News Analysis
After ending his party’s supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals in September 2024, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh consistently voted against the Conservatives’ confidence motions that sought to bring down the minority government.
“We’re not going to let [Conservative Leader] Pierre Poilievre tell us what to do,” Singh said on Sept. 19 ahead of the tabling of the first of several such motions by the Tories.
At the time, projections were showing that if an election were held then, the NDP would drop from the 25 seats it won in the 2021 election to around 15, the Conservatives would soar to supermajority territory with 220 projected seats, and the governing Liberals would drop to around 65 projected seats.
But if the NDP was biding its time in hopes of a reversal of polling fortunes before triggering an election, the party’s popularity seems to have drastically declined with the change in the political environment. This came about after the resignation of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his replacement with Mark Carney, as well as the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president.
The latest projections by polling aggregator 338Canada show that if an election were held today, the NDP would get just nine seats, while Singh is projected to lose his own seat.
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“What [the NDP] hadn’t been able to really capture was the extent to which there were a lot of latent Liberal voters who didn’t like Trudeau, and so once Trudeau was gone, the Liberal Party suddenly had some momentum,” Peter Graefe, a political science professor at McMaster University, said in an interview.
By the time Singh said he was ready to bring down the government in December, Parliament paused for Christmas break, and was subsequently prorogued until March 24 at the request of Trudeau when announcing his plan to resign in January.
This robbed the opposition of the chance to table a non-confidence motion before Carney was chosen as the new Liberal leader and prime minister, who then in turn triggered an election on March 23 for April 28, dissolving Parliament.
The NDP’s decline is also impacting the Conservatives’ fortunes in the election. Tories were previously leading the Liberals in the polls with double digits, but are now trailing them in most polls.
The Gamble
The New Democrats once formed the official Opposition back in 2011, winning 103 seats in that year’s election. But they’ve been declining since then.
In the 2015 election, the NDP dropped to 44 seats, went down to 24 in 2019, and gained one more to bring them to 25 seats in the 2021 election.
Singh has been downplaying the declining support, telling a reporter on March 30 that just his 25 NDP MPs were able to secure the “biggest expansions of health care in a generation” through dental care and pharmacare, referring to his party’s push to bring about the programs through its supply-and-confidence agreement with the minority Liberals.
But current projections show the party may not even meet the minimum 12 seat requirement to be considered an official party in Parliament.
According to Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, the NDP’s exit from the supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals was intended to give the party enough “breathing space” to differentiate itself from the Liberals in the run-up to an election.
At that time, the Liberals had just come off two surprise byelection losses, in Montreal and Toronto, amid steadily declining polling, while the NDP’s poll numbers were stagnant.
There were signs that the New Democrats were unprepared for an election and lacking voter enthusiasm. By July 2024, six NDP MPs had either resigned or announced they would not be seeking re-election.
The NDP was also facing financial difficulties. By the end of 2024, the Conservatives had raised $41.7 million in donations during the year, the Liberals $15.2 million, and the NDP just $6.3 million.
Graefe said the NDP faced a “catch-22” situation when it came to the option of triggering an early election. Although the Liberal Party’s weak position benefited the NDP, an early election would have almost certainly led to a Conservative majority.
“If they had brought down the government, a lot of the voters whom they’d be trying to win over in that election might have said, ‘all we did was open the door to a Conservative majority government,’ and they would not be able to actually catch those voters,” he said.
“The NDP was in a very weak position at that moment, and I think it decided to keep the thing going in the hope that the situation might improve.”
The situation, however, did not improve for the NDP.
Changing Support
Wiseman said the NDP’s decline is due to many progressives voting strategically in their ridings to ensure the Conservatives won’t win, with NDP voters switching to the Liberals if it appears their party is unlikely to win, and vice versa. This is done to prevent vote splitting, where a third party pulls votes away from a major candidate or party on the same side of the political spectrum.
This trend has been largely impacted by the Trump presidency.
Former NDP Leader Tom Mulcair recently said that “die hard” NDP supporters are rallying around the Liberals because of the Trump factor, adding that parties unable to form government and take on Trump should “get out of the way and let the only real contenders have at it.”
Impact on Conservatives
The Conservative Party has usually done well in federal elections where the NDP also did well, and vice versa, as the NDP vote eats into Liberal support.
During the 2011 election, the Tories increased their seat count from 143 to 166 and achieved a majority government, while the NDP went from 36 to 103 seats and became the official Opposition. Both the Conservatives and NDP also performed well in 2006, with the Tories gaining 124 seats and the NDP gaining 11 seats. However, in 2015, the Liberals gained a majority government while the Tories lost 60 seats and the NDP lost 51 seats.
Graefe said if polls continue showing the Liberals in majority territory, there is a chance more NDP voters may not feel they have to vote strategically to keep the Conservatives from power, and thus move back to the New Democrats.
“Maybe the 5 or 6 percent of the electorate that has left the NDP for the Liberals might decide to move back,” he said.
