals, Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh of the NDP.
It’s just before 9 a.m. on a weekday morning and camera tripods and light stands are being set up inside a pharmacy on a gritty section of Victoria Drive on the eastside of Vancouver.
Three people who will serve as props for the campaign announcement that New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh will be making have arrived. Two are nurses’ aides; the other, who is quickly throwing on scrubs before the cameras get rolling, is a hospital millwright. There are a few members of the media present, but they are vastly outnumbered by NDP staff, all crammed into the store’s almost pop-up-like surroundings. As campaign settings go, it’s difficult to avoid the contrast it offers up to the more spacious environs, packed with supporters, seen at daily events for the Conservatives and Liberals.
NDP stalwart Don Davies, who has represented this Vancouver-Kingsway riding since 2008, is on hand to introduce Mr. Singh. “I know what the polls are saying, but on the ground we’re getting a great reception,” Mr. Davies tells The Globe and Mail before things get started.
Mr. Singh arrives and announces a $3.5-billion plan to expand pharmacare coverage. When it comes time for media questions, the NDP Leader’s pledge is not the main topic: Current realities for the party are. Reporters want to know why the NDP no longer talks about forming government. Another asks Mr. Singh why there aren’t any party supporters at his events. The questions are similar to ones Mr. Singh had to answer a day earlier.
He brushes them off, responding instead by talking about what 25 NDP MPs managed to accomplish in the last Parliament. “Ottawa works best when one party doesn’t hold all the power,” he says.
In a federal election campaign, many have called the most important in a generation, Mr. Singh and his party have struggled to be heard.
The halcyon days of 2011, when Jack Layton led the New Democrats to 103 seats and Official Opposition status, seem a lifetime ago. It has mostly been a steady descent ever since: 44 seats under Tom Mulcair in 2015; 24 seats in 2019 and 25 in 2021 under Mr. Singh. But with many polls showing the party with single-digit support, there is a chance not only that the NDP could lose official party status – 12 seats are needed – but that Mr. Singh could end up seatless as well.
It’s been eight years since the now-46-year-old Mr. Singh rose to take over the NDP’s top job as a relative unknown outside of Ontario. Raised in Windsor, he had a compelling backstory. At 12, he was sexually abused by his taekwondo coach, which, for the longest time, made him feel like he “didn’t deserve love.” Mr. Singh would be bullied as a young, turban-wearing Sikh growing up in a mostly white, blue-collar town. His father was an alcoholic, whose addiction ended up costing him his medical licence and the family home. Mr. Singh would later say that his hardest day as an adult was nothing compared with his “easiest day as a child.” He would become a social justice lawyer before turning to politics in 2011 and being elected NDP MPP – a position from which he would later launch his successful bid to lead the party federally.
Today, the party’s dismal fortunes are widely blamed by party insiders, pollsters and pundits on Donald Trump. Given the global chaos his tariffs have caused and the anger stoked by his talk of annexing Canada, the progressive voter seems to have decided not to split the vote; rather, it appears they believe it’s time to line up behind the person deemed to be best qualified to take on the U.S. President. As things stand today, indications are they’ve decided that’s Liberal Leader Mark Carney, not Mr. Singh.
“If this election comes down to trade issues and staring across the desk at Trump as the final decision for voters, then it’s going to be hard for the NDP, because trade is not historically one of the party’s strong points,” former NDP MP Nathan Cullen said in an interview.
While a supply-and-confidence deal existed between Mr. Singh's NDP and Justin Trudeau's Liberals, Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives did not have room to bring down the minority government.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Of course, one can’t lay all of the NDP’s problems at the feet of the mercurial U.S. President. The NDP lost the support of many inside and outside the party when it decided to prop up the highly unpopular Liberal government of Justin Trudeau by signing a supply-and-confidence agreement in 2022. While Mr. Singh maintains the pact was worth it because it got the government to introduce dental and pharmacare coverage, the party seems to have received little credit for that among voters. Moreso, it helped obscure the two parties’ progressive brands: What was the difference between Liberals and New Democrats any more?
Not to be minimized, also, is the ammunition that pact gave the federal Conservatives. Mr. Singh ripped up the deal in September, 2024, saying the Liberals were “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people.” But then the party proceeded to prop up the same much-disdained government for months afterward, refusing to collaborate with the Conservatives, a party the NDP had little in common with, to bring the Liberals down.
Dismal polling numbers have infected team morale, according to a senior NDP official who can’t be named because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the party. Mr. Mulcair’s decision to write a highly publicized editorial advocating for progressive voters to back the Liberals was seen as a brutal betrayal of his former party. But it also fuelled the current ennui inside it.
Campaign workers struggle to press onward knowing how catastrophic the outcome could be. On the stump, Mr. Singh has dropped any pretense of becoming Prime Minister. You would think, given all that as a backdrop, rallying deflated troops has become one of Mr. Singh’s primary jobs. Apparently, that is not the case.
