Will The Last NDP Optimists Turn Out The Lights?

On Leverage, Seats, And Dippers

I don’t think I’ve ever shared this, but I am fascinated by the drama in Hollywood these days. I don’t mean the movies – if you think I’ve any interest in seeing Tom Cruise waste my time for nearly 3 hours when at no time am I under any illusions he won’t win, you know little of me – but I love watching this writers, and now actors, strike unfold, for a simple reason. I love seeing negotiations unfold, and how leverage can be used, and how overplaying it can blow up in one’s face.

Leverage, whether you’re intentionally using it or even if you aren’t cognizant, exists in every conversation of a professional nature. Over the years, the amount I’ve gotten to write about hockey is obscene, and I’m eternally grateful to be given the platform I’ve been given by a company for whom hockey is not a priority. Why’d they let me do it, then? To make me happy, because they want to keep a writer they like happy. It’s my leverage, even if it’s never acknowledged.

The concept of leverage is fascinating in its ephemeral nature – you can’t quantify it, you can’t be sure it’s real, and you certainly can’t know when you’re about to lose it. Overplaying it can see it go up in smoke, and there will be moments when you think you’re about to win it all and you end up with nothing. That said, it’s based in two things, at its core – how much the other side needs you, and how much you need them.

The reason I’m bringing this up is Tom Parkin is once again peddling a fiction that runs in NDP circles a lot these days, which is that an election where the NDP gained seats and see the Liberals returned in minority would see the NDP’s leverage increase. And to that I say one thing: please God think about this for more than 2 seconds.

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The NDP has the leverage they have right now for two reasons: the Liberals don’t have a majority, and relations between the Bloc and the Liberals aren’t great, which means that the Bloc do not present themselves as a particularly reliable source of votes for the Liberals. If either of those conditions were to change, the NDP’s leverage would change as well.

If, say, the Bloc were to be led tomorrow by a younger Gilles Duceppe-ian figure – someone staunchly from the left, who doesn’t like federal overreach but shares the Liberals’ politics on most other issues – then the NDP’s leverage would evaporate. Instead of needing the NDP for survival the Liberals could pick and choose when they go to the NDP and when they go to the Bloc, meaning the Liberals wouldn’t have to give the NDP so much economic redistribution for their votes.

Similarly, the NDP could win another 10 seats, but if the Liberals wiped out the Bloc nobody would care because it would end with the Liberals in majority government, another outcome where their leverage goes up in smoke. In both cases, the NDP’s leverage is entirely unaffected by their own circumstances, because leverage is often not about your own circumstances.

Sometimes, it is – had I been totally and publicly and humiliatingly wrong about the 2022 midterms and therefore lost everybody who followed my bets for TheLines a ton of money, yeah, I’d probably be in worse shape over there – but in politics, leverage is about one thing. Do you need my vote(s) and do you have another path to get them, because if you do need it, and you can’t get it elsewhere, then frankly the party with the votes can ask for whatever the fuck they want.

Whether the NDP has 12 seats and the Liberals need 10 or the Liberals need 60 and the NDP have 65, the NDP have the same fundamental leverage, which is that the NDP has the votes the Liberals need. Now, in a scenario where the NDP are the only place to go get votes, yes their leverage goes up, but that’s not inherent to whether the NDP have 20 seats or 40 seats, because the NDP’s performance has exactly 0 to do with the Bloc’s fortunes.

Now, the other part of Parkin’s premise is also ludicrous – the NDP aren’t winning seats at the next election, because the history of third parties here and abroad are that the actual experience of voting in an election has the effect of shrinking “loose” votes. Sometimes that means good things in First Past The Post – the fact that the Lib Dems surged in seats while stagnant in votes in 1997 as Labour-Lib Dem switchers in the southwest and Lib Dem-Tory seats went Lib Dem but in the rest of the country went Labour – but most of the time it means the third party gets squeezed. We’ve seen it in the last Federal campaign, 2015, 2014 Ontario, 2018 Ontario (the Liberals this time, but same process), and many other times beyond that.

Per my last model run, which I’ve been since made aware is probably an overestimate since last week’s Nanos was a fucking tire fire for the NDP in BC, the NDP win 22 seats on a polls only basis. Throw in a byelection impact, it’s 20, and this is at midterm, with a shit economy and a government that’s been unable to get its head out of its ass for longer than a week. If they’re at this point now, they’re winning 15 on election day, and everyone with a brain knows it. Poilievre, whatever his faults, leads a political movement that is about to eviscerate the NDP, and it’s going to be brutal.

The next election will see Poilievre do to the NDP’s rural and regional seats what Doug Ford did in Ontario, cutting through a swathe of seats in Northern Ontario and BC that do not share the NDP leadership’s commitment to social justice and talking like a Laurentian Elite. Call it racism if you want – you’d be wrong, especially considering Horwath got fucked by the same trend and Eby will in time (even if Falcon’s BC FC is completely and utterly unprepared to do it) – but the NDP is two parties in internal coalition, and Poilievre’s coming for half of it.

The way you’d win seats, therefore, is doubling the other half, the urban left wing half, but how many fucking times do we need to see Jagmeet fall on his ass in Davenport before we acknowledge the great breakthrough isn’t fucking happening? And even if they get three in Toronto – and they won’t – congrats, you’re losing 5 in BC and 2 compared to the old lines in Northern Ontario, so who cares. Win Halifax, give Kingston a run, maybe Edmonton keeps realigning, and you might break even. And highly doubt any of that actually happens. Oh, and they’re still broke from the last campaign, let alone ready to fund another one.

The NDP fantasy that more leverage is around the corner is as nonsensical as the notion they might gain seats at the next election. If you’re under the delusion the next election will go well for the NDP, pass the drugs, because the only way one could come to such a ludicrous and risible conclusion is either cognitive disease or mental impairment. The party is walking into a disaster, and they will deserve every sling and arrow of the fortune they will receive, even if they think it outrageous.