The NDP is getting outflanked — again

So close and yet so far. That was the story in the 2015 federal election for the NDP, who spent much of the campaign looking like a threat to finally win their first majority before getting outflanked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and his pledge to run deficits. Now almost a decade later, it’s happening again, except this time it’s Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives doing the outflanking. If he succeeds, it could cost the federal NDP their very existence.

On the surface, things don’t look quite this desperate. Sure, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP is polling a few points behind where it did in the last election, but they hardly look like they’re in danger of getting wiped out. Underneath that surface, though, are some very dangerous currents. Despite collapsing support for the federal Liberals, a phenomenon that ought to disproportionately benefit the NDP, it has barely managed to tread water in the polls.

That’s because Poilievre’s very deliberate pitch to working-class voters — you know, the traditional NDP base — is bearing fruit. According to recent numbers from Abacus Data, 10 per cent of those who voted NDP in 2021 now support Poilievre’s CPC. For a party led by someone with a fondness for tailored suits and Rolex watches, and who seems far more comfortable in a downtown Toronto cafe than a shop floor in Hamilton, this is a dangerous trend for Singh’s NDP.

So far, the voters they’re losing to Poilievre have been mostly masked by the disaffected Liberals who are parking their support with the NDP, but those are the same ones who might very well return to the Liberal fold come election time. Indeed, according to an Angus Reid Institute poll from January, more than one-third (36 per cent) of NDP voters said they’d be likely to switch to the Liberals, with a further 30 per cent saying it’s something they’d consider.

At least a few NDP MPs seem to be reading these tea leaves already. Charlie Angus, the longtime MP for Timmins-James Bay and former leadership candidate, has announced he’s not going to run in the next election. Manitoba’s Daniel Blaikie, the son of longtime NDP MP Bill Blaikie and a rising star in his own right, resigned his seat to serve as an adviser to Premier Wab Kinew. Carol Hughes (Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing) and Rachel Blaney (North Island-Powell River), both members of the party’s shrinking rural caucus, have also announced they won’t run in the next election.

The federal NDP is becoming an increasingly urban party, if not exclusively so, right at the moment when the federal Liberals are doing the same thing. Yes, Canada’s cities continue to get bigger and make up a larger share of our electoral map, but they’re not growing nearly fast enough to accommodate both — not, at least, without exposing them to a potential vote split that ultimately benefits the Conservatives.

One potential way the federal NDP might save itself here is by doing to the Liberals what’s been done to them in the past. Singh needs to find a way to outflank Trudeau on some key issue and become the de-facto alternative to Poilievre’s CPC. That would allow Singh to turn the familiar Liberal argument around strategic voting against them, and perhaps attract some new Liberal switchers rather than losing them.

But that would require Singh to take the same sort of risk that Trudeau took in 2015 by dispensing with the conventional wisdom around the importance of balanced budgets. There’s some major irony here. Singh’s victory in the 2017 race to replace Tom Mulcair was driven at least in part by the Trudeau-like image he offered as a young, stylish and social media-savvy leader. If Singh wants to live up to that comparison, he’ll have to do more than just look the part. Trudeau’s big breakthrough in 2015 was a result of the risks he and his team were willing to make, ones that could just as easily have backfired and cemented their status as the third-place party in Parliament. Instead, they outflanked the NDP on its left and secured a majority.

Now, the NDP needs to return the favour. Barring some sort of tectonic shift in our political landscape, the party won’t have a realistic shot at winning next year’s election. But if they want to prevent Poilievre from eating the rest of its lunch with traditional blue-collar voters and stop the Liberals from activating the strategic voting klaxon, they’re going to have to take some bigger swings than they have to date. Yes, they might strike out. But at the rate things are going, they’re headed there anyway.