The Decibel - What lies ahead for the NDP and Jagmeet Singh

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Nearly 15 years ago, the NDP became Canada’s official opposition. Now, Jagmeet Singh and the NDP are trailing far behind the frontrunners of the upcoming federal election and are no longer campaigning to win — but instead to hold the winners accountable, raising questions about the party’s future.Gary Mason is a national affairs columnist at the Globe. He’s on the show to explain how Singh’s campaign is responding to waning support, what’s led the NDP to this point and what the party’s collapse could mean for Canada’s political landscape.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Nearly 15 years ago, the NDP became Canada's official opposition. My friends, it's an historic night for New Democrats and you should all take... But now, its leader is fielding questions about whether they can even maintain official party status. The NDP have been reduced to fewer and fewer seats in recent elections. In 2011, they had over 100. In the last parliament, they had 25. And right now, the NDP is hovering at around 8% in the national polls, which could translate into only a few seats on Election Day. Some polls

show that even leader Jagmeet Singh's own riding could be at risk. So while this election could determine the direction of Canada for years to come, it may also have consequences for the future of the NDP and its leader. Today, Gary Mason is here. He's the Globe's national affairs columnist. He spent the last few weeks speaking with party insiders, including Singh himself. Gary will tell us what's led the NDP to this point and what its collapse in support could mean

for Canada's political landscape. I'm Maynika Raman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Gary, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, my pleasure, Manika. So I know that you've spent a good chunk of this campaign speaking to people who are involved in the current NDP campaign as well as other party insiders. How would you describe the mood right now inside the party?

I would say like there's sort of two camps right now. There's the camp that is still holding out for some sort of miracle. These are the people that point to, you know, the famous 2011 election in which the NDP did so well, 103 seats under Jack Layton. So in that election, the NDP was like a week before or just days before the English language leaders debate, they were still at 13%. And then they had this massive rush in the last 10 days of the campaign and everything changed for them. So there's a group that's still hoping for that sort of miracle to happen in this

campaign. But then there's the, I would call the realist to understand that things look very bleak. Things look almost existential in terms of the future of the party and what it could be facing. So I would say, yeah, there's two, two forces. I'd say the realist and the dreamers. I mean, honestly, either of those doesn't sound particularly good for the NDP. Holding out for a miracle or being realistic and knowing it's not going well, it seems pretty grim. Yeah, I think it is pretty grim. I think that, you know, when I was on the campaign trail

with Jagmeet Singh, he was constantly asked, why are there no supporters at your rallies? Or at his events, his campaign events where he was making announcements, but there was nobody ever there. Now after that, there were some stops where he was surrounded by supporters, but the campaign announcements in the early stages of the campaign and through the middle but the campaign announcements, you know, in the early stages of the campaign and through the middle of the campaign were very low key, a little bit, I'd hate to say amateur hours, but they were sort of, and they were kind of really missing the point

of what this election is all about. You know, the, the, Donald Trump of course has framed the big question in this election. And the NDP were making announcements about, you know, little pharmacare things here and really didn't seem to be speaking to what was really going on and what was on people's minds in this campaign. OK, so when you're kind of painting this scene and you're talking, you know, about a bunch of people kind of being the realists here. What is the worst case scenario that these individuals would be bracing for when it comes to this election?

Well, I think the worst case scenario are like some of the polls that we've seen, they've talked about three or four seats for the party. That would be catastrophic. And just for comparison, last election they won 25, right? So there is a big difference there. Yeah, a big difference. I think that you need 12 seats in the House of Commons to be recognized as an official party.

And with that recognition comes resources and money and things like that. So anything less than 12 seats, I think it's going to be very, very bad for the party. There's no question. I mean, 12 seats, even 12 seats is going to be going to be bad just because of the downward trajectory of support for the NDP over the last decade. It hasn't, it hasn't been good at all. So, you know, you're talking potentially single digit number of seats and that would be including the leader losing his seat in Burnaby. I mean that's how grim things are. This is an interesting point you're getting at here Gary because I think a

lot of Canadians see this election as kind of you know the existential threats from the US that we're worried about but it sounds like even within the NDP there's actually more specific existential threats at play here like they're worried about their future, it sounds like. Oh, absolutely. There's no question it's affected morale. But the NDP, you know, there's still a lot of people in the NDP that are fighters and believers and they'll go down right to the end.

