Liberal Government, NDP Disaster
by Barry Weisleder
Election results landed with a thud, disappointing most people across the political spectrum. Thanks to Donald Trump’s economic war on Canada, the Mark Carney-led Liberals barely snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and will form their fourth consecutive government The labour-based New Democratic Party suffered a humiliating setback. The only ray of hope is the possibility of a party re-boot that an NDP leadership race may spark.
The turnout was 67.2 per cent of eligible voters (more than 19.2 million people), just slightly above the mark in 2019. As we go to press:
the Liberal Party is elected or leading in 169 seats, obtaining 43.7 per cent of the votes cast (an 11 per cent increase from 2021).
The Conservative Party captured 144 electoral districts and 41.3 per cent of the votes (an 8 per cent increase), Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat in Carleton, but vowed to stay on.
The NDP lost its official party status, maintaining only 7 seats (a loss of 17), 6.3 per cent of the votes cast (an 11.5 per cent reduction).
The nationalist Bloc Quebecois took 22 seats (a loss of 12) and 6.3 per cent of the votes.
The Green Party is left with one seat (1.2 per cent of vote).
Mark Carney heads what is shaping up to be a Liberal minority government, in a very unstable parliament, with the distinct possibility of a new federal election in 2025. Pierre Poilievre’s anti-woke, ultra-right wing populist Tories will be snapping at Carney’s heels.
Jagmeet Singh lost his own seat in Burnaby Central and is stepping down after eight years as federal NDP leader. The party was shut out in the Atlantic provinces, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and picked up only one MP in each of Alberta, Manitoba, Nunavut and Quebec. Left –leaning NDP MPs Heather McPherson, Leah Gazan, Jenny Kwan and Alexandre Boulerice will be going back to Parliament.
What’s on the Liberal agenda? The new-again Prime Minister pledged cuts to social spending. He promised more government "investment" in the private sector (i.e. gifts to the billionaire captains of industry). Along with his cancelation of the capital gains tax hike, he showed a sharp shift to the right by a career big banker. To counter Trump’s trade war, “Captain Canada” Carney calls on workers to sacrifice, to make Canada more ‘competitive.’ He promises to boost military spending on NATO, the U.S.-led imperialist war alliance. That will occur at the expense of critical public infrastructure, health care, education, and by mostly ignoring food insecurity and homelessness. Indigenous peoples, rural dwellers, folks with respiratory problems, and many others will suffer the impact of increased harm to the environment. Greater state and corporate reliance on fossil fuels is sure to induce more deadly wild fires and floods.
Instead of canceling the procurement of fighter jets altogether, Carney suggested the possibility of moving its order of F-35s from U.S.-based Lockheed Martin to a European producer. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s pathetic response was to demand that the multi-billion-dollar war jets be made in Canada.
Though most voters focused on the electoral contest between the Liberals and Conservatives, the bleak fate of the NDP requires analysis. Undeniably, the labour-based NDP was destined, by its own actions, for a major loss of votes and seats.
While some important gains were achieved in dental care, pharmacare, and federal labour law, the NDP-Liberal pact of March 2022 to September 2024 weakened the working class politically. It gave the Trudeau Liberals a license to hike war spending, to subsidize Big Oil and Gas, to delay promised health reforms, and to accelerate social inequality. The alternative to such a parliamentary pact was to consider each piece of government legislation on its merits. The NDP should learn the lessons of the aborted alliance which produced such bitter results on April 28.
Pollster Allan Gregg, writing in the Toronto Star on April 18, put it concisely: “…the Liberals and NDP are viewed as incrementalist defenders of the status quo. By moving leftwards, the NDP could both distinguish itself from the Liberals and undermine the perception that the Conservatives are the sole option for voters who want systemic change.”
In the words of the popular Socialist Caucus button, “To Survive, the NDP Must Turn Left!”
Some radicals say that elections simply do not matter. They turn away from electoral politics despite the fact that it took generations of class struggle to win, for all adult citizens, the right to vote and to exercise freedom of expression. Where a mass labour-based party is on the ballot, election results provide a snap shot of the relationship of class forces.
Socialists are neither indifferent nor abstentionist towards elections. Where a party organically linked to unions runs candidates for office, we normally give such a party critical support. However, support for any capitalist party, the advocacy of a vote for a ‘lesser-evil’ bourgeois party, such as the Liberals, the Greens or the Bloc Quebecois, is totally out of bounds. It is akin to crossing a union picket line. On that basis, socialists say: Vote NDP, Without Illusions! Fight for a Workers’ Government!
The frustration and disappointment of many leftists with the NDP leadership is understandable. However, anger is no substitute for strategy. To change the course of the workers’ movement it is necessary to wage a struggle, that is, to fight for radical change inside the existing mass organizations, including unions and the NDP. Those who talk loosely about launching a new mass socialist party should reflect on the challenges of doing so. The Green Party, a pro-capitalist party with over 10,000 members and some rich donors, proved unable to field 343 Green candidates. It ran in only 232 electoral districts – forty-two years after it was founded at a conference in Ottawa in 1983!
Notwithstanding the devastating outcome on April 28, the NDP is still a mass, labour-based political party that attracted close to 1.21 million votes. Notably, it is where the interests of its social base conflict sharply with the petty bourgeois outlook of the party bureaucracy.
Decades of right-ward drift made it difficult for the NDP to offer a working class agenda – despite gratuitous references to class by Singh in the late stages of the campaign. When Trudeau was elbowed out, the NDP enjoyed 19 per cent support. Almost immediately after the writ dropped, the NDP plummeted to less than 9 per cent.
From far behind in the polls, Singh saw a political advantage in criticizing Israel’s genocide and identifying with global pro-Palestinian solidarity. Singh’s interventions at the TV party leader debates represented an important shift. This belated enlightenment is a welcome departure from the NDP’s anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist stance going back to the party’s founding. Racist ideology persisted under Singh’s leadership: the 2018 convention where he maneuvered to block a debate on Palestine, his refusal to withdraw the NDP from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group, the exclusion of pro-Palestinian human rights candidates in the 2019 election, his total focus on “antisemitism” to the point of not even mentioning the word Palestine at the 2021 federal convention, and finally the ugly expulsion of pro-Palestinian delegates from the 2023 convention.
The longstanding failure to differentiate social democracy from neo-liberalism has come to a head at this extraordinary political moment. The party brass forced the working class to pay a heavy price, as will be very evident in the months to come.
Only by a radical turn to the left can the NDP differentiate from the Liberal Party and offer a working class agenda. There are some hopeful signs. Over 200 NDP candidates endorsed the Vote Palestine pledge. Socialists led the way in winning support for policies to Stop the Genocide, End the Occupation and Embargo 2-way Arms Trade with the Zionist state. And most NDP members and voters want to put an end to awful price gouging by landlords, grocery chains, telecoms and energy suppliers. Only an anti-capitalist programme can fit the bill.
Jagmeet Singh announced that he will resign as soon as an interim leader is chosen. That will open an NDP leadership race. Can the broad left fill the vacuum? Can a democratic process to elect a new leader be assured? Does the left have the capacity to unite and fight for an anti-capitalist program? There is no viable choice but to try.
NDP Socialist Caucus policy is to build an independent class struggle left wing across the only mass labour party in North America. This is an integral facet of the fight against Trump’s trade war. We remain committed to that perspective – not necessarily to transform the NDP, but to win a working class majority for the socialist transformation of society. There is no practical and no principled alternative to waging the struggle. As the postal workers say: The struggle continues!