Jagmeet Singh, And One More For The Road
Thank God He’s About To Be Gone
“We're drinkin' my friend/To the end of a brief episode”
Jagmeet Singh has been the leader of the NDP for, somehow, nearly 8 years. His leadership has been, in totality, a fucking disaster. He had been slowly killing the NDP, and it has long been this site’s position that he needed to resign. The only column I wrote in the post-Election week in 2021 about Canada was that he needed to go, because it was so angering that the NDP were seemingly content to tolerate the intolerable.
Since then, Singh had led the NDP off the cliff entirely. Some of this site’s greatest pieces have been attacks on Singh, from housing policy idiocy to screeds attacking the fundamental dishonesty of him and his position in public life. He propped up the Liberals for years while claiming the Liberals were Satan, and is now left wondering why the voters don’t like him.
The NDP coalition is made up of three main groups of people - committed socialists who represent the party’s core vote, the socially progressive left who swing between the Liberals and NDP, and the culturally conservative, economic left, many of whom are now considering the Conservatives in ways they haven’t before. Those three groups are not everybody, but they’re the core elements that matter. And Singh has pissed off two of them.
If you are a socially progressive left wing voter who thinks Pierre Poilievre is bad, the Trudeau government was good, and that Donald Trump is Satan, Singh’s relentless negative attacks on the Liberals and on Justin Trudeau’s personal character have pissed off voters who would otherwise want to support a party whose votes enabled the minority Parliament legislative agenda. The level of vitriol that Trudeau loyalists had for Singh never shocked me, but it was always comedic how people who routinely would slag me off for my anti-Trudeau negativity loved cheering for my Singh bashing.
If you’re a culturally conservative voter who also believes that government needs to spend more money on rural hospitals and skills training and apprenticeships, you hate Singh. He’s been the chief reason Justin Trudeau, who has been very bad in the views of those voters, remains in office. Singh has been propping up a Liberal government that’s been hilariously out of touch with regional Canada and has been a disaster for many rural voters in seats the NDP represent like Skeena or Cowichan or Powell River. For those voters, who aren’t fans of Trudeau or the Liberals, they are now no better than them.
So who’s left? A few tactical voters and the base of the party, who are electorally irrelevant. Ah, but Evan, you must understand, Jagmeet is a great leader in campaign! No, he’s not - the great 2019 “surge” was mostly just the Greens campaign stalling out and the Liberal campaign being eminently meh. And he showed it in the French Debate last night that he fucking sucks.
I’ll be live-blogging the English debate tonight but Singh proved in the French debate he has nothing to say on the issues that Canadians care about, and that his great tragedy was not replacing Andrea Horwath as NDP leader in Ontario, because he is running to be the Premier of Canada. His relentless focus on health care in this debate and in this campaign is fine as a matter of moral courage or whatever, but it makes no sense when you realize that there’s no actual levers they can pull. They can poke and prod, but the reason it’s not a debate topic is simple - it’s provincial jurisdiction. But he doesn’t care because he has nothing to say about the big issues.
Be it cost of living, immigration, Trump, crime, drugs, or whatever else, the NDP’s opinions are either comically out of touch or completely irrelevant. Do you care what Jagmeet Singh would do in negotiations with Trump if he became PM? Of course not, it’s a joke to even consider it. And in an election where we need a serious debate about the future the guy who has poisoned the well of our politics needs to exit fast.
New Democrats will admit this in sourced quotes about “confused” messaging but the NDP have lied to Canadians systemically. If you care about truth in politics, the demise of Jagmeet Singh is and will be a good day. He has been constantly lying, because no matter which you think is true, he’s lying to somebody. Either he believes the Liberals are corporatist bootlickers who are no better than the Conservatives, at which point he is betraying every principle by leading a worker’s party into constantly backing of a corporatist party that works against workers interests. Or the Liberals aren’t a corporate party and they’re not opposed to workers and the Liberals aren’t scum, which makes sense when you realize that the NDP kept fucking propping them up but does mean that Singh lied and lied about how he actually felt about the Liberals. Either way he’s a liar.
He cosplays as a working class hero while wearing Rolexes and wearing bespoke suits. He has been caught holding a Versace bag before, which just screams in touch with the working class. None of these things would matter if it wasn’t the left’s opinion that these sorts of status markers do matter. But if his position is that Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau before him are out of touch, then you can’t be strutting into the Sheraton in Versace.
Singh is either the stupidest man in this country’s often very dumb politics or he holds Canadians in contempt. He either is too stupid to know he’s lying to us because he seems to think this is intellectually honest, or he’s so cynical he thinks it worthwhile doing this. But the funny thing is, if it’s cynical it’s so fucking stupid. Singh is a cancer on our politics who has done more to lower standards and allow for the cynical degrading of our politics than almost anyone. He has lied, he has pandered, and he has betrayed everyone who ever voted for him. As a 2021 NDP voter, that is the most regrettable use of my franchise that I have ever done, a mistake I will never make again.
Now, I’m going to listen to the words that led this piece and I’m going to enjoy one more for the road. Because thank fucking God, I’ll be drinking to the brief episode that is our national nightmare of Jagmeet Singh, NDP leader.
All this plus a few other issues: he holds left-liberal positions, not democratic socialist ones (hence is almost total lack of an economic platform featuring public ownership of key assets, resources, and infrastructure), and of course the absolute lack of defence and foreign policy. He’s used Palestine as an identity politics token rather than a serious issue (witness his failure to use his leverage with the government to force policy change) and failed on electoral reform (again, failed to use his leverage). I honestly don’t see what he’s offering. Signed, a democratic socialist who refuses to vote NDP this time.
The final nail in his political coffin should be his ass-backwards strategy for this campaign. Instead of leveraging all the good his party did supporting the Lib government and getting pharma and dental care in return, he's gone full frontal attack. He could have increased the NDP seat count and kept the Libs to a minority if he'd done this. He's needed to go for a long time.