But you know, I did a piece that was sort of an ancillary piece to the one I did on the NDP and Jagmeet Singh. And it talked about the phenomenon in this election where the majority of votes are coalescing around the two major parties. The last time that more than 80% of the vote coalesced around the two major parties, you have to go back to 1958, John Diefenbaker's landslide win back then. So that shows you how unique this election is. And in a way, it shows you how the NDP is getting kind of pushed to the side. But it's been 25 years since the NDP had less than 10% of the vote.

That was in 2000. So- And they're hovering around 8% right now, it seems like. Yeah. They're hovering around 8% right now. It seems like yeah, they're hovering around 8% 7% It's you know, I've seen 9 10% who knows where it's gonna end up. But for most of the campaign They've been less than 10% So let's get into this Gary like what's going on in this election if you know traditional NDP voters aren't backing Jagmeet Singh right now

Where are their votes going? Well, I think a lot of votes are going to the two other parties. You know, Greg Lyle, I talked to Greg Lyle with Innovative Research and he did some tracking that showed up to a couple of weeks ago that NDP was holding on to about 57 percent of its 2021 vote. And of the votes that they were losing, I think over 30% were going to the liberals and then about 14% had gone to the conservatives.

I think that they lost some of those votes to the conservatives well before the whole Trump thing blew up as the major campaign issue. The conservatives have been courting the NDP blue collar union vote for a while now. It started under Aaron O'Toole. You've seen it in other parts of the world. You know, the conservatives under Boris Johnson. So that same phenomenon is happening here.

What about the, I guess, you know, the votes that are going to the liberals? I guess what segment of the NDP party is now splitting towards the liberals? Well we can call them sort of the the cafe socialist the white wine socialist they're sort of educated often well-to-do progressives that you know support a lot of the values that the NDP you know promote and then you have you know along comes Mark Carney with all his experience. And when you compare the two, and if the question is,

who's best able to handle Donald Trump, well, the progressive voter who might've voted NDP in the last three or four election is probably gonna give their vote to the liberals this time on that question. So, I mean, there's no question that Singh is being hurt by that. There's also one other phenomenon

that I should point out. And I've always been mystified by this. I always wonder, how does this work? But in British Columbia, where I live, it wasn't uncommon, or hasn't been uncommon, to see people vote NDP preventively and conservative federally. In that sense, it's not the greatest leap in the world to think that there would be federal NDPers that would jump to the conservative party when you see that it's actually happened

in the past. AMT – One more question though about what's going on with the NDP support here because they do have a record to run on, right? They managed to get some legislative wins through when they were working with the liberals during this last session of government. Things like pharmacare, dental care, right? Those were NDP things that made it through. So why isn't that helping them in this election? Yeah, well, that's a very good question, because I think that that was the gamble that the NDP made when they decided to

prop up the liberal government of Justin Trudeau. This is with the Supply and Confidence Agreement. With this exactly Supply and Confidence Agreement of 2022. They thought, okay, we understand that we're going to be propping up an increasingly unpopular government. But this is the best way of getting some of our issues on the table and passed and maybe we'll get credit for them like pharma care, dental care. But as often as the case, the minor partners in these deals, they end up getting, excuse the expression, they get screwed in the end and they don't really get credit for anything. And it didn't help that when Jagmeet Singh ripped up that agreement in September of 2024,

saying that, the liberals are too weak, too selfish, and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people. They cannot be the change. They cannot restore the hope. They cannot restore the hope. They cannot stop the conservatives. And yet, then they went for several more months after that, propping up the same government. They, you know, they turn their back on every opportunity to let the government fall. And I think this is really a very, very key point, because there was a time when the NDP was actually ahead of the

liberals, like by a point or two in the polls. And if they had let the government fall and Trudeau was forced to lead the liberals into an election, I mean, the liberals could have been wiped out and the NDP could have been sitting pretty. They could have been the opposition party. So, but they instead they hung on. Then of course, Trump gets elected and the world changes and everything got flipped on the NDP. The whole thing got flipped on them. And now they're sitting there wondering what the hell happened? What happened to their grand strategy? Because it just went up in smoke. We'll be back after this message.

So far we've really been talking about how party insiders understand what's happened to the NDP support here. But I know that you actually spoke to Jagmeet Singh himself as well. So what does he say about how he understands this drop in NDP support? Well, he was still trying to keep a brave face about everything and he was still optimistic that the party was going to do well. But there's a couple of things that he told me, quotes, that I'd like to read to you that I found profoundly sort of out of touch. And I have heard from New Democrats who read the piece and saw the quotes too, and they were shocked by them.

