NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh speaks in the foyer prior to question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 17, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Tom Parkin is a social democratic commentator and the publisher of the Data Shows newsletter on Substack. He has previously worked on NDP campaigns federally, and in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives would coast to victory if Canada’s federal election was held now. That’s what the polls have been saying for almost a year.
But last Wednesday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh created a new path to power when he ripped up the supply-and-confidence deal with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. “The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people,” Mr. Singh declared. “They cannot stop the Conservatives. But we can.”
The Liberals’ weakness is apparent. The party has never started an election so low in the polls, even before its disastrous 2011 showing. Last week, Angus Reid put the Liberals at just 21-per-cent support.
And their once-mighty “strategic vote” capability has withered as other parties’ supporters say they will not vote Liberal, even to stop Mr. Poilievre, according to Abacus. An amazing 86 per cent of Canadians told Abacus they want change. The Liberals cannot be the change Canadians want; they are what Canadians want a change from.
Even the Liberals’ national campaign director, Jeremy Broadhurst, has announced he is quitting, with one source reportedly suggesting that he’d concluded that the Prime Minister can’t win.
But Mr. Singh is now arguing that his New Democrats could. That effort has two prongs: coalescing the anti-Poilievre vote behind the NDP, and attracting change voters from the Conservatives who are uncomfortable – or who become uncomfortable – with their leader.
Uniting the anti-Poilievre vote would move the NDP within the sights of the Conservatives. According to Abacus, voters supporting the Liberals, Greens or Bloc Québécois who would probably or definitely vote for the NDP to stop the Conservatives, if it became clear the NDP had the best chance of doing so, would produce a 17-per-cent swing; the Liberals would only rally an 11-per-cent swing of NDP, Green or Bloc supporters if the Liberals emerged.
But even that wouldn’t be enough to stop a party regularly polling in majority territory. The NDP must also lower Mr. Poilievre’s support.
The Tory Leader has energized his party’s base, in part through his support for the convoy, bitcoin and controversial hard-right figures. But only 25 per cent of voters intend to support the Conservatives because they are attracted to the party, according to Abacus. What brings the Conservatives to majority levels is the 17 per cent of voters primarily planning to vote Conservative to defeat the Liberals.
Mr. Singh, then, has opened the NDP’s door to change voters who had shut it because of his association with Mr. Trudeau. He will work to widen that opening by reducing the relevance of his association with the Liberals and creating a new change imperative. A change from the Liberals is already guaranteed; the change needed now is to prevent the Tories’ promised budget cuts.
There is also a key weakness Mr. Singh can exploit: Mr. Poilievre’s personal approval scores are lower than the Conservatives’. Angus Reid found that 43 per cent of Canadians favour the Tories, but Mr. Poilievre is favoured by 36 per cent. This gap may be because change voters are driven by Liberal repulsion rather than Conservative attraction – or it may be, as The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne wrote, because Mr. Poilievre is “so unpleasant.”
Mr. Singh will be doing all he can to increase voters’ discomfort with Mr. Poilievre. Last week, he showed how he intends to do it. In declaring the Liberals “too beholden to corporate interests to win,” he signalled his belief that Mr. Poilievre’s greatest weaknesses are his own corporate ties and his threat of cuts.
Look for Mr. Singh to refresh memories about past Conservative cuts to veterans, Old Age Security and federal health transfers. Expect him to push Mr. Poilievre about whether he would gut dental care, pharmacare and child care, and to needle him about his implausible conversion from anti-worker Thatcherite to alleged working-class ally.
The NDP will now be in a clear attack position whenever the Liberals and Conservatives do team up in the House, particularly when they jointly support public subsidies for massively profitable corporations and when they’re seen as doing the bidding of big business at the expense of Canadians.
To poke through Conservative inevitability, Mr. Singh will need to tie Mr. Poilievre to the same interests that made Mr. Trudeau ineffective, and left Canadians disappointed and poorer.
The path isn’t easy, but by declaring the Liberals a spent force and opening the door to change voters, Mr. Singh has now at least created one. Now his team needs the discipline to take it.