Election night could be simply summed as thus: a collapsing NDP allowed the Liberals to hang onto a minority against a surging Conservative Party. While some breathe a sigh of relief at avoiding a Poilievre government, the winnowing of the political contest into a two-corporate-party race across much of Canada contains many troubling undercurrents for the left.
How we got here
At the beginning of the year, the Liberal Party was in a full-blown political crisis. After several by-election losses and sagging poll numbers, the calls for Justin Trudeau to resign as Prime Minister reached a crescendo inside the party. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who had dominated the polls for the last two years, looked poised to win one of the largest majorities in Canadian history.
Fast forward four months and it was newly appointed Prime Minister Mark Carney who won re-election in a minority government. The Liberal turnaround was a remarkable lesson in how events, seen and unforeseen, not plans, drive politics. Trump’s election and his immediate tariff threats drove the Canadian ruling class into crisis. Faced with large tariffs, an economic recession, and threats to Canadian sovereignty, many voters feared for their future. Trudeau’s resignation allowed Carney to step into the role as economic manager and breathe new life into the Liberals.
The Liberals’ illusory victory
As the former Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney’s name recognition and outsider status allowed him to easily sweep the Liberal Party leadership contest. Carney quickly distanced himself from Liberal policies like the consumer carbon tax and capital gains tax that were the main targets of the Conservatives. This disarmed the Conservatives and allowed him to focus on the pressing issue of tariffs. A large swathe of the electorate, who had previously voted for either the Liberals or the NDP, grew increasingly anxious about the prospects of a right-wing Poilievre government being elected at the same time Trump was in power.
Carney leveraged the moment by projecting himself as a steady hand at the economic wheel. His long record of siding with big business interests was airbrushed away. With some notable exceptions, such as his promise to maintain a robust child care program and some investment in housing, Carney did not run on promising new social programs or bettering the lives of workers by investing in communities. Instead, he trumpeted economic development through pipeline expansion, militarism, and money for business–but not workers.
Carney was able to ride the momentum of the tariff crisis throughout the campaign with polls consistently showing a two- to four-point Liberal lead. While he increased the Liberals’ seat count from 160 to 169, and its vote share from 32.6 percent to 43.7 percent (adding roughly three million total votes), he failed to win a majority, thanks to the Conservatives’ over performing in key regions in Ontario and British Columbia, along with the Bloc Québécois vote not collapsing in Québec. The Liberals picked up seats in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, BC, Saskatchewan, Québec, and Eastern Ontario, but crucially lost seats in southwest Ontario, Brampton, and York Region. The Liberal surge in the vote share was almost exclusively driven by the collapse of the NDP and re-engaging previous Liberal voters.
Turnout for the election was 68.6 per cent, besting the last two elections and just slightly higher than the 2015 election.
The Conservatives advance
For nearly two years, the Conservatives were leading in the polls and ready to form the next government. Poilievre was able to position himself as the sole voice of opposition to the Liberal government. The Conservatives were able to connect with people’s real frustration about the housing and cost-of-living crises, and provide right-wing solutions like tax cuts, spending cuts, deregulation, further criminalizing drug use, and blaming migrants.
Trudeau’s Liberal government grew increasingly unpopular as it was seen as beholden to special interests and unable to address the cost-of-living crisis. Poilievre consciously sought to build inroads amongst workers and immigrant communities. Poilievre’s popularity surged as he made the case that “Canada was broken.”
When Trump ramped up his threats on the Canadian economy, Poilievre’s team was like a deer in the headlights. They dismissed people’s fears and only belatedly made a pivot to amping up Canadian nationalism.
