Can the NDP Rebuild – or Is It Time to Start Something New?

O nce the conscience of Canadian politics and a genuine alternative to the Liberal–Conservative duopoly, the New Democratic Party finds itself adrift. With the loss of the NDP’s official party status, the appointment of backbencher Don Davies as interim leader wasn’t just a placeholder move while the party regroups. It marks the culmination of a decade-long identity crisis, and a warning that the NDP may be entering terminal decline. Jagmeet Singh’s party’s supply and confidence agreement with the Trudeau Liberals, which traded policy concessions for support for Liberals, won it some modest victories. But the cost appears steep: a blurry public image, waning voter trust, and the disappearance of a real oppositional voice in Parliament. In this conversation, Matt Fodor, a political scientist and author of From Layton to Singh: The Decline of the NDP, reflects on how the party lost its ideological footing, why it’s struggling to connect with Canadians, and what must change if it hopes to survive the next decade. Now down to just seven seats in the House of Commons, the NDP, he says, faces a stark choice—rebuild or be replaced. I was struck by the NDP losing seats in an election where topics like housing and affordability were the key concerns of voters, beyond the sovereignty issue. What do you make of the party being unable to connect on those key files? It’s absolutely striking. It’s also striking how it was the Conservatives who hammered away at those issues and obtained the support of a lot of younger voters and working-class voters. However you may think of their policies, Pierre Poilievre’s team was channelling the anger out there. Yeah, they kind of ate the NDP’s lunch in that area, which is very concerning. They also couldn’t peel away any voters from the Liberals. Indeed. Most NDP votes that were lost went to the Liberals. It was NDP voters, seeking to block a Conservative majority, who assured a Liberal win. But Mark Carney represented a move to the right from Trudeau. The Liberals ran the most neoliberal person imaginable, with no populist bent whatsoever, and the NDP couldn’t even capitalize on that.

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What happened? Two things, I think. First, by signing the supply and confidence agreement, the NDP tied themselves to Trudeau. Jagmeet Singh was actually defending the Trudeau record more than Mark Carney was. On the economy, the NDP could not take advantage of a key plank, the wealth tax, which they’ve run on in three elections, and which they picked up from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the States. They didn’t really use that as an anchor for their policies and to say to voters: developers and property investors are getting rich, grocery barons are getting rich, so we’re going to tax them massively to pay for a redistributive program to help working people getting screwed by the system. The idea was in there, but not as a central plan. It was just sort of like: here’s what we got out of the previous government—which, you know, was a very unpopular government. Is it a problem with the party as it now exists? Or do you feel the party’s fine, the message is fine—we need a new messenger? I wouldn’t blame it on just Singh. It’s a problem with social democracy all over the world. You can see it in Germany, for example, where they got 16 percent of the vote in this year’s election—the birthplace of the social democratic movement, and that’s the lowest vote share they’ve gotten since the nineteenth century. You see it in the UK, where Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to victory last year. But in spite of a large parliamentary majority, Labour got only 33 percent of the vote. They won because of a split on the right. There’s an erosion of social democracy all over the place. We’re seeing it in Canada too, which has never had as vibrant a social democratic party as they do in Europe. So it’s a broader systemic issue? I think the connection between working-class communities and social democratic parties has really eroded over the past forty years. There’s a number of reasons for that, but I would blame the decline of unionized industrial jobs and the rise of neoliberalism. In what way? The basic premise of neoliberalism is that freedom and prosperity are best realized through the so-called free market—deregulation of capital, free trade, competitive levels of taxation, so on. State policy has to work inside that framework and not push against it. However, neoliberalism needed a popular base, and it was sold to the public through such things as tax-cuts ad rhetoric about freeing us from big-government bureaucrats. The idea of individual success and individual consumption was elevated over community and solidarity. You’re supposed to make it on your own and be more entrepreneurial. That’s had a significant cultural impact. And that led to working-class communities breaking from social democratic parties? It’s a bit more complicated, because social democratic and centre-left parties were not just passive victims in all of this. They actively contributed to it. In the 1990s, they adopted what has been broadly labelled the Third Way, in response to declining electoral fortunes and the changed political and economic environment. Part of this was a retreat from class; these parties now appealed to the general electorate rather than making explicit appeals to workers. As Third Way–influenced governments governed as