NDP LEADER
Singh’s New Democrats cast themselves as party of regular Canadians
Jagmeet Singh enters his first federal campaign as leader with fewer nominated candidates and less money than his rivals — but with optimism to beat expectations,
OTTAWA— Anything can happen. Yes, the New Democrats start the 43rd federal election with fewer declared candidates and less money than the Liberals and Conservatives. Sure, public polls put the Green party in a position to compete — and potentially beat — the NDP for the first time. And yes, it’s true Jagmeet Singh is a leader untested in a national contest that many predict could be gruelling, even devastating, for Canada’s social democratic party.
But Charlie Angus says New Democrats should take heart. They’ve been written off before, and beat expectations. Who can really be sure that come Oct. 21 it will be different?
“Our focus is going to be motivating that base, getting out our traditional organizers and supporters, and then extra — in some areas — 2, to 3, 4 per cent that will win back ridings or bring other potential ridings into the fold,” the veteran New Democrat MP for Timmins— James Bay told the Star by phone this week.
“Anything can happen in this election,” he said.
Singh is already on the road in one of his two campaign buses, rolling through southwestern Ontario hosting rallies and round tables in an effort to drum up support and attract attention to local candidates. On Wednesday, Singh’s team was abruptly switching his schedule so he could hail the election call in downtown Toronto, but a conflict with the international film festival forced him to remain in London as originally planned.
He will then attend the first leaders’ debate Thursday in Toronto, where the party hopes to wrest back some of the seats it lost to the Liberals in 2015.
The New Democrats are trying to frame the campaign as a contest between themselves, a party that truly fights for the common people, and the Liberals and Conservatives, whom they accuse of governing on behalf of a corporate cabal. In his speech at a rally in Toronto on Sunday, Singh repeated what has become his go-to line leading into the campaign: the other parties make life easier for the rich and harder for everyone else, and that only the NDP has the nerve to stand up to the corporate lobbyists he alleges have held sway in Ottawa for so long.
“This election is clear. It comes down to a very clear choice,” Singh said. “Who can you count on to fight for you?”
Alongside the populist tinge of this rhetoric, the NDP has released what top officials describe as the foundation of their platform: the New Deal for People. The pitch has seen the party abandon the balanced-budget pledge of the 2015 campaign in favour of large-scale program spending and increased taxes on the rich and corporations. The NDP would herald an “historic expansion” of public health care to cover prescription medicine, and then dental, vision, addictions services, mental health care and more over the next decade. The party would pump $5 billion into existing programs to build another 500,000 affordable units, inject $1 billion into provincial child-care programs, eliminate the interest on federal students loans and move toward tuitionfree university.
On climate change, the New Democrats pledge to spend $15 billion on an action plan to reduce emissions beyond Canada’s current target under the Paris Agreement, retrofit all buildings in Canada by 2050 and create 300,000 jobs in clean tech and renewable energy.
To help pay for it all, the NDP promises to raise billions of dollars by creating a new, 1 per cent tax on wealth over $20 million, increasing the income tax for people earning more than $210,000 each year, and partially rolling back the corporate tax breaks made under the former Conservative government.
The campaign comes as the NDP has seen its fundraising drop from the heights of its time as the second biggest party in Parliament; the party earned more than $18 million in donations in 2015, but only $5.1 million last year, according to filings with Elections Canada.
The NDP has also been slower than the other parties to nominate candidates for this year’s campaign. As of Tuesday, the NDP had declared candidates in 205 of Canada’s 338 ridings, a party spokesperson said.
Under the slogan, “In it for you,” the NDP hopes to contrast its package of policies with the Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and convince left-leaning voters who may have wanted more progressive accomplishments in the past four years that the NDP is a real option.
“A lot of people who voted Liberal last time, for the first time, bought into this, ‘he’s on my side, he’s in the for the middle class,’ ” Michael Balagus, a senior campaign adviser for the NDP, told reporters at a party’s headquarters recently.
“It went from a sense of disappointment to a real sense of anger, and they are looking for someone who they believe would genuinely be there for them,” he said.
Jennifer Howard, the campaign chair and Singh’s chief of staff, said the plan is to spend a lot of time in southwestern Ontario, where the party hopes to hold and pick up seats in places like Windsor, London, Hamilton and the Greater Toronto Area.
The party is also targeting seats in northern Ontario, where Grassy Narrows Chief Rudy Turtle is running in Kenora, and British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, where Singh himself won his riding of Burnaby South in a byelection last February.
While the party has chartered a plane for the “majority” of the campaign, Howard said much of Singh’s tour will be by bus in these regions of Ontario and Quebec, and in B.C. (the party has arranged for a bus in the east and a bus out west).
“We’re going to get to everywhere in the country,” she said.
For Angus, the opportunities lie in tapping into disappointment in Trudeau, and convincing voters Singh is the right alternative to soothe it with hope.
“Our focus now is getting enough, moving enough votes back in key ridings that we lost last time, to change the political makeup of this next parliament,” he said.