NDP's Leverage Lunacy

Spoiler: They Still Have None

There are days when it’s really obvious which political commentators also pay attention to sports, and specifically the business of sports. It’s not a bad thing if you don’t, but it shows when we get to minority parliaments and the concept of leverage, because political parties make all sorts of claims about their leverage that never hold up.

Right now, we’re seeing the limits of Jagmeet Singh’s leverage, because the NDP are desperately scrambling to claim that actually they’ll pull the trigger on an election if there’s not Pharmacare soon. The problem? Whether or not your threat gives you leverage entirely depends on whether the threat is credible, and whether the other side are scared of the outcome. And right now, the Liberals have no reason to think it’s credible.

But it’s a good thing the NDP endorsed Jagmeet, because he’s the leader who’s killed any chance of leverage.

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I know there’s a portion of people who don’t like the sports analogy, but it’s the easiest way of illustrating the point. The NDP want to be Connor McDavid – at the end of the day, McDavid can walk into Ken Holland’s office and say “give me my money or I’m gone” and Edmonton has to do it. They can hope that McDavid’s goodwill and understanding of how a salary cap works means he won’t be unreasonable, but if McDavid says give me $3M more than anyone else, Edmonton has to say yes, for two reasons. If he went to free agency every other team in the league would give him a blank cheque, and he’s so good Edmonton would be utterly fucked without him. That’s what the NDP wants.

The problem is, they aren’t that. In 2021, the Liberals didn’t really give a shit what the NDP had to say because the Liberals were not-so-secretly looking for an election anyways, so an NDP “threat” to pull the plug wasn’t a threat to the Liberals. Now, the Liberals don’t want an election any time soon, but the NDP is failing the other test – even if Jagmeet Singh threatens one, nobody will take it seriously. The NDP can beat their chest that they’ll cause an election, and everyone in Liberal circles will treat the threat with the same seriousness most people give their kids when they claim they’re gonna be an astronaut.

If the NDP had $10M in net assets and were forecasting for 45 seats and they had a leader who had already earned a Parliamentary pension, it would be a legitimate threat. But they’re on cruise control to 15 seats, their net assets that are actually liquid are essentially* breakeven, and Jagmeet isn’t fucking going until he’s got the pension. And so, the NDP will accept not only half a loaf, but much less than it. Incidentally, this is why Joe Biden gave up comparatively little in the debt ceiling negotiations in the spring – Kevin McCarthy wasn’t actually willing to make the US default, so he had little leverage.

(*Getting an accurate asset balance for the NDP is nearly impossible – they’re on paper in the positive, but plenty of their assets are things they need, like HQ and other physical assets. Best as I can tell, they’re essentially break even on a cash level. If someone in the NDP wants to dispute this assessment I can be reached in multiple places.)

The problem the NDP is running into is, hilariously, that which a lot of labour runs into – there are just structural limits on your leverage sometimes. Some in the NDP seem to be trying to make the concept of leverage a subjective assessment, but it’s not one. You get paid more if you score 45 goals in your contract year than if you score 25; you have more leverage in a hung parliament if you’re polling at 25% than if you’re polling at 18%. This is basic shit, but if the NDP wants to address the structural problem, they just chose not to.

All of this comes back to the fact that the NDP has a shitty leader who isn’t primed to achieve anything electorally at the next election. If the NDP had a leader who raised more money, or one who was polling better, the Liberals would feel more pressure to appease them. If they had a leader who could do both, the Liberals would feel a lot more pressure to move quickly. But with a leader who nobody in the PMO or the broader Liberal ecosystem believes will pull the plug, they’re gonna give a quarter of a loaf. And the NDP will swallow it.

The way you could get some leverage? Replace Jagmeet with Charlie Angus, because then the chances of the NDP going below 20 seats is gone and you’re not facing a leader with this all or nothing pension cliff in early 2025. Would that suddenly turn Justin Trudeau into a card carrying social democrat? No, but it might speed up him getting to a more generous offer to the provinces on Pharmacare.

The other way to at least remotely try and get more donations would be a targeted fundraising blitz – Jagmeet spending the fall pounding the pavement in southern Ontario and the Lower Mainland to raise as much money as possible so that when they’re negotiating with the Liberals, they can look at the Liberals and say we can afford a campaign and not be actively laughed at for saying it. Those are actual, tangible ways for the NDP to gain a little leverage. But I don’t have hope.

When Singh spent the 2021 campaign saying he was trying to win and that he wouldn’t rule anything in or out in terms of hung parliament possibilities, I got why he was doing it. The NDP being credible in saying they’d work with either LPC or CPC would massively increase their leverage, because if the Liberals know they’ll only work with them, then they can tell the NDP to take or leave 10 cents on the dollar. But just because the NDP didn’t say they’d work only with the Liberals didn’t change the basic fact that if the NDP had the chance to put a Liberal government in office over the Tories and they didn’t, there’d be an internal mutiny in a day.

The NDP’s only leverage comes from a credible threat they’ll force an election. With shit polls, no money, and a leader waiting for his pension, the threat’s a joke. And that’s why the next election will be in 2025.