Jagmeet's Dishonourable Delay

On Necessary Exit

The thing I keep being told by people in the NDP or from people who know Jagmeet Singh is that he’s an honourable, decent man. Having never met him, I can’t voice an opinion, but I’ve heard it from enough people to think it’s probably true, on a personal level. My problem with the man, however, is how fundamentally dishonourable his conduct has been as Leader of the NDP.

Singh’s entire leadership hangs on a fundamentally fraudulent idea – that the NDP have held the Liberals to a minority government, when it’s a complete lie. And because of it, he has managed to convince, somehow, a majority of his caucus and his members that he isn’t the single biggest impediment to the politics his party supposedly stands for out there. And whatever successes come from the Confidence and Supply Agreement, he has set back the left a decade at minimum by signing onto formal status as the Liberals’ junior partner. And he doesn’t even have the honour to leave, and let the party try and steer away from the rocks he’s set a collision course for.

Singh has been a punching bag in these pages for a while, and I hold no apology for it. Whatever you think of the man, he is emblematic of everything that is wrong with politics – someone for whom personal glory is more important than the good of the movement, someone willing to lie and deceive for his own purposes, someone who is willing to say or so anything to try and get any form of power. We don’t usually talk about Singh in these terms because of his supposed human niceness, but as a leader he is exactly what so many on the left claim to hate in the visage of Pierre Poilievre. Put more bluntly, every day more he stays as leader is a day he is putting himself above the party.

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The supposed hook for this column is today’s Leger poll, which has the CPC up 17 in Ontario and the NDP stagnant on 2021 at 18%, but let’s be honest, this is about everything. This is about being in an agreement with a party you supposedly hate, this is about the party being broke and therefore unable to conduct an election campaign even if you wanted one, this is about a leader putting the Parliamentary pension into the discussion of what’s in the national interest for how long this Parliament should last. This is about Liberal weakness and the NDP being unable or unwilling to meet the moment.

More than that, however, it’s about tribalism and partisanship and the complete disinterest in the NDP to even think about whether better is possible. Usually when I write this column I’m pissed, angry and railing against the world of some moronic statement or policy from them. This time, it’s pure sadness – sadness that one of our great national institutions has been reduced to this.

The NDP would lose seats if an election was today. When the next election comes they’ll continue to lose the seats they’re currently losing to the Tories, like the Vancouver Island and Interior ones and their Northern Ontario seats, but the Liberals will rebound at least to some level and the gains they’re staring at in Toronto will recede. They’ll be reduced to a rump, blown out of their traditional working class cities and towns while not making it back in Toronto.

This is supposed to be a party and a movement that is about sacrifice, collectivism, and the many and not the few. In staying as leader far beyond his utility to the movement, Singh is defying not just political reality and what gives the NDP the best chance of holding seats after the next election, but also the entire point of the movement he is so allegedly proud to lead. Or, to be blunter – if the average regular Canadian was as bad at their jobs as Jagmeet is at his, they’d be out on their asses.

If the NDP is to mean anything moving forward, they have to think through what they want to mean to people, and in this case it means leadership. It doesn’t just mean leadership, because it also requires a complete reassessment of who they’re for and what they stand for. And Jagmeet will never do it because to do that would require acknowledging just how bad the NDP’s station is right now.

The reason I said his whole leadership is based on a lie is because it is. The NDP did nothing to stop Trudeau winning another majority government in 2019 or 2021, complete electoral irrelevances. What happened in 2015 was simple – the Conservative collapsed so heavily that the Liberals won majority government with seats they airquotes “shouldn’t” have won, like the 4 Albertas and Mission-Matsqui and Fundy Royal and NB Southwest and a bunch of others, which meant that the Liberals were notionally in a minority position just on likely losses.

What majority government optimists in 2019 (and then 2021) understood was that there were 15 NDP seats that were likely to fall in Quebec, and that the path to majority was through those NDP seats. The problem for the Liberals was that the Bloc surged and the other path got wiped away, and then the Bloc held their ground in 2021.

The reason this matters is that New Democrats, in accepting two extremely pathetic performances from Singh in those campaigns, have essentially said that their view of his leadership wasn’t in any way about how well Singh did, but how well the Bloc did. Somehow, NDP partisans and backers of the current leadership have put themselves in the rhetorical spot of arguing that the existence of a Hung Parliament is a success unto itself, and therefore that Jagmeet should stay because the Bloc surged in the final 10 days of that campaign.

Much to the chagrin of those who want to discredit this, I’m sympathetic to the cause. I have voted NDP both federally and provincially, I cried when Jack Layton died, and I made sure to steal a copy of the Montreal Gazette from the hotel in Chambly we stayed in the next morning to read the tributes. I see the value of a vehicle to push the Liberals left, even when many people who consider me a fellow traveler despise its very existence. I am who the NDP needs to think highly of it, and I am increasingly unconvinced of its purpose.

As currently constituted and currently led, the Federal NDP are a waste of space, a political wasteland, an abyss of well intentioned failure. But it’s led by a man I can no longer ascribe that last modifier to. The NDP are led by a man who isn’t fit to shine the shoes of its great leaders, a man so manifestly unfit to do the job it is a wonder that the self obvious solution does not strike NDP MPs and members as necessary every time he speaks.

The Liberals are nowhere and the NDP is staring down the barrel of a decade of irrelevance, all for a man who refuses to do what every leader who cares more for the movement than themselves has to do. Every day Jagmeet Singh clings on to his leadership is a day the damage the NDP will sustain worsens, and every day it is harder to look at him as anything other than antithetical to the party. What the NDP needs is a leader who cares more about the collective than himself, and Singh has proven his addiction to the spotlight will never be beaten by what’s best for party or country. Given that, he must go.