Singh's Poisonous Leadership

On Jagmeet's Latest Disaster

“Justin Trudeau's actions are cowardly, anti-worker, & proof that he will always cave to corporate greed.”

Jagmeet Singh is the leader of a political party that was founded in part by our country’s unions and built for the purposes of protecting workers. The New Democratic Party was literally founded as a joint venture of the CCF and the Canadian Labour Congress. That it is a worker’s party above all else is something it sometimes has an odd relationship to, but it is the core tenet of the party. It is the one thing you can hang your hat on about the NDP.

Jagmeet Singh leads a worker’s party. Justin Trudeau, allegedly, is an anti-worker coward for forcing binding arbitration to stop the rail lockouts. And yet, Jagmeet Singh is the only reason Justin Trudeau retains the confidence of the House. Make it make sense.

I know I promised to stop bashing my head into the wall about this fact, but the NDP are being led by a man so completely and utterly vacuous that he either doesn’t get that a worker’s party propping up an anti-worker PM is bad or he’s willing to lie about fundamental things for votes. He is either systemically lying to the country about Justin Trudeau for likes or he genuinely believes it is his moral imperative to prop up a government that is in his depiction barely to the left of the Tories. If Jagmeet genuinely believes that, he should force an election. If he doesn’t, he should shut the fuck up. But this farce is poisoning us all.

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Would an anti-worker party have passed legislation banning replacement workers? Would an anti-worker party have let federal public servants strike for as long as they did without back to work legislation? Would the issues in the Port of Vancouver have dragged on so long with a draconian, pro-corporate government? No, obviously not.

If the government was genuinely anti-worker they have a wide Commons majority for a lot of anti-union things. Look at 2012 provincially - the NDP supported the Liberal minority government on most issues, but on teacher contracts the Liberals got their votes from the Tories. There's nothing stopping the Liberals from shopping there again to pass their “anti-worker” agenda, except for the fact that it doesn’t exist.

What we have is a government that has to balance broader economic interests with the specific interests of the workers in question. Binding arbitration is a reasonable compromise that gives the workers an ability to get a solution. What it’s not is a sell out. But let’s be clear, this isn’t about this decision or the truth or decency of any kind. The NDP as a political party have given up on facts, truth, honour, and integrity. They are, fundamentally, a broken, cancerous institution, led by a constitutionally dishonest man who poisons us all every time he speaks.

Jagmeet Singh is, by all accounts, a reasonably intelligent man. He is not often called stupid, though he often plays stupid for clicks. Either he is genuinely so stupid as to believe simultaneously that Justin Trudeau is the caricature that Singh paints of him - a useless, out of touch conservative who cares more about protecting corporate interests at all costs - and that he must stay in office as an indispensable fact, or he’s lying. The position he claims to hold rhetorically, and the position his party has held in the House, can only be held by a genuine idiot or someone who thinks we’re all idiots.

Every time Singh goes on one of these pseudo-intellectual flights of fancy, the overwhelming consensus response is outrage. It’s not outrage at Justin Trudeau’s bad policies, but it’s a universal anger that the NDP are led by someone so genuinely terrible as Jagmeet. This is a fact that unified conservative strategists who have no skin in the game, run of the mill Liberals who are grateful every day the NDP is run by this joke, and even amongst many New Democratic voters and members think his time is up. And this is very obviously why.

Where is the NDP’s plan to actually fight rising prices? What’s the NDP’s plan to fight rising inflation? How are the NDP advocating for progressive ideas? Even if we accept a populist approach should be their path, where’s the proposed rise in the top tax rate or an additional band on the top 1%? It wouldn’t raise a ton of money but at a time when inflation was elevated, reducing spending by crunching the top might not have been a terrible idea (and would certainly poll well). Where are the ideas? Whatever you think of Dental and Pharma, neither are exactly new ideas. Where’s the national fund open to the provinces who agree to free public transit or free tuition, both ideas that Abacus just showed poll very well.

What's the NDP’s answer to the Housing crisis, beyond platitudes about luxury condos being bad? Their BC wing has done good work and the Ontario NDP have at least made steps at good, but the Federal Party is nowhere. What’s the NDP’s answer to the rise in Temporary Foreign Workers? Bloomberg reported that nearly 45000 TFWs were brought in to work in retail stores and restaurants in 2023. As Youth Unemployment rises, rents rise, and wages at the bottom end of the wage scale fail to match the impressive gains of our American cousins, where’s Singh’s impassioned plan? The closest we’ve gotten was Singh talking about the “controversy” around an EV plant bringing in some South Korean TFWs to help build the plant to make sure it works like the ones in South Korea. On the broader questions of labour exploitation and wage suppression? Nowhere.

Jagmeet Singh has led the NDP since 2017. His 7 years in the job have seen the party lose votes and seats, and that is even true when you admit that no NDP leader was ever keeping 15 of the 16 seats in Quebec that Mulcair handed off. He has failed to elect New Democrats. He has failed to defend climate action as worthwhile and has failed to make a case for the government’s signature climate effort, which is also a not-insignificant redistributive effort. He has failed to stop the intellectual decay of the NDP, putting up a climate change platform in 2021 that was ripped to shreds by climate experts. He has the luxury of facing a Liberal government that is so very fucking clearly past its best before date, and he’s still at 18%.

More depressingly, he is still at 18% despite injecting venom into our politics. Jagmeet lies about Trudeau and the Liberals with an ease that should terrify us all. He is so okay saying whatever he thinks will make his base happy that he has stopped caring at all whether what he’s saying is true. He has been a cancer on our public life, willing to spread as much disinformation and misinformation as he condemns from Skippy. He is everything that progressives correctly hate when it’s a Conservative message coming from them. It’s a moral stain on anyone who cannot see the vacuous and dangerous nature of his actions just because it comes in the form of airquotes progressive buzzwords.

Jagmeet Singh is hurting this country every second he delays the inevitable. He is a cancer to our politics and our nation. For the good of this country, resign.