The NDP Just Signed Their Own Death Warrant

On Today's Liberal Swindling Of The NDP

“I love you/But I’m afraid to love you” is the NDP’s relationship to the Liberal Party, in all reality, because they know that the Liberals are their best hope of winning any real, substantive power any time soon. Yes, there may be the delusionals who see a NDP government coming soon, but those people are the minority, but more importantly, the way the party acts is clear. They love the Liberal Party, against their best wishes, but that scares them.

It's why Jack Layton gave the Liberals their 2005 Budget with a whole hell of a lot of concessions before tossing the Liberals off their asses in December of that same year. It’s why Jagmeet Singh votes with the Liberals most of the time and acts like they’re the Tory Party 2.0, despite the fact that he knows they aren’t. It’s why the NDP struggles to ever make consistent strides – because they have no identity for themselves outside of their love-hate relationship with the Liberals. It’s a genuinely fascinating experience to be entirely defined by something else, but here – unlike being (say) Prince Harry, born into the first line of his obituary – the choice is entirely the NDP’s.

They’ve clearly been looking for a way out of this ill-defined stasis for a while now, ever since Mulcair brought them back to 44 seats and third place, but there were always two ways out – align more closely with the Liberals, or finally break away and make a new, useful vision of themselves away from the Liberals. The NDP’s faced this crisis by doing nothing, and that’s why they’re still stuck in the mud, and the voters of (what should be) the Socialist Republic of Davenport are still represented by a Liberal. Now, with today’s deal, they made a choice.

And that choice will end the NDP as a force for a generation.

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What do New Zealand First, the German Free Democrats, the British Lib Dems, and the NDP have in common?

The first three all served as feeder parties for a bigger, main party of Government at one time or another, and in all three cases, got smashed to smithereens the next time they went to the polls. Take New Zealand First – in 2005, their votes were needed to prop up the Labour government, and then in 2008 they lost all their seats. In 2011, free of the stench of their time close to power, they got back in to Parliament, a position they stayed in until 2020 … when, after three years in government, they got tossed, again.

The Lib Dems lost 49 seats in 2015 after propping up the Tories in the UK, and when the Free Democrats went into coalition with Angela Merkel in 2009, they got eaten, losing 10% of the vote and all 93 of their members. This is the lifecycle of small parties that prop up bigger ones – they take the blame for the failures and none of the credit for the successes.

If you want to limit this conversation to just parties in confidence and supply – ones that didn’t take Cabinet seats – stick in New Zealand, where in 2008, the ACT Party got 5 seats, before being an ally of John Key. Here’s ACT seat totals the next four elections: 1, 1, 1, 10. Guess the election that didn’t come after a term of ACT propping up a National Government, I dare you.

Come to Canada, where in 2017 two minority Parliaments were elected that were three seats short of majority government, and with an ideological ally waiting in the wings to put them over the top. Would you like to guess what happened to both of them? The governments both went to early elections in 2020, both won majority governments, and the minor parties both lose seats and votes. Why should we think the NDP will be able to avoid this fate?

Let’s be more specific – the NDP won 25 seats at the 2021 election. There are a handful of those, away from major cities and in culturally conservative areas, where them not being the Liberals is very, very helpful. Charlie Angus reps one of them in Northern Ontario, it’s the kind of seat where the right is making advances, both here and abroad. And this is where this deal falls apart. The Liberal brand is toxic in places like this – with a 13% PPC vote and an NDP vote that fell by 5% in 2021, all to the PPC – and so, the NDP just got rid of their best argument – we’re different than the Liberals. Assuming the Conservatives nominate Skippy, that seat’s flipping blue as the PPC get squeezed.

You think this is just one seat? Niki Ashton’s vote fell in Northern Manitoba by 8% last year, split between the Tories and the PPC, and while she’s probably gonna win again, this is the point. Skeena, North Island, Nanaimo, and London are all areas where the NDP have tenuous holds and working class electorates who cringe at the fact the Liberals are more focused on saving the skies than saving their jobs, and now the NDP just gave Justin Trudeau a bearhug. And the Liberals are laughing.

Justin Trudeau gets to be the one who makes the announcements on dental care and pharma, and so he will accrue the goodwill that will arrive when the dividends of the policies come, while the NDP see a death warrant on their culturally conservative flank. The Liberals will still fight the NDP like hell, and it’s not like the Liberals won’t fight Jagmeet for their seats, be it downtown Toronto or Winnipeg or wherever.

Maybe the NDP will look at this and accept this as the price they’re willing to pay, but they need to do so cleareyed that this could set the NDP back a generation. The Liberals will say they gave the NDP what they wanted, but what they actually did was get the NDP to sign their own demise. Turns out, there’s a good reason the NDP is usually afraid to love the Liberals, and this deal is a disaster for them.