And I'll tell you the context. The first one was I was asking him about, you know, given the polls isn't one of your primary jobs right now, trying to keep the spirits of the troops, you know, up. And this is what he said, you don't become a new Democrat because you assume you're going to be in a position of power. New Democrats don't enter elections with the pursuit of power or naked power. People become new Democrats because we believe we're going to use our power to do important

things. But what stuck out about that is it was like, we don't go into an elections to win power, it's to try and force change for good. And a lot of New Democrats think that is just the wrong, you have to go into those elections thinking or hoping or planning to win. I mean, at a provincial level, New Democrats, certainly in the West, they all go into elections planning to win. I mean, at a provincial level, New Democrats certainly in the West, they all go into elections expecting to win. If you don't go into an election expecting to win, or at least planning to win and fighting to win,

to enact your agenda. So I think a lot of people were, I know a lot of people were shocked by that. They were shocked and a little bit disappointed that that's what he said. And then there was one other thing he said, you know, when I asked him, why do you think the NDP is having such great success, provincially, certainly in the West, like forming governance all over the place. And yet they're not, that's not translating to success, you know, federally.

And he said, we are the new Democratic Party. He emphasized the word new. It's a young party and it takes time. And I thought, wait a minute, your party was formed in 1961. It's been around, it'll celebrate its 64th birthday in August. It is not a new party. I thought that was a pretty oblivious to reality. It just was not a good thing for him to say.

So I wasn't impressed very much with some of his responses to difficult and hard questions. I thought that they showed a leader who was a little bit out of touch with his party and what other people in the party are thinking. And we will definitely talk a little bit out of touch with his party and what other people in the party are thinking. And we will definitely talk a little bit more about his leadership itself here, Gary. But you raised a good point, I think,

here about the success of the NDP at provincial levels and the challenges they're facing at the federal level. Because right now, we have NDP governments in BC and Manitoba. Recent memory, they've been in power in Alberta, Saskatchewan. If you go back far enough, Ontario as well, right? So what is the difference at the provincial level that lets them win? I'm going to point to one particular NDP government that I followed quite closely, and that was

John Horgan's NDP government in British Columbia. And John Horgan was almost like the perfect NDP leader because he was like pro resource development but do it responsibly and don't do it just for the sake of doing it. But you know, an LNG line to, you know, Northern British Columbia would bring in a lot of revenue and it's better than an oil pipeline. So he could make the pitch. But the biggest thing was he was all about fiscal responsibility. Up until COVID, every budget that Carol James, his finance minister, brought in was balanced because that's obviously the greatest knock against NDP governments or NDP parties is

that they're fiscally irresponsible. I think any government that's been successful, any NDP government that's been successful provincially has had to convince people, look, we're not these profligate spenders. We're going to manage the purse strings well, and you can trust us. Increasingly, NDP governments have been able to do that. But getting back to the federal NDP, I think that they haven't been able to convince the broad spectrum of Canadians that they

are going to be able to handle the books and grow prosperity, and that it's just not going to be a big spend fest with the NDP. Because they talk mostly about what they're going to do that costs money and they spend a lot less time speaking about where they're going to find the money to do this and I think that that that's really what's held the party back federally. It's interesting because when you're saying this it sounds like the provincial wing of the parties they kind of move a little bit maybe to the center

to get power if they're talking about more fiscal responsibility, right? So I guess it begs the question, does a left leaning progressive party, maybe that just doesn't win on a large scale in Canada? I think you're right. The NDP governments in the West, they've all won in effectively two party provinces. I mean, it's the NDP versus the alternative on the right. And now you go right across Alberta, you know, Saskatchewan. There's basically two parties that are fighting for power.

