Confidence’s Cancerous Conclusion

On The NDP’s Decision

Let’s play a game, shall we?

Why are the NDP pulling the plug on the confidence and supply agreement? I can’t really figure it out, because it’s a horribly dumb idea. It’s not going to appeal to Liberal-NDP switchers who like the government and like the deal, and it’s not going to solve the NDP’s regions problem, so what the fuck is the point? It’s a move designed to do something, despite the fact that Singh refuses to actually make a fucking decision about what the NDP wants to be. 

A February 2024 Abacus Data poll asked Canadians a pair of forced-choice Preferred PM questions - Poilievre v Trudeau and Poilievre v Singh. 66% of NDP voters preferred Trudeau to Poilievre, with 34% preferring Poilievre. That split was slightly more favourable the other way, with Liberals breaking 73/27 for Singh. But in both cases sizable proportions of their parties would rather Pierre Poilievre than the other progressive option. And that’s a huge problem for assumptions about some form of progressive alliance.

What people who want to advocate for a progressive alliance - be it local deals, a national agreement, or a full fledged merger - miss is that the NDP and Greens are not people who are merely too stupid to vote for the Liberal Party. They’re not people who can’t grasp the concept of vote splitting, it’s people who either genuinely believe that only their party deserves their vote - often people who believe that there is something noble in building a movement from the ground - or people who want to protest vote. My favourite stat in the whole world is that by one estimate, in 2015, 29% of UKIP voters intended to vote to Remain in the EU at a future referendum. Something like a third of UK Independence Party voters were at least open to voting Remain.

The crisis that Jagmeet Singh and the entire NDP faces is a fundamental truth that political parties are substantially more heterodox than we realize. And the reason I’m bringing all of this up is that there is an image of the NDP that needs to die. The NDP are not actually the urban, metropolitan party that they pretend they are. They are two parties mashed together by first past the post, sure, but their dominant strength is in places where their brand isn’t urban metropolitan social issues, but a working class economic coalition that cannot agree on much beyond fuck the rich. And it’s the story of NDP failure in both Ontario and nationally.

Wab Kinew got around this problem in Manitoba by putting up better than anyone ever could have expected results in the Winnipeg metro. Winning the Tuxedo byelection earlier this year was merely a capper on the election, but even in the immediate aftermath of the General Election, the story was NDP (relative) underperformance outside the metro, and incredible overperformance in it. David Eby is trying to make the same play in BC now, winning moderate, federal Liberal supporters who voted for the BC Liberals in the Lower Mainland to offset losing seats in the Interior, Island, and North.

In Ontario, the NDP are closer to a true coalition of the working class and the urban centres, but even then it’s falling apart. The NDP lost seats in Windsor, Hamilton, and Timmins to the PCs last time around, they lost their Thunder Bay seat to the PCs but stole the Liberals’ one, and they’re polling so badly that they’re somewhere between possible and likely going to bleed even more seats like Oshawa, the Thunder Bay seat they did win, Timiskaming-Cochrane, another Hamilton, and another Windsor.

Federally, the tenuous coalition already did fall apart. The NDP’s current power base of seats is a combination of genuinely Big City urban seats (Boulerice in Montreal, 2 in Winnipeg, 2 in Edmonton, 5 seats in Vancouver), some successes in second tier metros (Hamilton, Windsor, Victoria/southern Vancouver Island), and then regional “cities” that are closer to glorified towns (Skeena, Kootenay, Northern Ontario, the rest of Vancouver Island). The problem with that coalition is that Northern Ontario, Windsor, Skeena, Kootenay, and the rest of Vancouver aren’t “progressive” in the same way that Danforth and Davenport are. And it shouldn’t surprise people that voters that live in Comox or Kenora think the word is going to hell in a handbox.

What is happening to the NDP is the same thing that has happened to every left wing party the last decade or so, especially ones with formal union ties. The Australian Labor Party won in 2022 despite not even coming close to winning former Labor heartlands in Queensland, Democrats have seen their support in places like Minnesota’s Iron Range and Youngstown, Ohio collapse, and even British Labour’s massive landslide didn’t return the party to its previous heights in many Red Wall seats like Ashfield. Those parties are winning elections in substantially different ways than they did a decade ago, let alone 3 decades ago. The NDP have to decide what they want to do moving forward.

They can either move forward from here to try and save the right trending seats by cutting back on the social progressivism and focusing solely on economic populism or they can try and become a party for social liberals and progressives who think the Liberals are weak on Palestine, gay and trans rights, etc, but neither of those options are aided by today’s decision.

My problem with Jagmeet’s leadership is that it is entirely superficial. He is the most what you see is what you get party leader I’ve ever seen. There is no hidden complexity or depth to him. There’s no strategy to revitalize the left, no strength in organizing that can or will eventually help win us elections or power, it’s just vain self interest. It’s cosplaying a working class hero complaining about the price of apples while wearing a Rolex. It’s the fact that in his video announcing he’s ripping up the deal, 18 seconds in he says “The Liberals have let people down. They don’t deserve another chance” and then there’s another 81 seconds of nonsense that at no point says he’s going to vote to bring down this government. He is all tell, and no show.

The future of the Canadian left is a topic that fascinates me, and it’s become one of this site’s recurring hobbyhorses because it’s really fucking annoying the number of people who think they can just speedrun progressive governments forever by changing the voting system or masterbatory fantasies about a merger of the Liberals and NDP that has none of the very obvious downsides of one. The left needs serious people and serious thinking. The fact that I am what passes for serious is a rather serious indictment of the state of the left, but it makes sense when you remember that Jagmeet Singh gets to lead the party of Tommy Douglas into the ground.

This decision will do nothing to help the NDP. Liberal-NDP switchers will hate the NDP for this and make it harder for them to take credit for the achievements, as the Lib Dems in 2015 found after their policy of “conscious uncoupling” from the Tories. The NDP have already taken all the damage they will take from signing the thing, and now they’ve pissed off their own voters who supported the deal and the potential Liberals who are pissed at Trudeau but could never countenance Poilievre.

If you think this is going to save the NDP in Charlie Angus’s seat, you’re hopelessly naive or you think voters outside of the big cities are all rubes. The NDP will not be able to run against a government they propped up for at minimum 3 years like they’re actually an oppositional party. If they try and go to Skeena and Kootenay and Comox and Timmins and say that they hate Trudeau just as much as their voters do, they’ll get laughed at. And they deserve it.

Jagmeet can be in or out of the deal. He’s still a fundamentally cancerous leader leading a fundamentally broken party. Until he pulls the plug on this Parliament, everything out of his mouth is pure, uncut poison, lies designed to make Canadians believe a fundamental mistruth. He is the only reason the Liberals have governed the last three years. He is still saying he is open to supporting the government while claiming they don’t deserve a second chance. He is a cancer on this country. And all today’s announcement did was lay his fundamental dishonour to bare once again.