“You don’t become a New Democrat because you assume you’re going to be in a position of power,” Mr. Singh told The Globe in an interview. “New Democrats don’t enter [elections] with the pursuit of power, of naked power. People become New Democrats because they believe we are going to use our power to do important things.”
But at least provincially, New Democrats in B.C. and Alberta and Manitoba and Saskatchewan certainly go into elections planning to win. They may wonder why NDP success at that level hasn’t translated to success nationally. “We are the New Democratic Party,” Mr. Singh said during his interview with The Globe, putting emphasis on the word new. “It’s a younger party, and it takes time.”
Once the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had renamed itself the New Democratic Party in 1961, it overwhelmingly chose Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas to lead it.
The most recent peak of NDP influence was the 2011 election, when leader Jack Layton brought the party into Official Opposition status while also fighting terminal cancer.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
The NDP was born in August, 1961, and turns 64 this summer. Using youth and inexperience as an excuse for not winning would be aggressively challenged by many in the party. Talk to enough NDP backroom types, past and present, and inevitably, talk of 2011 comes up. It seems absurd to even be mentioning Mr. Layton’s famous “Orange Wave” election in the context of what’s happening today. So why are people referencing it now?
“The week before the English leaders’ debate in 2011 we were at 13 per cent in the polls,” recalled long-time party stalwart Anne McGrath, who has occupied senior roles in the party for decades. “And then things started to turn fast.”
Kathleen Monk, a political consultant who was Mr. Layton’s director of communications in that campaign, points to that election as well as evidence you can’t already count the party out now, either. “Look, you have to trudge through the valley of death the first 14 days of a campaign,” Ms. Monk said in an interview. “And then things start getting real.”
Sure, strange things can happen on the campaign trail. But if anything, 2011 is illustrative of the lost years that have followed for the party, especially in Quebec. The party picked up 59 seats in the province in 2011, a high-water mark it hasn’t come close to matching. On the contrary, it’s been pretty much a disaster ever since. Last election, there was only one New Democrat elected in Quebec.
There are lots of theories among senior voices in the party as to why: 2011 was a freak blip; a province that is resolutely secular will never vote in numbers for a turban-wearing political leader; Bill 21, which outlawed the wearing of religious symbols, including hijabs and turbans, by public servants, made Mr. Singh’s efforts to grow support in Quebec even more daunting.
There is every chance the party could get wiped out entirely there this time around. Absent any realistic shot inside Quebec, it’s hard for the NDP to assert its national party credentials. It also creates the unshakable image of a political institution that is shrinking in status, not growing.
But the NDP’s problems run much deeper than Quebec. It is bleeding support on multiple fronts. Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group, a public opinion survey company, said the NDP currently is only holding 57 per cent of its 2021 vote, with 35 per cent going to the Liberals and 14 per cent going to the Conservatives, according to his latest tracking.
The Tories have been targeting the New Democrats’ blue-collar vote for some time now. The strategy ramped up under Pierre Poilievre, who has broken through with many hard-hat-wearing union members increasingly uncomfortable with the NDP’s focus on identity politics. Mr. Poilievre’s assertion that “wokeness” is upending societal norms has resonated with many outside the Conservatives’ traditional base of support.
Mr. Poilievre has also made affordability the central aspect of his sales pitch to Canadians. This just happens to be the NDP’s bread-and-butter issue. At least it was. “What Poilievre did was effectively use the carbon tax as proof that the NDP wasn’t serious about affordability,” Mr. Lyle said. “All people had to do was look at their gas bills to know he was right.”
Mr. Cullen said that when struggling with how to meet basic needs, a working person can succumb to the kind of “simplistic” arguments the Tories and Mr. Poilievre are making – to wit: Immigrants are the problem.
“What’s that old expression?” Mr. Cullen said. “The greatest scam the right ever pulled was convincing those who made $20 an hour that those who made half that amount are the enemy instead of the guy making $500 an hour. But Poilievre’s pitch on this front is hitting the mark with those who are feeling desperate.”
Pierre Poilievre, cooking naan at a campaign stop at an Indian restaurant in Richmond, B.C., has centred his message on cost of living.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
Brad Lavigne, who has played senior roles in NDP campaigns federally and provincially over decades, says the “grievance style of politics” that Mr. Trump revolutionized and that Mr. Poilievre has made a big part of his political playbook speaks to many people.
“This us-versus-them mentality is very divisive but also is attractive to people who feel their party isn’t speaking to their concerns because they are too focused on class issues rather than day-to-day living issues,” Mr. Lavigne said in an interview. “And you can’t ignore the fact that Mr. Poilievre is a very effective communicator who has drawn some people who were not traditional Conservative supporters into his camp.”
The NDP has generally been an unlikely amalgam of white wine socialists and work-boot, dirt-under-the-fingernails types. There is little question that Mr. Singh has lost some members of both groups; white wine socialists to Mr. Carney and the work-booters to Mr. Poilievre.
There are other problems.
