Being left for dead is a bit of a hobby for the federal NDP. In the 1993 election, the party was crushed by the rising Liberals. It was left with 9 seats and 6.88 per cent of the vote. It was their worst showing since 1958, when the precursor to the party, the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation won a mere 9.5 per cent of the vote and 8 seats.
The NDP had another weak showing in 2000 before starting on a path under leader Jack Layton that took it becoming the official opposition. Later, under Thomas Mulcair, the party even had a real shot at forming government.
Last Monday, the NDP suffered its worst electoral showing ever, winning 7 seats and just 6.3 per cent of the national vote share. It shed votes to the Liberals as millions of Canadians sought to stop the Conservative party from forming government and looked to Mark Carney to stand up to Donald Trump. On election night, party leader Jagmeet Singh announced he’d be stepping down. Now, the NDP is a rump in Parliament, with neither leader nor official party status.
The path forward for the NDP must involve focusing on what it can do for workers, and the poor, but there’s more to it than that. Some blamed the party’s defeat on its policies and ideological commitments — or lack thereof — arguing it had moved too far to the centre. That’s incorrect. As much as one might prefer a left, openly and thoroughly socialist NDP (as I do) the Canadian electorate isn’t particularly ideological; even if they were, most wouldn’t identify as socialist. Moreover, the NDP program was the most left-wing of the lot, and still large swathes of their previous voters elected to support a party led by former central and investment banker Mark Carney. Others voted for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
Now, the NDP has some serious thinking to do. It faces both short-term and long-term challenges. The Liberals have gone up, but they will come back down. They always do. Meanwhile, the NDP, without official party status in the House, will struggle with a lack of resources and attention.
Given time, however, it’s likely they will rebound, especially if they choose a new leader who fits the moment.
The party can choose to continue to play a role in setting the national policy agenda and pressing the government of the day to better serve Canadians, particularly poorer people and workers. It’s done so before, stretching back to the party’s fight for Medicare in the 1960s, securing individual and collective rights in the 1980s, more robust supports during the global financial crisis, and an expansion of the welfare state — pharmacare, dental care, child care — during the Trudeau years.
In the upcoming Parliament, the NDP will once again hold the balance of power. Now, as before, it will share that blessing and curse with the Bloc Québécois. That power carries risk. Before the 2025 election, the party believed its co-operation with the Liberals and the goods it delivered would benefit it electorally. It did not.
In the long run, the NDP must decide what kind of party it wants to be, for whom, and to what end. It ought to answer that question by asserting an expressly left politics, but also by engaging in grassroots movement building focused on, above all, rallying the working class and pursuing long-term, class-based structural reform. That way lies not only influence in the House of Commons, and a shot at making better policy for Canadians, but also growing the party and its support base by providing a clear alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives — and then, hopefully, taking a shot at forming government, and transforming the country.
Past, atypical success for the NDP has been a function of a weak Liberal party, as the 2008 and 2011 attest — and as 2025 confirms in contrast. Leadership, policy, and strategy matter but on their own are unlikely to mean the difference between forming government, or even official opposition, or not. Those concerns are more likely to mean the difference between a showing that yields enough members of Parliament to fill a minivan and one that could fill a school bus. But setting out to transform the electoral landscape of the country in the long-run? That’s how you fill the House of Commons.
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