NDP Autopsy: Jagmeet Must Resign

On The Terrible 2021 Election

Jagmeet Singh needs to resign as NDP leader.

This is not coming from some Liberal with an agenda to prop up Justin Trudeau, whose party I last voted for in 2015, but coming from someone who voted for the NDP in 2021. It is my strong belief that Canada needs an effective non-Liberal, left party to push the Liberals and to push the debate to the left, and I voted for the Ontario NDP in 2018. I say all of this to make one point very clear - I want the best for the NDP, I genuinely do. And that’s why Jagmeet has to resign, and do so immediately.

We’ll start with the election results, which is the reason that this topic has such traction as to compel me to write about it now, where the NDP won 25 seats, a net gain of one. I could be wrong, but 5 seats changed hands involving the NDP on Monday - they lost St. John’s East (which, fine, defensible) and Hamilton Mountain (uh, not so much so) to the Liberals, and gained Edmonton-Griesbach and Port Moody-Coquitlam off the Tories, and Nanaimo-Ladysmith off the Greens, to come to 25 seats. Some in the NDP are trying to spin this as a victory, which is mindnumbing in its idiocy and also betrays the fundamental unseriousness of the NDP, but even beyond that, let’s dig in to these results.

The NDP failed to win Davenport, which they lost in 2019 by 1400 votes, against a Liberal MP that even Liberals admit is fucking crazy, they failed to win Parkdale-High Park, where Peggy Nash used to be the MP, and they even failed to get within 2000 votes in Spadina-Fort York, where the denounced Liberal incumbent was dumped over a 2019 rape charge which ended up being overturned. Yes, before you yell at me, some large number of those votes were cast before the rape charge was publicly known, but also, that seat is the exact kind of seat where a strong party could make the difference - it’s geographically tiny, the voters there are likely to have degrees, hold socially liberal views such that would therefore preclude most voters for knowingly voting for a rapist (or, sorry, credibly accused rapist, because I would like to not to be sued), and they still shit the bed. The NDP priority that final weekend should have been blitzing Toronto to win Davenport, Parkdale, and Spadina, and Jagmeet didn’t show up. The last time he was in Toronto was Thursday morning, and between then and election day he didn’t come back to the largest city in the country, and the city with the most potential NDP gains to be found. He found time to spend an entire day on the East Coast, and he found the time to go to fucking Kingston with four days left, but no, he couldn’t go back to Toronto.

Let’s talk about where he did go after his final appearance in Toronto - Kingston, where the NDP lost by 12%, Sherbrooke, where the NDP vote fell by 14%, Sackville, NS, where the NDP came in third and lost by 15%, Halifax, where the NDP lost by 24%, Saskatoon, where the NDP botched Saskatoon West again, Regina, where they lost by 13%, Edmonton, where they did flip a seat, congrats, Kootenay-Columbia, where they lost by 8%, before he spent all of Sunday blitzing the Lower Mainland - and failing to flip Burnaby North-Seymour or West Van, which was touted as a key target because of Avi Lewis. Just a masterclass of strategic brilliance here, clearly. From that list it’s incredibly clear the NDP has no idea where they were targeting, or who their voters were, and it led to just a clusterfuck on the night. Clearly the NDP had no idea they were losing Hamilton Mountain, because if they thought they were in trouble there there’s no way they’d be spending time in Sackville, right? They could have spent Friday blitzing Toronto and Hamilton, and they might have won an additional four seats from it - Parkdale, Davenport, Spadina, and Hamilton Mountain - but they spent precious time on fantasies. They had an event in Regina, where they lost their only seat in 2019 by 24%. Brilliant job, just fucking wonderful.

Ah, but every party makes odd strategic decisions, right, that’s not Jagmeet’s fault that party data was off, is it? I mean, putting aside the fact that the NDP hollowed out riding association funds for the national campaign, making the quality of people available to work at the local level worse, it is his fault for making extremely dumb and indefensible decisions. Let’s be brutally honest about what the NDP did here, they decided that an event in Regina was more important than more time in Toronto on the Saturday before the election, which is so stupid I don’t even have to explain that one. That’s a fireable offence to begin with, but let’s move past that, and get to what he was selling when he did show up places, as ill-advised as his decisions on where to go were.

He was trying to sell a climate package that was universally derided as a joke by every smart person in the climate space, including the guy who wrote Rachel Notley’s climate plan, and was trying to claim that Trudeau’s climate plan was a fraud despite the fact that Andrew Weaver called it the plan he had been waiting his whole life for. He was trying to sell himself as a different kind of politician and then spent two minutes ducking the simplest yes or no question on Trans Mountain from Rosemary Barton like every politician ever. He was trying to sell himself as a radical, and his platform was warmed over buzzwords. Where was the national telco designed to bust Rogers and Bell? Where was the fund for cities to buy hotels and turn them into accommodations for displaced people? Where was the vision on what a NDP foreign policy would look like, pulled between the anti-war doves in the Layton tradition (remember, Layton had been the one to advocate for an earlier withdrawal of Canadian troops, before being called Taliban Jack for the policy which Harper ended up implementing)? Where was there any form of seriousness in this fucking campaign?

The thing that gets me about the NDP is that they could actually be a party worth quite a bit to the country, even if they never replace the Liberals. The history of parties being pushed by their rivals is long, and even in Canada, Pearson and Trudeau were both pushed left by the NDP at the time. Now, however, Jagmeet has reduced his party to a joke, a truth no more clear than when Jason Kenney had to apologize for killing his citizens with his asinine and idiotic “Best Summer Ever”, and Jagmeet’s response was to blame Trudeau for disunity in the federation. Straight up, if you are this unserious, leave politics forever and never come back, because if you think Justin Trudeau is responsible for Jason Kenney playing politics with people’s lives, you’re either lying to everyone or genuinely too stupid to hold public office - and we know you aren’t stupid.

Jagmeet Singh got a pass in the 2019 campaign because the argument was every leader would have done worse than Mulcair did in 2015, which putting aside whether that was true or not ignored the fact that Singh lost seats in English Canada compared to 2015 too. He won 23 seats in the 9 non-Quebec provinces and the Territories in 2019, compared to 28 for Mulcair, and that should have been a sign that it wasn’t just Quebec racism that cost the party. Now, he’s at 24 outside Quebec, still less than Mulcair’s supposedly completely unacceptable result, and yet people are saying this result should see him stay in office? Get the fuck out of here.

Jagmeet has had two cracks at this, and he has failed to deliver results worthy of the party of Tommy Douglas, Ed Broadbent, and Jack Layton. He has failed a tradition in Canada worthy of advocacy and defence, and he has betrayed the millions who voted for his party. His leadership has been an abject failure, and if he is given a third crack at running a national campaign, it should be a source of national shame that the Canadian left is so okay with preening nonsense and TikTok virality over seriousness and proper advocacy for the Canadians who need a better government than the Liberals would provide without a left-wing check on their power. I don’t have anything against Jagmeet as a person, but as a leader he has failed. It is on everyone who wants the best outcomes for Canadians who desperately need progressive government to make that fact clear. Jagmeet must resign, or else the NDP’s deep unseriousness will hurt all the groups it purports to care about. If Jagmeet cares for the good of the nation, a transition to the new leader will be announced soon. If he doesn’t, he will cling to power. Either way, he needs to resign.