Remember the Leap Manifesto? That was the document fronted by author Naomi Klein and her filmmaker husband Avi Lewis (now a federal NDP candidate) and introduced during the 2015 election. A plan to aggressively tackle climate change, it was viewed as radical and unhelpful by many, including then Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley. It was debated by delegates at the party’s next convention, creating a fissure inside the NDP that may not have completely healed to this day. It unquestionably led to the surprise dumping of Mr. Mulcair as the party leader in 2016.
Ultimately, what the document proposed was a complete move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. While it was never officially adopted by the party, it still lives in the hopes and dreams of many. On that front, the NDP would appear to be at odds with the current zeitgeist around fossil fuels in Canada, which is, if not “drill, baby, drill,” at least a mindset open to more pipelines and energy infrastructure development.
Consequently, Mr. Singh’s call for action on climate change seems thinner by the day. “The environment is no longer the issue it was elections ago,” Mr. Lavigne said. “Now it’s jobs, the economic security that comes with that, our energy security, our ability to sell our natural resources to more than one market, building big things. Those are all coming into play. And there is a tension, a pinch point, inside the New Democratic Party over these issues.”
Parties' environmental policies have shifted a lot in this race. One of Mark Carney's first acts in power was to phase out the consumer carbon price the Liberals had once championed.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
At this juncture, however, seemingly little would be gained by abandoning one of the party’s core positions to chase votes they may not get anyway.
“It’s hard to see how the NDP could lose by being the last party standing on the carbon tax,” Mr. Lyle said. “There’s still 30 per cent of the public that says we should keep the carbon tax the way it is. … The carbon tax was never as radioactive as it’s taken to be right now. The problem is that that almost doesn’t matter now. The tax has been demonized, and it’s just not a winning issue.”
Unless you’re the NDP and are trying to salvage as much of your base as possible.
Not everyone is pessimistic about the party’s future. Ms. Notley, for one, says there is an important role for the federal party to play in this extraordinary moment in which the world finds itself. “And the reason I say that is because we are almost certainly bound to be confronting a very serious economic dislocation for a period of time,” she said in an interview. “And when that happens, more than ever you need a voice that will stand up for working people and vulnerable citizens across the country. And that voice has always been the NDP.”
She added: “Whether you do that as Opposition, whether we do it by holding the balance of power, you need that voice at the table.”
The question few senior New Democrats want to answer these days is the degree to which the party’s leader is responsible for the bleak state of affairs. Asked if this is the end of the line for Mr. Singh unless the party can pull off some kind of miracle and increase its seat total, Ms. Monk, the party insider, won’t bite: “I won’t give you that quote, sorry.”
Others feel it would be inappropriate to kick someone while they are down, especially in the middle of an election. Off the record, a few indicate that the math should speak for itself: The party has been losing votes since the 2011 election. The situation hasn’t improved under Mr. Singh.
While situationally, Mr. Singh can be charismatic and engaging, those traits aren’t translating to a broader audience. It’s fair to ask also whether the NDP, federally, has moved so far from what would be considered a centrist agenda that it is no longer a viable option for most voters. It does beg the question: What is holding the party back federally from doing what its offspring provincially have been doing well for years now? The NDP governments that have been the most successful have been fiscally responsible, balancing budgets instead of running massive deficits outside of abnormal events such as the pandemic.
Regardless, the buck ultimately stops with the leader, and it’s difficult to imagine Mr. Singh staying in the job much longer.
For his part, Mr. Singh won’t address any questions about his future until the election is over. However, it’s unimaginable he remains as leader if the party gets fewer seats than it did last time. Even if the party was able to miraculously maintain all the ridings it won four years ago, Mr. Singh is likely to face strong headwinds if he tries to stay in the job. It would be that much easier for the party to part ways with him should he lose his own seat – which is a distinct possibility.
Mr. Layton’s 2011 rallying cry – “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done” – seems like a quaint rejoinder now. For the first time in years, the party doesn’t even talk about forming government and is almost certainly bracing for a result that could be almost existential in nature.
If the Liberals win, and Mr. Carney governs from the centre-right, there may be room for the NDP to regain its footing in the national political conversation. If the Conservatives win, and the Liberals tack left again, it will be harder for the New Democrats to find a place to be heard.
Mr. Singh and the record number of people who turned out for advance polls will see how the final result turns out on April 28.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Before Mr. Singh wraps up his Vancouver campaign stop, he’s asked whether the party would enter a period of soul-searching after the election. After all, the numbers don’t lie: Between the 2011 and 2021 elections, the NDP has lost about 1.5 million votes. It could add to that grim tally next week.
Might it be time to revisit what exactly the NDP stands for? What does it represent in most people’s minds: a movement party? A protest party? A party that plays honest broker in Ottawa between the other two main parties?
Has the time come to reimagine what the NDP can be?
“I think we’ve shown who we are,” Mr. Singh said. “We’re the ones you can trust with power to get things done for you. That’s what we’ve always been. It started with Tommy Douglas and universal health care. … The more power you give us, rest assured, we will always use it to help out everyday folks.”
This election could well determine the direction of the country for years to come. It could also decide the future of a political party that seems to be fading from the national consciousness by the day.
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