With Trudeau out of the picture, it was Doug Ford, not Poilievre, who became the Conservative leader in the spotlight for standing up to Trump. It was at this moment that the long-simmering divisions inside the Conservative party spilled over into the public. Poilievre and his campaign manager Jenni Byrne are widely disliked by Premier Ford’s team and by Nova Scotia’s Premier Tim Houston. Ford and his campaign partner Kory Teneycke accused Poilievre of blowing a 25-point lead because of their inability to pivot towards addressing the tariff war. On election night, hard-right Conservative MP Jamil Jivani blasted Ford on live TV, blaming him for Carney’s victory.
While the Conservatives lost on election night, they dramatically increased their seat count from 119 to 144 and their vote share from 33 per cent to 41.7 per cent. This was the highest vote share for the Conservatives since Mulroney.
While they failed to best the Liberals in the popular vote, something they succeeding in doing in the last two elections, they made key breakthroughs in Ontario, winning ridings in Windsor, London, Brampton, and York Region. This prevented the Liberals from forming a majority. They won 44 percent of the vote in Ontario, up from 34.9 per cent in 2021. In BC, their vote share went from 33.2 per cent in 2021 to 41.2 per cent this election. While the Liberals increased their vote share dramatically as well, from 32.6 percent to 43.7 percent, their increase almost exactly matches the 11-point drop in the NDP vote share.
For Conservatives, this is good news. The likelihood that the Liberals will be able to replicate their vote share is near zero. The Conservatives increased their raw vote total by 2.3 million votes. They did this by consolidating the PPC vote, which collapsed by 700,000 votes, and winning over new layers of voters without rushing to the political middle. According to polling, they won over more new young, working-class, and racialized voters, while the Liberals disproportionately peeled away a whiter, older, more professional layer of voters into their voting bloc. In regions like Peel and South Western Ontario, the Conservatives peeled away enough former NDP or Liberal voters to make major breakthroughs.
Disaster for the NDP…
Winning only seven seats and 6.3 percent of the popular vote, by every metric this was the single worst federal election outcome in the 93-year history of the CCF/NDP. In 1935, the newly formed CCF contested its first election, winning seven seats in parliament of 245 seats (as opposed to 343 now). The disastrous 1993 election saw the party win 6.8 percent of the vote and pick up nine seats. Even the calamitous 1958 election, which precipitated the dissolution of the CCF and formation of the NDP, saw the party win more seats and a greater vote share.
The two immediate factors that led to the NDP’s poor performance were the confidence and supply agreement with the Liberals and the Trump threat. The confidence and supply agreement tied the NDP to the Liberals at a time when their popularity was sinking like a stone. Unable to address the cost-of-living crisis, consistently over-promising and under-delivering, Trudeau came to symbolize an out-of-touch elite who is cozy with big business. The NDP was painted with the same brush as they were effectively propping up the government. The two flagship wins in the confidence and supply deal–a national dental care program and a national pharmacare program–were late in coming and significantly limited in their impacts.
While these were important wins, the NDP largely won them through parliamentary politicking and lobbying, and not through a high-profile, pan-Canadian campaign that could have mobilized working-class voters and deepened their relationship to the party.
The deal also left the Conservatives as the only opposition to the government, so when people ran up against a cost-of-living crisis or were upset with the government for any reason, the Conservatives became the only game in town for voters to park their support. Likewise, when the NDP took a good position on Palestine (although undermined by actions at the provincial party level), they struggled to truly differentiate themselves from the government they were keeping in power.
Seeing the writing on the wall, the NDP tried to pivot in the late fall by withdrawing from the government. But the damage was done. The huge drop in Liberal support over the previous eighteen months resulted in no increase to the NDP’s poll numbers, which is remarkable.
As calls for Trudeau to resign grew louder, the NDP threatened to trigger an election. When he did finally, Singh was left as the most prominent face of the previous government (however inaccurate that was). All across the country, NDP voters abandoned the party for the Liberals. The NDP lost 1.8 million votes, representing a decrease of 58 percent of votes from the previous election.
In the GTA, they finished in third place in every seat except one. They lost NDP strongholds in Hamilton Centre and Windsor, and were reduced to distant third-place finishes in once competitive seats. They produced fringe party numbers in the 905.
