º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

The New Democratic Party.

As voters rally to the cause of Canada, they are running away from the NDP. If this campaign is a fight for the federation’s survival, it’s now a two-way fight between Liberals and Tories.

New Democrats are fighting for what’s left of the left. And for their political existence.

Opinion polls across the country tell the story of impending doom, and the gloom is already written on the faces of Ontario New Democrats. The NDP’s humiliation in the Feb. 27 provincial election — finishing a distant third in the popular vote behind the two major parties — was a reflection of the party’s declining fortunes federally.

This is not what social democrats dreamed of for decades. New Democrats have long fantasized about finishing off the rival Liberals provincially and nationally — overtaking them, displacing them, eliminating them.

Step by step, election by election.

Over the past decade, the NDP styled itself the Official Opposition in Ontario — a government-in-waiting, destined to overtake the lagging provincial Liberals at Queen’s Park. A decade earlier, federal New Democrats presumed to be Canada’s natural governing party in lieu of the Liberal laggards.

But political destiny rarely turns out as planned. All these years later, a rare political realignment may be underway — just not the one New Democrats always hoped for.

Be careful what you wish for.

Why have the NDP’s fortunes fallen so far, so fast, federally and provincially?

First off, this isn’t the first time the party has fallen on hard times. The “New� in New Democratic Party refers to its reincarnation in 1961 out of the ashes of the old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a party of prairie populists that had also lost popularity.

Three decades after its founding in the Great Depression, the CCF — whose full, formal name included the parenthetical catch-all: “(Farmer-Labour-Socialist)� — sought a second wind by hitching its wagon to organized labour in a formal partnership. Rebranded as the NDP, that socialist-unionist marriage of convenience has failed to bear electoral fruit federally.

To be sure, the NDP has had its moments and mandates provincially. But New Democrats only poll well when Liberals perform poorly — and vice versa; hence the NDP is a force in the west, and does well in pockets of Ontario whenever and wherever the Liberals are in abeyance.

Which means that the NDP’s appeal is now more geographical than ideological: Albertans opt for New Democrats when they are tired of Tories and want to alternate the party in power, not because they are enamoured of the NDP’s social democratic aspirations or pretensions.

Federally and provincially, the union vote has been abandoning New Democrats for decades. Now, progressive voters are abandoning the federal NDP even faster than they bailed on the Ontario party.

Canadians are looking for a safe harbour and knowledgeable navigator in a tariff storm, but also someone who can plausibly stand up to Trump. This federal election has become a two-way race pitting Liberal Leader Mark Carney (seen as a persuasively qualified former central banker and business executive) against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (a career politician with little real world experience or qualifications) to counter the Trump threat.

The NDP’s Singh is seen as an also-ran, if he is heard at all. He made matters worse by ignoring that reality at the campaign’s outset, insisting doggedly that he was running to be prime minister.

More recently, he has recognized his irrelevance by recasting the NDP as the traditional conscience of Parliament, punching above its weight and wielding the balance of power to fight for social programs that the governing Liberals would otherwise ignore with an unconstrained majority.

Yet even that message has failed to penetrate or resonate with progressives. While the NDP deserves credit for promoting pharmacare and dental care in recent years, both of these embryonic programs have maxed out for the moment because of both fiscal and provincial constraints (in any case New Democrats do not have a monopoly on social progress, given the recent Liberal advances on a national child care program that the NDP once thwarted).

Either way, the NDP has lost its leverage in the time of Trump.

For years, the party maintained strategic ambiguity about which party it might support in a minority, but that too lacked credibility or palatability — for how could they plausibly support Tories federally or provincially? More recently, Singh has conceded that Liberals were his only logical allies, all the while threatening to withhold support to extract concessions.

But if the Liberals were to resist NDP demands down the road, would the party then vote to defeat a sitting government, triggering fresh elections in a time of national emergency? It’s an increasingly empty threat by a party that couldn’t possibly pull the trigger without shooting itself — and the country — in the foot.

Voters understand that this is not the time to leave a new government hamstrung by a conditional mandate, subject to the demands of an increasingly marginal party. In a dog-eat-dog world where Canada and the U.S. are immersed in a trade war, voters don’t want the NDP tail wagging the Liberal dog with the American wolf at the door.