º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

Hours before, Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister and Singh’s former governing ally, had rocked the country by announcing his intention to resign.

With a crucial election now on the horizon, it was the NDP’s last chance to distance itself from Trudeau’s unpopularity and its association with the Liberal government — and position itself for success in the coming race.

“Justin Trudeau’s Liberals,” he started in a forceful voice before pausing, “have let down Canadians.”

“And frankly, it’s not just Justin Trudeau,” he said, stumbling on his words before raising his voice again. “It’s every Liberal minister, every Liberal MP who looked down their nose at you, when people were saying, ‘We can’t make ends meet, we’re struggling with the cost of living.’

“So it doesn’t matter who the next Liberal leader is. They’ve let you down. They do not deserve another chance.”

It was an uncharacteristically hostile rebuke from Singh, who entered federal politics with a positive mantra of “love and courage.”

But the game had changed. Entering the most consequential battle of Singh’s political career, his back was now against the wall.

In the weeks to come, the Liberals would unite under Mark Carney, setting up a neck-and-neck contest with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a campaign dominated by the spectre of U.S. President Donald Trump, leaving little room for Singh’s appeal to Canadians going into his third election as NDP leader.

“When you go back to the moment where Jagmeet Singh decided to rip up the agreement with the Liberals, there was a need for a game plan to bring down the Trudeau government on your own terms,” said Karl Bélanger, a former NDP national director. “You were in the driver’s seat, and he let that slip away from him.”

One of the arguments, Bélanger said, was that a seemingly inevitable Poilievre government was “something we must stop at all costs.” The NDP had spent all its political capital on a deal that had propped up Trudeau’s minority government, and it was not prepared to see its achievements vanish if the Conservatives took power.

That goal of stopping the Conservatives may now be realized, Bélanger said, but “it will be at the cost of New Democratic seats.”

Compared to his two chief rivals, the NDP leader has been running a small-scale campaign. While Carney and Poilievre jet around the country, rallying large groups of supporters in a tit-for-tat effort to showcase their mass appeal, Singh has opted for photo-ops in local campaign offices, sitting down at coffee shops or bookstores, or on picket lines with striking workers.

Polls now suggest voter support for his party has plummeted to below eight per cent. As of Thursday, the Star’s polling aggregator, The Signal, showed the NDP on track to win just 12 seats in the House of Commons; in the last Parliament it held 24. Against that backdrop, Singh no longer presents himself as the country’s next prime minister, instead pitching his party as guardian of the social safety net and as a potential power-broker to hold another Liberal minority government to account.

He’s also no longer the star of his party’s message. The NDP is directing its resources toward fewer ridings than usual, running a targeted campaign that aims to save incumbents’ seats and pick up more in urban battlegrounds. And in many of those crucial races, Singh is absent from campaign flyers and messaging.

Singh’s talk about protecting public health care and cracking down on corporate landlords has been overshadowed by questions about his party’s sinking fortunes: What message do you have for progressive voters flocking to the Liberals? Why isn’t it resonating? Are you still the right leader?

Part of his dilemma is simply that he is no longer as popular as he once was, poll after poll shows.

Singh, 46, was seen as a compassionate, social-media savvy optimist who broke down barriers when, in 2017, he became the first person elected leader of a major federal party who was a visible minority.

“I saw myself represented in Jagmeet,” said Armaan Singh, the co-chair of Canada’s Young New Democrats, who first volunteered for the party during Singh’s 2017 leadership campaign. “He connected so well with young people and made it feel like we have a space in politics.” 

That image lasted for years, even among Canadians who did not vote for Singh’s New Democrats — and even as the party’s seat count plummeted in Quebec, and Singh failed to deliver a promised breakthrough in the diverse, vote-rich GTA suburbs.

During the 2021 campaign, Singh was described at a leaders’ debates as “popular” and inspiring to Canadians. The problem, according to pollster and moderator Shachi Kurl, was his platform of big promises with few details on how they would be achieved.

Then came the deal.

Signed in 2022 in the aftermath of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” occupation of Ottawa, and as Canada shouldered the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply-and-confidence agreement Singh made with Trudeau ensured the Liberal minority government maintained the confidence of Parliament in exchange for progress on a number of shared priorities.

And it got things done: More than 2.7 million Canadians have now been approved for a new dental care program, an anti-scab law is set to come into effect in June, and three provinces and one territory have so far signed pharmacare deals — fulfilling a goal Singh set out in his first major speech as leader to NDP faithful in 2018.

But the agreement also drew the ire of New Democrats who were wary of appearing too cosy with the Liberals, especially amid a campaign by Poilievre’s Conservatives to dub the unpopular government the “NDP-Liberal coalition,” and brand Singh a “sellout” for supporting Trudeau.

“To see the NDP co-operating with (the Liberals) I think was a mistake,” said Matt Nicolaidis, an NDP organizer in London, Ont., who voted for a leadership review in 2023 but supports Singh now. “But we had our divorce. We had our moment in family court.”

Former NDP MP Randall Garrison said Singh was “quite conscious” that the governing pact could come with political risks, but was “quite determined that we should use the power we had to get things for Canadians.” After ending the deal because they felt it had run its course, he said New Democrats felt they needed to wait until dental care was expanded before triggering an election.

Now, the New Democrats are left attempting to define the deal on their own terms, and Singh is fighting to preserve what he says his party achieved.

“I’m not feeling great about the party as a whole,” said Owen Oussoren, an organizer with the youth wing of the party in Ontario. He described the campaign as reactive, lacking in vision and a “major failing.”

“I’d like to see Jagmeet resign after this election … unless some drastic change happens,” Oussoren said.

Among New Democrats, it’s no secret that this could be Singh’s last campaign after eight years as leader — and not just because of the party’s tanking fortunes.

He’s got more grey hair than he did when he arrived on Parliament Hill, and it’s his first campaign as a father of two. His wife, Gurkiran, has been away from the spotlight, working on Singh’s re-election campaign in Burnaby Central, where he faces a challenge from a Liberal surge that threatens NDP’s support across B.C.

Still, the knives are not yet out for him as New Democrats focus on voting day.

For Nicolaidis, Singh’s fate “entirely depends on the results of the election.”

“I think Jagmeet is a responsible leader that will listen to people,” he told the Star.

For Singh to stay on as leader, Bélanger said the NDP must either increase its seat count or hold the balance of power over another minority Liberal government — a sentiment shared by many New Democrats who spoke to the Star.

But it’s a low marker for success, and perhaps a fall from grace for a leader whose stunning rise once prompted speculation that he could become Canada’s first New Democrat prime minister.

Will it be a failure for Singh if he pays the ultimate political price for his deal with the Liberals? No, say some supporters.

“We didn’t do these things to get credit, and politics in Canada is notoriously ungrateful,” Garrison said.

“Is there going to be great growth? Probably not. Is there anything that New Democrats could have done differently up to this point? I don’t see that at all.”