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The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh could barely draw a crowd. Today, his party is leaderless and rudderless after losing most of its seats — and official party status — in Monday’s election.

Across America, the tag team of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) and Bernie Sanders went from city to city to strength. They attracted tens of thousands of supporters young and old to help revive their party.

Which party did they rally to? The old Democratic Party, where each has a home, each in their own way.

When a country faces an existential crisis, the very existence of the left is put to the test. In Canada as in America, each in their own way.

AOC is a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from New York. Sanders is a nominally independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran for the party’s leadership.

Both are considered far left by American if not Canadian standards: Sanders is a self-styled Socialist; AOC calls herself a democratic socialist.

Yet each has made their peace and found a place within the big tent of the establishment Democrats. Together, they keep the party peppy and progressive.

Only in America, you say? Why not Canada?

If the mainstream, centrist, putatively progressive Democratic party in the U.S. is capable of anchoring AOC and Sanders, why can’t the mainstream centrist (and putatively progressive) Liberals serve as a united home for all of Canada’s self-styled progressives?

Why should leftists be hived off to the NDP, bleeding the base of the Liberals in almost every election while the federal New Democrats go up and down and around depending on the political winds?

The question is not an abstraction. It is about obstruction — the NDP at some point needs to get out of the way of centre-left government lest it pave the way for Tories to take power (as they did in 2006, thanks to New Democrats).

There’s not much left of the left in Canada today. Lacking heft, it cannot continue in future as it has in the past.

The Liberals are in perennial need of support, because the right is gaining ground in Canada and around the world. Recent electoral history reminds us that Liberals only win government when New Democrats lend them their support — either as voters (switchers), or MPs (and MPPs) wielding the balance of power.

Alternatively, when the NDP seat count soars every decade or so (thanks to party supporters returning to the fold) the Liberals do poorly — making way for the right to win the day. The Conservatives might have done it again in Monday’s election after achieving an impressive 41.3 per cent of the popular vote even with an unlikable leader in Pierre Poilievre and an unbearable bogeyman in U.S. President Donald Trump.

If not for the collapse of the NDP vote that mostly migrated to the Liberals, the Conservatives could have coasted to victory. Which is what happened in 2006, when the NDP under Jack Layton defeated the Paul Martin Liberals, ushering in nearly a decade of Stephen Harper’s Conservative rule.

Back then, Harper had already shown the foresight to see the light and unite the right. He ended the self-defeating splitting of the right-wing vote that kept the Liberals power election after election.

Yet all these years later, leftists persist as splittists. How much longer will every progressive resist the imperative to unite the left, or what’s left of the left, so as to unite against the right?

The answer is that it will take forever to come together as one happy party. The tribal rivalry and mutual antipathy between New Democrats and Liberals cannot be overcome anytime soon.

What then is to be done? Consider the alternatives close to home and in recent history:

In the U.S., Sanders and AOC cling to their socialist antecedents while also linking up, informally and formally, with the mainstream Democrats.

In Ontario, the long-serving MPP from Rainy River, Patrick Reid always identified his party affiliation as “Liberal-Labour,� a nod to the enduring appeal of the old Labour party in his riding up until he retired in 1985.

So why don’t diehard New Democrats rename themselves? Why not New Liberals?

Or perhaps rebrand themselves as hyphenated Liberal-Democrats?

The NDP now boasts a mere seven out of 343 seats in the House of Commons. If these unhoused New Democrats are reluctant to shelter in a big tent Liberal party, if they still cannot bear political integration, perhaps party hyphenation — and co-ordination — is the remedy.

Either way, it’s time to accept the obvious: Liberals and New Democrats who keep competing against one another, and splitting the vote between each other, will keep delivering closely contested ridings to the Conservatives.

The old New Democratic Party need not pick a lane, just a new name. And a new way of doing politics that unites progressives against a united right.