neoliberals—lower taxes, balanced budgets, free trade—they moved away from major redistributive programs. As a result, a class dealignment occurred. Working-class voters were increasingly up for grabs. Many workers have embraced right-wing populism, as it does present itself as an alternative to the status quo. The decline in working-class living standards is real, and people are not wrong to believe the political establishment has failed them. But it’s the populist right, with its mix of both cultural conservatism and some economic populist rhetoric, whose message is resonating with many. The left, in contrast, seems hopelessly lost. That’s what I found interesting. The Conservatives won several union endorsements. Their messaging seemed to explicitly court that demographic—“More Boots, Less Suits,” for example. The NDP also lost strongholds in Hamilton and Windsor, areas that historically have seen a lot of union support for the party. Is there something fundamentally wrong with how the NDP is connecting with working-class voters? Do voters believe they have to turn to other parties to get what they need—that the NDP just isn’t powerful enough? I think it’s a mix of things. First of all, the NDP was never as powerful as social democratic parties in other countries—it’s never formed the federal government and never received a majority of the votes of manual workers or union members. The NDP had to settle for being a labour-based party that exerted an influence in Parliament. However, the NDP has nonetheless been impacted by the broader trend: the weakening links between social democratic parties and working-class voters. Over the past decade, especially, support in industrial and working-class communities where the NDP once had a significant base evaporated. How do you explain that—the loss of union support? Unions, and their approach to politics, have changed as well. Unions once represented more of a countervailing force. The old Canadian Auto Workers union (which has since folded into Unifor) in the 1980s and ’90s was a voice of economic nationalism and progressive unionism for the left. But in the past twenty years, there’s been a move toward a sort of pragmatic, business unionism: getting the best deal you can get for your members and forming closer ties with the Liberals and, in some cases, even the Conservatives. On the point of Conservative union endorsements, I should point out that these are locals in the building trades which never really backed the NDP to begin with. Indeed, the Conservative pitch to the “working class” really leans into a rather narrow conception of the working class, which centres on male workers and male-dominated sectors, particularly those with culturally conservative views. But to your point, there obviously is something fundamentally wrong with how the NDP connects to working-class voters. They’re increasingly seen as indistinguishable from the Liberals, and that perception was further solidified with the supply and confidence agreement. There’s a great deal of anger and frustration out there, but the NDP sounded like they were defending the status quo. To add to the NDP’s woes, young voters seem to be shifting right. National results from Student Vote Canada would have given the Conservatives a minority government. NDP support trailed behind the Liberals in third place. It’s distressing. Especially the gender gap. I should note that most of the rightward shift is among younger men; young women are very progressive in their views. Historically, it’s never good when young men start moving to the far right. All this means that we effectively have a two-party system now. Outside Quebec, it really was a two-party election. How do you feel about that? Your book seemed to see Canada being healthier, politically, for having a third option. I think the NDP has had a positive influence in Canadian politics. It’s not a party of big business, and for a long time, it was able to advocate for working people and on behalf of social justice. It added a social democratic tinge to the North American political culture we have. It’s too early to know whether we’re moving toward a two-party system. It may not be permanent—the NDP lost party status before, in 1993, and eventually came back. But coming back is not inevitable. In this election, Singh struggled to make the case for the NDP’s purpose. The message was confusing: on the one hand, we were told the Liberals were headed for a supermajority and it was therefore safe to vote NDP. On the other hand, he was saying that a Conservative government must be stopped at all costs. This ironically played right into the strategic-voting narrative. Do you feel that there is a path for them to be a national party? Coming back is not a guarantee. Some seem convinced this was a temporary setback, given the Trump tariff situation and the desire to stop a right-wing government. That once Carney governs more to the right, there’ll be a revival of social democracy. