Bikeless NDP leader predicts a spring election cycle

Ottawa is paved with mean streets right now for Jagmeet Singh.

Not only was one of his fabled bikes recently stolen from outside his condo, but the New Democratic Party leader is surrounded in Parliament by political parties he doesn’t trust.

Singh isn’t accusing any of them of bike theft, to be clear, but in these pandemic times, the NDP rides alone.

Though Singh was cheerfully upbeat when he sat down with the Star’s editorial board on Thursday, he also had no trouble rattling off all the ways in which the NDP is basically friendless in the current minority Parliament.

He doesn’t have any working relationship with Justin Trudeau, he says, and is truly convinced the prime minister is trying to engineer a spring election.

Singh doesn’t think that Erin O’Toole would be any better, though, categorically ruling out any prospect of working with a Conservative minority government in future.

The Bloc Québécois is also no ally. The NDP leader has had run-ins with the Bloc over racism accusations and Singh lumps them in with Conservatives as utterly nonconstructive during the pandemic.

“I can’t name a single thing that the Conservatives have advocated for or done that has helped people in this pandemic, not a single thing,” Singh told the Star in an hour-long virtual sitting. “Nor the Bloc. They’ve not done any concrete thing to advance something that would actually make people’s lives better in this pandemic.”

He didn’t get to the Greens in his no-trust list, but the enmity between the NDP and the Greens is long-standing and a lot of harsh words were exchanged between the parties during the 2019 election.

This friendless, bikeless political condition doesn’t seem to have dampened Singh’s spirits.

Of all the party leaders in the Commons, he is, perhaps ironically, the friendliest, definitely more sunny than the prime minister who once promised to govern with a relentlessly sunny disposition.

Yet Singh sees cynicism all around him. It was a repeated theme as he fielded questions with the Star on Thursday.

For several weeks now, some political observers have been wondering why Singh keeps talking so much about an election he wants to avoid this spring. It isn’t just the NDP leader — spokespersons and pundits aligned with the NDP have been stating matter-offactly that Trudeau is laying the groundwork for an election sooner rather than later.

It’s starting to seem like a fixation. Singh gave the Star the back story. He said that Trudeau had let it slip during a phone call late last year that he was expecting a spring election while they were discussing proposed fixes to election laws. This also lines up with reports of a fundraiser around the same time late in 2020, in which the prime minister was reportedly telling Liberal party faithful to brace for an election sooner rather than later in the new year.

It may well be true that Trudeau believed his government would fall as soon as the budget comes out this spring, but all this was before the last two months of lockdowns, second waves and vaccine-delivery problems.

Are the Liberals really itching to get out on the campaign trail before a considerable amount of Canadians are vaccinated?

Singh still thinks so. Trudeau’s minority government has held together this long largely because the NDP helped it survive confidence votes, but this reality doesn’t seem to have built any lasting bonds of friendship between the parties or the leaders.

Trudeau’s friends — and interests — are elsewhere, he said. In one hour, Singh accused the Liberals of being way too friendly with tech giants, big pharma and wealthy people of all types. He did not accuse Trudeau of being too friendly with the NDP, as critics of both parties contend. “No desire for any sort of collaboration,” is how Singh put it.

The NDP leader appears to be trying to cast himself in the same role as the late Jack Layton, who used his minority government position from 2004 to 2005 to extract various items of largesse from Paul Martin’s Liberals.

The problem with that comparison is that Layton was helping Martin avoid an election the Liberals desperately didn’t want. How Singh intends to wrest concessions out of a prime minister who wants an election — as the NDP leader contends about Trudeau — is a bit of a mystery.

It may be true that the NDP is riding alone right now, but the extent to which it works with Liberals in the next few months will tell us a lot about the timing of an election. Trudeau may well be hoping that Singh gets his Dutch cruiser back, so the two leaders can spend spring on the bike trails, not the campaign trail.