Canada Catchup: Buying Optimism On The NDP

Why I'm Finally Buying Into The NDP Breaking Through

(I've been neglecting Canada these days, and at least in theory we might have a Federal Election coming soon, so I'm starting a new weekly Saturday Canada column - the Canada Catchup.)

One of the reasons I got the 2019 Canadian election right was the fact that I never bought into the idea the NDP would have a particularly good night. I trusted, really from the summer on, that disaffected, soft left, Liberal-NDP swing voters would "come home" and vote for the Liberals out of fear that Andrew Scheer's Conservative Party would be that bad if they managed to get into office. And that is, broadly, what happened.

Why did it happen? That's pretty simple - dissatisfaction with Justin Trudeau wasn't enough to justify the risk of Scheer in the eyes of enough of those voters. I don't want to get into a fight about whether that was right or wrong - the answer is a different voting system where that tradeoff doesn't exist, obviously - but it is the choice that faced down many on the left of politics. It was a tough choice for many, I'm sure, but that fear of a Conservative government was real - I know, I lived it, every day, every poll, every moment of three months of campaigning. It was crippling for many, and I know this because people begged me for reassurance every time any bit of bad news about Liberal fortunes came. Much in the same way Democrats begged for the reassurance in Georgia, Liberals and left wingers did for months in Canada, because of a fear of what a right wing government could do.

That fear killed the NDP and the Greens, because it consolidated the race to blue or red, forcing soft Dippers and Greens home. It's the same thing that happens to minor parties all the time - they get squeezed. It's a law of politics in a winner take all electoral system. It sucks - and again, we need to reform the voting system - but it is a reality that faces more minor left wing parties than fear of the right taking office constrains their voters from always voting for them.

But what happens when that fear goes away?

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The Conservative Party of Canada is having a biennial policy convention this weekend, and one of the motions up for a vote was whether to acknowledge Climate Change is real.

And they voted against it.

Now, to be slightly fair to the Tories, Erin O'Toole will have something in his platform that is called a "plan" to deal with the environment and climate and all that. I put plan in quotes there because his plan will be vacuous nonsense, and everyone who cares about environmental policy knows this. He leads a party that is full of unserious people on this (and, let's be honest, every) issue, and that's why he's languishing around 30% in the polls.

Like, let's be very frank here - does anyone think Erin O'Toole will be Prime Minister after the next election? I mean, if you listen to the Conservative Party Twitter account, they don't even think so, because they keep accusing Trudeau of wanting an election, which you think an opposition would be all for, right? Apparently not, because they know what I know, and what everyone knows - they're going to lose the next election, and almost assuredly lose a bunch of seats in the process. Frank Graves, founder of EKOS polling declared the election over on Twitter Friday night, and if you asked any modeler, any pollsters, any psephologists, or anyone with a Twitter account that follows Polling Canada, they'd all say the same damn thing. This election, whenever it comes, is just about a Liberal Majority or Minority. That's where we are right now. And there's one big beneficiaries of this - the NDP.

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Right now, LeanTossup has the NDP on 18.4% of the vote and 28 seats, improvements in both vote share and seats, and a result that is broadly similar to what Eric Grenier and 338 have projected. I buy that that is where the average of polls are, and that the LeanTossup model is accurately projecting them out from that vote share - after all, the LeanTossup model was the best in 2019 - but I have a sinking suspicion the NDP will end the campaign in a better spot than that.

Jagmeet Singh is often sidelined in the media outside of the campaign, the problem with being the fourth biggest leader in a Parliament where not a lot is happening. Trudeau makes his big announcements away from the Commons, and all the big decisions were taken last year. Now the fights are about how to distribute vaccines, which the NDP don't exactly play a role in the debate around whether the Liberals should be doing more or not.

They tried to pick a political fight with the Government over Pharmacare, the fruits of which we'll have to see over time, but right now they're just hanging around. But, unlike in 2019 pre-writ, they're hanging around at 18-19%, depending on the polling average, and not the mid to low teens that they were then. Jagmeet is a good leader, which is shocking for me to say, since I kinda used to hate the guy, and he will get moments in a general election campaign to impress, like he did in 2019. To my admittedly weak ear, his French seems a bit better these days, and the NDP have a couple of close seats in Quebec where they could be coming back in - and, if the Bloc falters, they could be a decent anti-Liberal antidote in some of their 2015 seats, especially in east Montreal. But mostly that Conservative ineptitude makes me think there is real, possible room to grow for the NDP.

If nobody is scared of the Conservatives running the country after the election - and, to be clear, there is absolutely no risk of that while they're down 10 in Ontario and in third in BC, as Grenier's polling averages show them to be - then the question is a Liberal majority or minority, and the NDP can work quite well as a sanction against the idea of unchecked Liberal power and corruption. The Liberals have proven themselves to be thoroughly untrustworthy - from election promises on electoral reform and abolition of the gay blood ban broken through SNC and WE - when given control of the car. They believe they are the natural governing party, and while that is an accurate portrayal of our country's history, the way they say it in private is proof of their arrogance. They don't know what consequences are, because they've never faced any.

In 2019, if you were a soft Liberal-NDP voter, you went home to the Liberals out of fear of the Tories, but this year, there's nothing to fear. The Tories aren't in the picture, and it comes down to Trudeau alone or Jagmeet having some amount of say in the governance of the country. That is a question where the 25% of the country currently saying they'll vote for a non-Liberal left wing party can coalesce around the NDP. That Liberal vote at 35% is also probably soft, especially in BC - and if the NDP could take even just a bit of the Liberal vote there, a small swing could flip a lot of races in the Greater bit of Greater Vancouver.

Now, none of this is a certainty - maybe Trudeau runs an elite campaign, maybe Jagmeet stumbles - but this is the first time I've gone into an election campaign with hope for the NDP for a long time. I didn't see 2011 happening, obviously, and as much as I walked into 2015 hoping Tom Mulcair could pull off the job running from the front, I didn't have a lot of hope, and we all know what happened there. This time, I can see the NDP doing pretty well, and I don't expect them to underperform where they currently are.

Am I predicting official opposition? Of course not. Am I predicting 60 seats, even? Again, no. But, the NDP's best ever performance in non-Quebec Canada is 44 seats, earned in 2011. They would get 44 seats in 2015 as well, but that included 16 seats in Quebec. Is 44 seats out of the 9 non-Quebec provinces, and somewhere between a couple and a handful in Quebec possible? I think it absolutely is. The other thing is getting to (let's say for the sake of argument) 22% makes the map look a lot more attractive next time, as you get a much better sense of where those next wave of targets are coming from.

It's long been a truism of my beliefs of how politics works that being low on third parties always works. And yet, here I am, believing in the NDP's upside, all because the Conservatives are so far out of the game. The chance is here, guys. Come and take it.