The campaign the NDP ran was more akin to a funeral march. There were no real rallies or energy. The base and leadership were not motivated. Very strong left-wing MPs who would normally be very competitive were rowing against the current.
While critical of Carney, the NDP failed to articulate a clear alternative vision. The NDP had some good policies and a patchwork of progressive messaging, but they presented no coherent alternative or narrative that spoke to workers. While they failed to meet the moment, we should also understand that ultimately the NDP didn’t falter because it ran a bad campaign, or had a weak leader, or ran up against strategic voting. This result was mainly the product of politics and strategic choices years and even decades in the making.
…and a disaster for labour
For the labour movement, the election was an unmitigated disaster. Labour failed almost completely to voice a vision for working people in the midst of an election about the future of the economy–despite having over two years to come up with one and lead a campaign to connect with their own members. Even when labour pushed the government to support workers in the midst of the trade war, it was tempered by a politics of progressive competition that has turned labour into a junior partner of the corporate sector. Parts of labour even got on board with increased military spending and pipeline expansion.
At other points in its history, labour has advocated for the nationalization of industries and expanding crown corporations, strengthening laws around severance and termination to discourage factory closures, and massive increases in investments in workers. It is no wonder that a good chunk of union members voted for Poilievre, someone they believe offers change from the status quo.
The social basis of social democratic politics has been severely eroded. The Conservatives are making real electoral inroads in working-class communities. When unions can barely articulate or defend even social-democratic-lite politics, there are serious problems ahead. Polling amongst young people as well as the parallel youth national vote saw massive increases in support for the Conservatives. Young people are struggling to find careers while navigating the housing crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, and confronting the climate crisis. The right, not the left, is connecting with these frustrations and turning them away from collective solutions. This is especially true of young men (and middle-aged men, too). This doesn’t mean young people are lost to the right, but it is indicative of what polling reveals about real contradictions amongst not just young voters, but all voters.
How should the left respond?
There has been much made about the dangers of strategic voting on the left. But strategic voting is not something you can stop by wagging your finger and saying, “I told you so.” Strategic voting is the product of pessimism and a low level of political confidence and consciousness. Only by building a fighting left that aims to transform people’s consciousness and shift the terms of debate can we win an argument about strategic voting.
After the 1993 defeat, the NDP engaged in a thorough review of the performance and direction of the party. Today, there needs to be at the very least a real grappling amongst party members about the direction of the party.
There will be a great temptation on the radical left to think that the left’s problems or the NDP’s problems can be solved by adopting a more radical platform and a new radical leader, or that it can be solved by dreaming up a new party. But simply saying that the NDP needs a new leader and a new platform (or a new party) is simply engaging in a version of left-wing triangulation—mirroring exactly the thinking of righ-twing social democracy. This thesis incorrectly assumes that there is a ready-made, fully formed socialist constituency just waiting to vote for socialism (so we just need to say the right things). Anyone who actually is engaged in their union and/or in petitioning and knocking on doors as part of campaigns knows this doesn’t reflect reality.
This is magical thinking that is born from political weakness and isolation. The foundations of social democracy have been sapped for decades in Canada. The class basis for new radical ideas needs to be built anew from struggle. Ideas can change and there are real openings to advance a working-class alternative to the trade crisis, build an anti-war pro-Palestine movement, and challenge Canadian billionaires and bankers. Socialists can play a critical role in building these, but we must resist the temptation of shortcuts. Instead of focusing on the right set of words, the left must figure out how to reinvigorate a fighting labour movement, rebuild an active student movement and involve new layers of people in campaigns.
The election did not close the book on the political and economic instability in Canada; it simply turned the page. With Trump in office and a minority government that is destined to bleed support as it fails to deliver, the contradictions of the moment will emerge. Right now, it looks like the right is poised to capitalize. But if the left is able to organize, we could rewrite the future.
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