Idlout, Floorcrossing, And The NDP Crawling Back To Jagmeet’s Failure

On The New Liberal Majority

What is this site for if not to say what others won’t?

I kid, slightly - I was certainly not the only person warning the NDP that the decision to keep Jagmeet Singh as leader was leading the party to disaster - but Tuesday’s news that Lori Idkout, the MP for Nunavut, has crossed to the Liberals has me thinking about Singh.

This site’s archives are riddled with correct takes and also errors - my confidence O’Toole wouldn’t win in 2021 despite strong polling is paired with an uncanny faith in Premier Steven Del Duca. I certainly get my reputation, and the fact that Mark Carney won the 2025 election for the Liberals doesn’t really make me feel any better about the 2022 columns saying Poilievre could never win. But the one thing I was unambiguously right about was Singh, who was obviously driving the NDP off a cliff for the entirety of his time as leader.

Singh won less seats in English Canada in both 2019 and 2021 than Tom Mulcair’s allegedly unacceptable 2015 performance, and his decision to enter supply and confidence with the Liberals was always going to kill the party. That’s not revisionism - I wrote it the day that he signed that godforsaken document.

Why am I thinking about all of this? Because as I think about Idlout crossing the floor, I keep coming back to one basic truth - Singh’s catastrophic leadership, and the decision to let him fight the 2025 election, has led to this - a situation where the vagaries of resource development and defence spending policy don’t just cause a tiny fracture in the party, but deal what could possibly be a death blow to the chances of getting party status back at the next election. And every other bit of analysis leads you crawling back to Singh’s failure.

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Let’s not underestimate the stakes of this - the NDP’s path to 12 seats before this news was already extraordinarily narrow, given the fact that it would take winning back CPC-NDP seats in rural and regional BC and smaller working class cities southwestern Ontario while also winning back Peter Julien and Matt Green’s urban progressive ex-fiefdoms. If, or more accurately when, the Liberals pick up Boulerice’s Montreal seat, the task was going to be nigh impossible, because the leader who wins you back Windsor West and London Fanshawe isn’t going to win back New Westminster or Hamilton Centre. Whatever you think of Avi Lewis, the task he is likely to be handed is immense.

Now it’s even fucking harder. Singh’s calamitous campaign and Boulerice’s departure means the NDP have 4 even remotely safe seats and two seats where they won by 300 votes or less. Idlout’s floor crossing makes it even easier for the Liberals to flip it, but given the scale of northern development under Carney and the fact that we managed to come so close in 2025 with a candidate not nominated until April, it’s likely we would have won it with or without a floor crossing. Don Davies is equally in trouble next time, because instead of Liberal resources being spent to defend safe seats because we didn’t understand the map, Vancouver Liberals will be correctly deployed in Kingsway in a way they weren’t in 2025. Hell, Gord Johns will also get significantly more CPC attention next time with Avi as leader, though their lacklustre polling might save Johns.

This is Singh’s legacy. It confounded me at the time that nobody else could see the crisis the NDP were facing in their Conservative-facing battleground, and I was proven entirely correct by the results. Of the 24 seats the NDP had on the new lines going into the 2025 election, the CPC won 10, the Liberals won 7, and the NDP held 7. They got blasted out of Timmins and Skeena by the Tories, Victoria and Churchill by the Liberals, and even in the seats they held they’re by no means clear. All because of the arrogance to treat legitimate warning signs about Singh as a luxury that you didn’t need to worry about.

The NDP are going to be down to 5 seats in short order - when Boulerice leaves, they won’t win the seat again - which means they’ll need to functionally run the table of their key targets to get back party status. Yes, a couple of CPC-held seats will be relatively easy gains on paper - Conservatives flocking to Carney in Manitoba and Alberta make Transcona and Griesbach fairly easy flips right now - but they’re staring down the barrel not of one bad election and recovery, but a systemic repositioning as an irrelevance.

The NDP doesn’t have two more chances at it, they have one. If this was a blip, an aberration, and they’re back with party status and a decent share of the vote, then they will be considered a big party again. But if the NDP don’t have party status after the next election, and the Liberals win a comfortable majority, questions that haven’t even been considered will start to be asked. Will Cochrane and Vassy still include Dippers on their panels? Will there be some form of head to head format on offer for debates moving forward? Will the already limited amount of coverage the NDP get from the print press be slashed further? The answers won’t be pretty, if they no longer are a major party.

At that point, it’ll be nearly impossible for the party to recover. The loss of coverage will only reinforce the party’s position as an irrelevance, which will make it even harder to break through. As the Liberals consolidate their left flank with people like Idlout and soon-to-be MP and former ONDP Deputy Leader Doly Begum, you’ll see a similar pattern with capable people choosing the only vehicle fit for purpose. Idlout might be today’s crisis, but her departure is really just emblematic of the crisis the NDP’s faced since they stupidly let Jagmeet fight the 2025 election. That decision set the NDP on a course to disaster, one they’re not going to be able to solve with Avi Lewis.

But hey, at least they didn’t have to agree with a Liberal and avoid this whole problem.

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