Ontario might be the outlier there, I guess, if we go back to the early 90s. Ontario would be the outlier. But like in British Columbia, for example, the NDP is almost like a classic liberal party. It really is. And then the conservatives, they're the center-right party. The NDP is the center-left party. And that's kind of what you see right across the West. So the two-party system, you know, Ontario, as you mentioned, it's a bit of an outlier,

but that really helps the NDP. They're not fighting with a lot of other little smaller parties to win power. Yeah. All right, Gary, let's come back to the issue of drug meets things leadership itself, because we've talked through a bunch of issues, but let's actually look at this question of whether part of the problem might be the leader. So what did party insiders say about that? They didn't really want to talk about it. I remember talking to Kathleen Monk. You see

Kathleen a lot on the pundit shows and she worked for Jack Layton and she's done a lot of work with the party and worked on a lot of elections. And I asked her, so if Jagmeet doesn't get the same number of seats, if they don't hold their 25 seats, you think that's the end? And she said, I'm not going give you that quote but you know off the record I think they all recognize that this is probably the end of the line for Jagmeet Singh I mean unless there's a miracle I mean if if you look at where the NDP vote has been going since 2011 which was sort of the height of their the popularity under Jack Layaitin. They

won 103 seats, including what 49 or something and 46 in Quebec. It's just gone down. They've lost from that election to the 21 election. I think they've lost 1.5 million votes and they look like they're going to lose even more here. So the trajectory is all wrong. So this is Singh's third election. So clearly he hasn't been the answer. You know, there's problems for a turban wearing Sikh political leader in Quebec. So there's issues there.

I'm glad you brought that up because the success of the Orange Wave was in big part due to Quebec, right? And he is, you know, the only visible minority leader issues there. I'm glad you brought that up because the success of the Orange Wave was in big part due to Quebec, right? And he is, you know, the only visible minority leader out there. Yeah, absolutely. And I just don't think that province is, given its strong secular nature, is ready for a turban wearing political leader. And Bill 21, you know, sort of banned religious symbols. And that bill, even though it was controversial, mostly outside the province of Quebec, it had broad support inside the province.

And that made things even harder for seeing to grow NDP support inside Quebec. So- Yeah, and I'll just say this, this bill, yeah, because this is like laws around instituting secularism, right, in the province. So this is where, you know, the religious symbols maybe clash a little bit more with the thoughts there. Absolutely. So it just seems like we're saying this a lot, but since Jack Layton, it's been all downhill for the NDP in Quebec. I mean, that was such an unusual election, the Orange Wave election.

Jack, it was mostly his charisma that turned the tide there for the NDP, his debate performance. And it was just, it was a phenomenon that we haven't seen since. And it's just been miserable ever since that election. But getting back to Jagmeet Singh, I just, you know, I really like him on a personal level. Like when you sit down with them one on one, there's a magnetism about him. But he's not making that connection on a broader scale. He's just not. I don't know if it's strictly just politics. Is it, you know, Canadians writ large not ready for someone who looks like Jagmeet Singh to be their prime minister?

I don't know. But I think that he probably knows that this is the end of the line. I just don't see how under any terms he can survive this. So just lastly, before I let you go here here Gary, we talked earlier about the worst case scenario for the party. The NDP only winning a handful of seats in this election, losing party status potentially. But bigger picture, what does Canada lose if our next parliament is basically a two-party house, basically between the liberals and the conservatives without those more powerful third parties?

I think they lose a lot. I really do. I think if our politics begin to look like US politics, where there's only two choices at the top of the ballot, I don't think that that's good. Because it leads to divisiveness. It leads to a polarized electorate. It leads to just, my side is right, your side is wrong, that kind of politics.

But I think more crucially, it closes out other thoughts, other, you know, other parties influence on policymaking. And you know, say what you will about the NDP. I mean, they did have a role, an instrumental role in a couple of really good policies that the liberals brought in, like pharma care and dental care. Those have helped a lot of people, a lot of poor people, a lot of people that could use the help. And those voices can't be heard anymore. If there's not a place for that kind of thought and reasoning and empathy, maybe, then I think we're a poor four. I really do. I

think that, you know, I would just say quickly, I think we really missed an opportunity when, you know, Justin Trudeau decided not to pursue proportional representation. I think it's the fairest kind of election that you can hold. First past the post, it's deficient for, it's wrong for so many reasons, but maybe I'm just, you know, a two pie in the sky. But, you know, to answer your question, I think we're going to lose a lot. And I hope, I really hope that this is just a one-off phenomenon that we're seeing as a result of Donald Trump, and that we'll see a return to the kind of more balanced, broader spectrum of ideas represented in the House of Commons and not just, you know, two parties that in many respects you can't even tell the difference between the two of them.

Gary, appreciate getting the chance to talk to you. Thank you for being here. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you very much for asking me. That was Gary Mason, The Globe's National Affairs columnist. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramen-Wilms. This episode was edited and mixed by Ali Graham.

Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our associate producer is Aja Souter. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.