NDP: If You Want To Save Your Asses, Replace Jagmeet With Angus

On An Electoral Necessity

I don’t think anyone will be surprised when I say this, but it’s clear that the NDP’s electoral fortunes are tied right now to getting rid of Jagmeet Singh. On the new boundaries, the current NDP is only projected for 24 seats, and they’re only projected for that because right now Leger has them at 24% in Ontario so I have to tip a couple of inner Toronto seats and a couple other LPC-NDP battles to them. It’s obscuring the fact that the NDP is losing 6 seats in BC, or more precisely, Port Moody-Coquitlam and then the Far Away 5, as I might start calling them.

The NDP’s chance at not just holding firm but gaining seats isn’t through Singh or his specific brand of Trudeau antagonism, but through holding the Far Away 5 out in BC (Skeena, Kootenay, North Island-Powell River, Nanaimo, and Esquimalt Saanich Sooke), and then holding (or gaining, as the lines dictate) seats in Northern Ontario or the industrial areas of Ontario. If the NDP actually care about winning Conservative seats or holding Conservative targets at bay – seats like Oshawa and Kenora, that are Conservative held, or holding back Tory advances in places like Windsor Tecumseh or Timiskaming – then they need a new leader.

A lot of hope, including by friend of this site Max Fawcett, has been pinned on Daniel Blaikie, the erstwhile member for somewhere vaguely Winnipeg, but the problem with Blaikie is that he’s a better version of Singh’s politics – broadly socially liberal, broadly suburban faced in appeal, and fundamentally not going to solve the electoral crisis at the NDP’s doorstep. There is actually one person who can solve their problem, if he were to lead them into the next election.

And that’s why, despite the fact that he’s blocked me on Twitter, any progressive serious about wanting Poilievre not to win needs to endorse Charlie Angus becoming leader of the NDP post haste.

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I know Angus has a bad reputation on parts of the more big-L Liberal left for his role scrutinizing the WE Charity and the scandal there, but if you’re a Liberal whose biggest priority, getting Angus in the NDP leadership is a win. The Liberal vote in places like Soo St. Marie and Manitoulin is going to go down, but if it goes down to the Conservatives, that’s a lot worse than if it goes to Angus. If the NDP can return to what it historically has been, that might make it harder to win places like Nipissing or North Bay in 2015-style years, but it also makes the Tories winning them in years slightly worse than 2021 impossible, which is a trade worth making.

Go out west, however, and the benefits clearly exceed any concerns. In BC, there are truly three different electoral battles – broadly speaking, LPC-CPC in the Greater bits of Greater Vancouver, LPC-NDP in the City of Vancouver proper and Burnaby, and then CPC-NDP on the Island and the Interior. An Angus NDP would be one that realigns the NDP vote in an efficient way, protecting their non-metro incumbents and only suffering slight haircuts to Don Davies’ margin while not wasting votes or energy in the outer suburbs.

For the NDP, their only plausible current path to power – real, substantive amounts of power is for them to be the partners to the Liberals. I know it is a long term folk dream of the party to do what they’ve done to the Liberals in the west and supplant them, but the thing is, that’s not on the table right now and it’s certainly not on the table with Jagmeet, so the NDP has to make a decision. Sticking with Jagmeet will end with the NDP losing seats and the broader left being closer to losing power.

On the other hand, an Angus leadership would represent an opportunity – a reset on the pandemic years and the anger that a lot of their traditional voters feel about elites ignoring their (as they see them) legitimate concerns about vaccination and mandates, an opportunity to have something new to sell to counter Poilievre’s argument that he’s the breath of fresh air needed in Ottawa, and a leader who authentically understands cultural conservatives.

As much as it always stuns some number of my readers, the NDP’s current electoral map is full of socially conservative people. It’s not that they’re all ardent homophobes or racists, but the NDP base in the seats they actually hold has a lot of people who would feel uncomfortable seeing two gay men holding hands in public or still call our Indigenous people by the name implied by the Indian Act. We know this, because in much of northern Ontario the NDP vote fell to either the Tories’ or PPC’s benefit, and the seats with some of the highest PPC votes are NDP held.

Whenever I make this point, I get accused of slandering these people, and I’m not. It’s a statement of the bloody truth that the NDP vote is a marriage between people who would be content to never be faced with active evidence of homosexuality and those who actively seek out queer spaces. It’s a marriage that only makes sense when you consider both wanting economic redistribution while being uncomfortable with the societal changes of the last 25 years and protecting marginalized communities as being “left wing”. They are, but it obscures the very real cultural differences between those two things.

What happens with the modern NDP is their membership is very urban and very socially liberal and very comfortable with the products of modernity – very comfortable in mixed company, whatever the mix might be – and the voters they need to keep aren’t, so the membership has saddled the party with a leader who can’t hold the emerging frontier.

I don’t like Charlie Angus as a human being much – I think he’s self aggrandizing, I think his pitch for a malapportionment is idiocy on stilts designed to make it easier for him to win again, but the thing is, I get that that’s a feature, not a bug, if he’s to become leader. An NDP leader who I like isn’t going to win them anything, because a NDP leader I like is going to be a Liberal without the arrogance and the tendency towards ethical malpractice.

If the NDP wants to help this country, they need to replace Jagmeet with Charlie Angus and reorient the party back to their economically left wing roots. It won’t replace the Liberals, but it’ll make Poilievre’s path forward nearly impossible, and lock in their ability to control a Liberal government. If NDP voters and NDP MPs care about the policy advances they claim to, they’ll turf Jagmeet tomorrow. If they don’t, know they’re not actually serious about putting country over party.