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. When Jean Chrétien moved the Liberal Party rightward in the 1990s, the NDP was never able to counter him. One of the great tragedies of that time was the fact that the Chrétien Liberals were a very fiscally conservative government—even one of austerity—and the social democratic voice in Parliament had been decimated. This could happen under Carney as well. I honestly don’t know if the NDP can revive the old social democratic voting base, like it did under Jack Layton. The two main pillars of party support—who were not always in agreement with each other—have both drifted away. Urban progressives became an increasingly Liberal constituency under Trudeau, while the Conservatives have won many seats in the old working-class and industrial communities. Is it ultimately a leadership problem? It’s true that Singh never really resonated. He was seen as the NDP’s answer to Justin Trudeau: a young, charismatic, and stylish leader who could revitalize the party and appeal to the millennial generation and diverse communities. But he was never able to deliver on his pledge to expand the party base. He opted to move to BC from his home base in Brampton in order to get a seat in the House of Commons. The NDP has not won a federal seat in Toronto for over a decade. Trudeau renewed the Liberal Party and gave it a more progressive identity, and the NDP was unable to counter that. Singh was a social media star of sorts, but likes and shares did not really translate into votes, and many grassroots activists felt that resources poured into Singh’s image came at the expense of local organizing and on-the-ground campaigns. Too much emphasis has been placed on the idea of the charismatic leader. To be fair to Singh, the supply and confidence deal he made with the Liberals did lead to some substantive policy successes. You can certainly argue that they achieved some reforms that may not have gotten through otherwise. But it’s also quite possible similar things could be achieved on a case-by-case basis without sacrificing the party’s independence and identity. And the formal agreement made many see the Liberals and the NDP as increasingly tied at the hip. Singh made things worse in the way he left that deal. As Trudeau became increasingly unpopular, Singh was trolled by the Conservatives, called a sellout, and was told to trigger an election. Eventually, he announces that he’s leaving the deal. And he doesn’t really explain why; it just looks like he’s trying to distance himself from Trudeau. The NDP didn’t really develop a new parliamentary strategy or articulate any sort of alternative agenda. That hurt them. In your book, you talk about the consultant class inside the NDP and how it helps establish the identity of the party. What part do they play in the NDP’s current predicament? That’s not my term—I believe that term was coined by Martin Lukacs at The Breach. But it’s a central theme of the book, and it goes back to Layton’s time. Under Layton, there was a fundamental shift in the party organization. The NDP became an electoral-professional machine, with a group of key advisers increasingly controlling party affairs at the expense of both the membership and caucus. Grassroots democracy eroded as conventions increasingly became stage-managed affairs and local riding associations became hollow shells. This consultant class had two models in mind for the federal NDP: the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and the electorally successful provincial parties, such as the Manitoba NDP, which govern as pragmatic centrists. This consultant class is also close to and fraternizes with the Ottawa bubble. The NDP was historically not connected to the business-lobbying world, but key players from the Layton era later joined lobbying firms that served as intermediaries between government and industry. In other words, they saw themselves as playing in the “big leagues” with the Liberals and Conservatives. They broke into those leagues in 2011. Yes, the NDP saw a remarkable breakthrough in 2011—and this was seen as a vindication of the centrist strategy. However, the conditions that worked for Layton that year couldn’t be replicated under his successors. In the 2015 election, the NDP squandered a historic opportunity to form its first-ever government. The party establishment played it safe, and Tom Mulcair moved further to the right by advocating for balancing the budget and not increasing taxes. Trudeau led the Liberals back to power and outflanked the NDP on the left. Under Singh, the NDP corrected course, in the sense that it vowed not to again be outflanked by the Liberals—and has since positioned itself ever so slightly to the left of Trudeau. However, this consultant class remains firmly in control of the party. Layton had worked closely in tandem with his inner circle, while Singh seemed to act more as a spokesman and a salesman, largely abdicating the running of party affairs to his chief of staff and the national director. Where does the NDP go from here now? Left-wing politics in Canada appears to be at a crossroads. The NDP just suffered a spectacular defeat. Certainly, there will be a battle for the party’s soul. But the party establishment is not interested in ceding control and seems not to have really gotten the message. They want a quick leadership race where only “serious” candidates run, with an entry fee of $150,000, five times what it was in 2017 when Singh ran for leader. We need an honest and independent party of the left in Canada that’s democratic and participatory and locally active in all corners of the country, and not just at election time. It should play a role in mobilizing and educating people—and offer bold solutions to deal with great challenges such as rising inequality, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s destruction of the commons. If the NDP can’t be that party, perhaps it’s time to consider the building of something new. The post Can the NDP Rebuild – or Is It Time to Start Something New? first appeared on The Walrus.