The Ben Mulroney Show - Where the NDP goes now after their utter collapse

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Where the NDP goes now after their utter collapse Guest: Brad Lavigne, President of Counsel PA, NDP Strategist Guest: Tom Parkin, Principal at Impact Strategies and Canadian columnist and commentator If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Take a moment to congratulate Prime Minister Carney on his victory. He has an important job to do to represent all Canadians and to protect our country and its sovereignty from the threats of Donald Trump. Tonight and every night, all of us here, we're on Team Canada. We want Canada to thrive and we're going to continue to fight for Canada. Obviously, I'm disappointed that we could not win more seats,

but I'm not disappointed in our movement. I'm hopeful for our party. I know that we will always choose hope over fear and optimism over despair and unity over hate. New Democrats literally built this country. Tonight I've been forward, I've been forward a party leader that I'll be stepping down as party leader as soon as an interim leader can be appointed. That was the voice of former leader of the NDP, federal lead Jagmeet Singh, after what can only be described as a collapse of the vote for that party across the country, having won no seats

in Atlantic Canada, none in Ontario, and one in Quebec. So where do they go from here? In the face of defeat, every party must ask themselves some very serious questions, and I have to be honest with their answers. And that for the NDP to move forward, they are going to have to have that very conversation. And so who better to launch in that conversation are on our side of the fence, then with our two next guests, Brad Levine, the president of Council PA, he's an NDP strategist and Tom Parkin, principal at Impact Strategies

and Canadian columnist and commentator Brad Tom, welcome back to the show. Hi there. Hello. So Brad, let's start with you. Let's start with the party as a whole. Explain the collapse. Many New Democrat voters who supported the party in the 2021 and 2019 election campaigns decided that the

threat of Pierre Poliev and Donald Trump was the ultimate ballot question and therefore they decided to support the Liberals by and large. Some new Democrat votes also stayed home and even some still went to the conservatives in some in some key battleground writing. So lots to lots to consider as to what went wrong. Ben. Yeah. Tom, I know that jug meat Singh says he sacrificed himself in order to keep Pierre Poliev out of power. Do you actually think that's the case? Or is that is that some nifty wordsmithing? Because I mean, maybe he regrets not bringing the government down in October, he could conceivably still be in a stronger position today.

I Yeah, being in a stronger position against the peer poly of majority is not a good position. And that's for sure what would have happened last fall. And so I believe it's essentially a true story that Mr. Singh is saying and that for New Democrats, left to center voters, the idea that he would pull the plug on a government before dental care was in place, before the anti-strike breaking ban was in place, and launch into a Trudeau versus Pierre Poliak campaign, which was only going to come out one way. If he would have been condemned for that internally, there's just no doubt about that in my mind.

So he had to play for time and hope that he could turn it around. Obviously, he couldn't. Tom, you would know better than I, but the stories that I was hearing prior to this election when the party had official party status was they were having a tough time paying down their debts, raising the money that they would need to prosecute an election. I cannot imagine that that gets easier if they end up without official party status, which means there whether or not they the the country needs the NDP federally, can they actually from a financial standpoint, keep this boat afloat? Well, that's, you know, that's a tough question. We it is always tougher for the Democrats raise money than the other parties. And we're likely looking at a

minority. So it looks like there's probably not going to be four years to raise the money that's required for election campaign. But we've got a budget coming at some point this spring. And if Mr. Carney doesn't renounce his plan to cut income taxes for the highest income earners and cut programs that people rely on $20 billion unexplained cuts. It seems very hard for me to understand how the new Democrats could support such a thing. Brad, let's talk about who could come in who could create the enthusiasm, mobilize the base, bring new people into the party, start raising money, perhaps change the minds of people who've turned their back on the NDP.

Could that person be Wab Kanu? Could that person be Valérie Plante? Yes. Those are both excellent names. And I think it's far too early to kind of put names out there. But listen, you're absolutely right about what's next. I'm actually more optimistic than maybe some of your listeners may see because leadership opportunities create hope. That is with the next leader, with a new leader, with some new energy, some new

new energy, some, you know, some new, you know, engagement with Canadians, that's what leads the money, right? So like money, bodies, votes, it all, I think it's very much leader dependent. And you know, I'm very optimistic that there is a tremendous need, there's a tremendous will among the country. I don't believe that those that abandoned the party in this election were abandoning the values and the belief systems of the party. They were, I think, moving for the moment. And I think it was one, you know, kind of a lending of the vote as opposed to a moving

away forever. I think this is a temporary move. And I think with the right leader, both the energy and the money and all of that which which we need to rebuild. So I'm actually quite excited because there are great names out there. There's great people. Wab Kanu, first term leader and premier of the province of Manitoba, fluently bilingual, universally loved within the party, probably too early because he's made his commitment to the people

of Manitoba. He's just, what, two years into his mandate there. Valéry Plong, former mayor of Montreal, fantastic, fluently bilingual, social democrat, you know, has the governing experience, much like Jack Layton did in the City of Toronto before he became leader of our party back in 2003. So there's a lot of great names out there. I'm actually waking up while I'm sorry to see a lot of great MPs didn't make it past the finish line last night, but I'm incredibly optimistic because the need with the move to the right of the Liberal Party, the need for a strong Democratic Party has never been greater and I think there's a lot of energy right now within the country. So I'm actually waking up today, sorry to see

the results last night, but incredibly optimistic about the future. Tom, I've heard conversations in the face of defeat many times where people say that I didn't leave my party, my party left me. And the Tories have are forced to ask themselves, do they need a pivot back to the progressive conservative days? You know, we heard that Justin Trudeau took his party too far to the left. Is it time that the NDP have an honest conversation about how this party seems, at least from the outside looking in, to have morphed away from the Jack Leighton days, from the Ed Broadbent days, into a party almost single-mindedly

obsessed with the struggles of the Middle East? Well, I disagree with that framing of the question. I just don't believe that premise is true. The whole election campaign that Doug Moutain just prosecuted was about affordability, was about keeping the prices of groceries down. Well, yes, but to be fair, he might have wanted to talk about that, but he wasn't getting any attention for that. From my perspective, any time the NDP was making headlines prior to the election, it was over this issue. Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying really is that other people have

been able to misdirect him from the purpose that he's trying to campaign on by using this ploy, I'll say that. Yes, I guess to some extent that is extent that is successful. I mean, you're in a way proving it right now. But I don't believe that that was fundamental to what happened last night. And anyway, I agree with Brad, a lot of it was people lending their vote because they thought it was an exigent circumstance. And the question is to approach them back.

I do think though to add to the point, there could be more work done on tone or mood maybe. All right. Well, when we think back to early judgment, he was very popular, especially with younger voters. He brought a huge number of non-white young activists into a party that had been dominantly white. Gentlemen, I'm going to have to leave it there. I'm going to have to leave it there, but this is a conversation that we will continue.

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