The NDP Death Wish - 23,837 votes from oblivion
So why have a leadership race?
How bad was the 2025 election for the federal NDP?
After reading that the focus for the folks at NDP head office wasn’t saving the seats of candidates who might actually win, but pretending they could keep Burnaby for Jagmeet Singh, not as bad as the party deserved it to be.
If you’ve wondered how the hell delusional US Democrats working in the White House could pretend Joe Biden was healthy enough to dance through a second term as president, try to track down the NDP Braniacs who went all-in on trying to keep Jagmeet around to finish what he started in 2019… shuttering the party’s doors east of the Rockies.
With the NDP on the verge of electorial oblivion, instead of sending every warm body (and every spare nickel) to help incumbents who had an actual shot at holding their seats - like Leila Dance and Niki Ashton in Winnipeg or BC NDPers Peter Juilian or Don Davies, who only won by 310 votes - they go to Jagmeet’s riding, where it was pretty clear he was running a distant third?
What the actual #$@!?
Everyone I know who has met Jagmeet swears he’s a lovely human. So I’ll assume he’s not the half-wit who came up with the idea that he was the most important player on the team. So who was?
One of my favourite jokes as a kid was probably from Mad Magazine. Someone was sad and someone else told them: “Cheer up, things could get worse.”
The punchline: “So I cheered up. And sure enough, things got worse.”
As bad as the numbers were for the NDP, they came sooooo close to being wiped off the map. By my count, the seven NDP MPs who went to Ottawa collectively beat their opponents by only 28,837 votes. And the math is even uglier if you take their two top finishers out of the equation.1
The Bloc got more votes nationally than the NDP.
Heck, there are provinces outside of Quebec where the Bloc got almost as many votes as the NDP. And in almost every province - including Ontario - the Bloc also elected just as many MPs as the NDP did. None.
Nope, they didn’t run in those provinces, but as far as voters were concerned, neither did Jagmeet’s party.
I’m checking out panels, pundits and podcasts where NDP hacks and Ontario-based analysts who think the entire country works like Queen’s Park2 are proclaiming that, of course, the NDP will be back, because just look at how strong the party brand is provincially!
I get NDP spin doctors attempting this clumsy cosmetic surgery, but hearing anyone else say this makes me think Canada’s chattering political classes really need to take provincial history classes.
Citing the NDP governments in BC and Manitoba - and their Opposition status in Alberta and Saskatchewan - as proof the NDP will rebound federally and that Canada didn’t just devolve into a two-party (plus Separatist du jour) electoral system is ADORABLE because…
These provinces all feature two-party races where the NDP plays the role, and generally adopts the policies of, the Liberals - because the Liberals no longer exist on the provincial political Monopoly board.
BC has been a two-party province for generations. Since WAC Bennett’s Socreds ate the Liberals and the Tories in the 1950s, our elections have been a choice between the NDP and whichever party is not the NDP. There have been brief exceptions when the “free-enterprise” vehicle of-the-day was totalled by the designated driver, but those have been blips.
Saskatchewan also tends to decide between the NDP and not-the-NDP - currently, The Saskatchewan Party.
Alberta has historically been a single-party province, with the occasional NDP opposition led by a Notley.
Manitoba currently has two parties, plus one lonely Liberal and one independent. Is that the healthy three or four-way race being cited as “proof-of-life?”
Or is it Ontario… which has a provincial NDP that wins seats, but not votes and a Liberal Party that gets votes, but not seats.
Someone please walk me through how two-party provincial elections prove that a federal NDP will rebound in a world where they don’t have party status - which means they don’t have the funding for a research staff and aren’t guaranteed any airtime in question period?
My only proviso… Please do this without pretending that Wab Kinew will take the job - which would make about as much sense as Doug Ford deciding to run the People’s Party - or that there’s going to be a new electoral system before the Leafs win the Stanley Cup, never mind before the next election.
Saving the party or saving staff salaries?
So how do the people running the federal NDP plan to save the party?
Spoiler alert: They don’t. Their plan is to save their jobs.
And the best way to do that… make sure no one is held accountable for what went wrong by not holding a legit leadership race that brings new faces to the party as candidates, never mind as voters.
The party brass is floating the idea that the race needs to happen quickly - which means that no one new can raise their profile and sign up members…
They are also pitching a $150,000 entry fee to scare off anyone who might, ya know, be an actual socialist or not have established party backing or a union bankroll. If the pricetag is to ensure the new leader can raise funds, they’re not leaving time for a candidate to pull off the kind of grassroots campaign that you’d think would be gold for a progressive party on the edge of irrelevance.
The party has made this move before. This is also the BC wing of the party’s go-to move for scaring off “outsiders” or, as other political parties like to call to them, “potential leaders.”
Party of the People!
Solidarity at head office forever!
We shall overcome… democratically elected leaders…
And the first move towards making sure no one makes waves about what happened in the election (and whatever happens next) is to appoint a new interim leader without talking to the MPs they’ll be leading because, hey, that would require seven calls or emails and could take minutes.
Instead, the party’s national council followed procedure 3 and rushed to appoint Don Davies because… that’s the guy they liked.
And the NDP’s corporate leaders at head office knew that if they really wanted to stand out in this Parliament, the best way to do that was to make sure the public face of the party was one of the only three middle-aged white guys they elected.
Or maybe the people who did all they could to promote Jagmeet at the expense of the party looked around to find the guy who would do the best job of claiming that Jagmeet was awesomesauce and that the party’s historic collapse in no way indicated the party had historically collapsed.
They either wrote an email because they knew it would leak - which strikes me as pretty darn plausible for a trio of incumbents who know that anything in writing leaks eventually - or because the party leadership wasn’t taking their calls.
Neither of those reasons suggests that all seven of these people will still be in the same caucus in a year.
Fortress Alberta? The Next McLeader
So when I’m seeing people speculate about the official party pick - and watching who pops up every time there’s space in front of a microphone - the person clearly teeing up a run by coyly claiming she’s not sure if she’s teeing up a run (and refusing to criticize the skeezy way Davies was anointed) is Alberta’s Heather McPherson.
An Alberta-based leader would be a bold flex for a party that desperately needs to regain seats in BC and Ontario and dreams of once again being competitive in Quebec. But this would continue the NDP tradition of following electoral disasters by appointing a female leader with a Scottish surname to clean up the mess.
McDonough, McLaughlin, McPherson…
Cracks in Fortress Alberta…
One thing that has always made the NDP unique - and more of a religion than a political party - is that membership in the provincial party means you also belong - have to belong - to the federal party. And vice versa. Or you did.
Just after the federal election debacle, the Alberta NDP and the federal NDP called it quits. The vast majority of provincial party members saw their connection to the federal party as a liability (as their previous leader, Rachel Notley, often did).
As devastating as the loss of official party status was, this split - and the precedent it sets, where joining the provincial NDP no longer means signing on to support NDPers in Ottawa - may be the end of the federal party’s future.
Imagine if the next federal NDP leader decides to stake their territory - and try to reestablish the party’s progressive bona fides - by taking a swing at David Eby’s government in BC or Wab Kinew’s in Manitoba or…
Solidarity for… now… eh. Except in Alberta.
NDP Nepo Baby Takes Aim at “Insiders”
So the “outsider” being touted to take a run at the NDP leadership is NDP Nepo Baby Avi Lewis. The son of former longtime Ontario NDP leader, Stephen Lewis - which means he actually bleeds orange and was swaddled in union-made diapers - is publicly and loudly warning about the influence of NDP “insiders.”
To put this into a nonNDP context… imagine if Justin Trudeau and/or Caroline Mulroney claimed they’d never met their dads.
If you can get past the irony - and his brutal third-place finish in Vancouver Centre - Avi’s pitch to “trust the base” is strong and I’ll quote it here:
We need a party rooted in:
* Moral clarity - on climate, oligarchy and genocide
* Solutions as deep as the crises we face
* Public ownership, massive reinvestment in universal services, transfer of wealth from the top to everyone below.
So let the grassroots rise. And let’s reclaim our party for the many, not the few!"
Avi also warns against sticking with the “Liberal-lite” policies of the last several decades… also known as the policies that get provincial NDPs elected... you know, those provincial governments being cited as proof of the NDP’s inevitable return to federal relevance?
And he makes a strong pitch for the party to experiment with the radical idea of a leadership race that encourages people to run. “We can demand that our process - our decision - is made in the sunlight of collective action, not the back rooms where insiders ply their trade. A process that is not rushed, that allows members new and old to get fully involved and have a say.”
If anyone’s holding their breath waiting for a decision made in the sunlight, ambulances are standing by - because Tommy Douglas made sure we all have public healthcare…
“I think it’d be really dangerous to tell ourselves that we were simply the victims of strategic voting, and it was the times and there was nothing we could do… We stopped being the New Democratic Party of Canada some time ago and we became a leader-driven movement.”
- Former NDP MP (and one of the guys who lost to Jagmeet Singh in the last race for NDP leader) Charlie Angus
(Edmonton’s Heather McPherson pulled off an 8259 vote win over her Tory competitor and Rosemont’s Alexandre Boulerice topped the local Liberal by 5601.)
Spoiler alert: Not every province has MPPs.
"Our constitution gives the federal council — our party's governing body between conventions — the exclusive authority to appoint an interim leader, and the process was followed to the letter," national director Lucy Watson said in an emailed statement. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-mps-concerns-interim-leader-selection-process-1.7537699
You made me laugh out loud several times here. Laugh till we cry?
Canadian politics... never boring...