They hoped for a new orange wave. Why didn’t it happen?
Federal NDP insiders weigh in on failure to make major gains despite rise in popular support
OTTAWA—Cruising through southwestern Ontario at the back of a campaign bus on the last Tuesday of the election campaign, the New Democrats were feeling fearless.
Buoyed by the energy of the crowds turning up to Jagmeet Singh’s rallies and an ambitious offensive strategy, senior party advisers and staffers enthusiastically discussed their growth-focused push.
They easily rattled off regions and ridings where the party hoped to break new ground and rekindle former victories — and they saw an opening to make it happen.
That didn’t quite pan out.
Despite entering the campaign with high hopes, more money, a generally well-liked leader and an arguably persuasive case that New Democrats made a difference through the COVID-19 crisis in the last minority Parliament, the party gained just a single seat in the Sept. 20 vote.
Now the federal NDP finds itself in a familiar place: backed into a corner of the House of Commons with 20-something MPs. The magic of the Layton era, when the party seemed tantalizingly close to power, is but a wistful memory. And now it is sifting through the debris, searching for a way to break out of its traditional position as an alsoran federal party.
“There’s stuff that we for sure can learn from and want to hear from people in terms of how I can get better, and how we can get better at those close races,” Singh told the Star last week.
“What needs to be done to close those gaps so we can get these fighters into Parliament?”
“We don’t have to present Jagmeet anymore. But what exactly the NDP will do — I think that (in) the next campaign, this is what we have to focus on.”
ALEXANDRE BOULERICE DEPUTY LEADER
The party is only beginning to contemplate the answer to that question. Last week, Singh announced it had appointed Bob Dewar — brother of the late Paul Dewar, who was a New Democrat MP from Ottawa — to lead an internal “debrief” of the campaign that just ended. But in a series of interviews with key NDP figures, the Star was able to trace the outline of an early analysis about what went wrong for Singh’s party.
“I’m sure there are things that we can improve … but I don’t think there was a big mistake that I can point to,” said Jennifer Howard, Singh’s chief of staff, who reprised her 2019 role as the NDP’s national campaign manager this year.
In an interview, Howard pointed out that by increasing the size of its caucus by one seat, to 25 MPs, the party finally reversed a trend that had seen it lose significant numbers of seats in the past three elections.
Nationally, the NDP also increased its share of the popular vote, from around 16 per cent in 2019 to almost 18 per cent this time around, while the Liberals, Conservatives and Greens all saw their shares of the vote drop.
There were challenges to be sure. But for Howard, they were mostly circumstantial. She said it was harder this time to get in contact with voters because of the pandemic, leading campaigns in some urban areas — like the dense riding of Toronto Centre — not to canvass residents of condo towers because of COVID-19 fears.
And although the NDP kept hammering Justin Trudeau — Singh charged throughout the campaign that the Liberals were false progressives who would continue to fall short on left-wing priorities like economic equality and climate action — Howard said most voters simply decided they didn’t want change.
NDP national director Anne McGrath, who was a key architect of this year’s campaign effort, acknowledged that winning just one more seat “fell below our expectations for sure.”
McGrath also admitted that the party has work to do in areas of the country that hold the most seats. For example, the NDP was shut out of Toronto and its surrounding suburban communities for the third straight election, and failed to add to its single seat in Quebec — a province seen by McGrath and others in the party as crucial to any legitimate shot at power.
“Quebec and Ontario are areas where we feel that there were opportunities that were not realized,” McGrath said.
Jessa McLean, an outspoken internal critic of the party who unsuccessfully ran to become its president earlier this year, says the campaign’s local-level organizing was a “disaster.”
McLean, the head of the NDP’s riding association in Ontario’s York-Simcoe, told the Star in an interview last week that the party was too slow to approve candidates and did not provide enough resources to help local campaigns.
“We were hindered by the party,” said McLean, who claims she was not consulted before a candidate was appointed in her riding after the campaign started.
“That makes it impossible for locals to create a campaign at all,” she said.
While local fundraising is the responsibility of each riding association, McGrath said there were many ridings that were able to stage strong campaigns with support from the party. But she acknowledged some regions lacked “ground-level organizing,” mostly in the form of paid campaign staff working in ridings where the NDP felt it could win.
Part of the reason for that, McGrath said, was the financial situation that Singh inherited when he became leader in 2017, which forced the NDP to “seriously scale back on staffing” as it focused on improving fundraising and paying down debt.
That resulted in a campaign budget of around $25 million this year. And while that was more than double the $10.5 million the NDP spent on the 2019 election, it wasn’t enough to get the party’s election machine humming far enough in advance of this year’s campaign, McGrath said.
For the next campaign, the party needs to make sure it has the money to hire organizers and clinch its candidates “way earlier,” she said.
“We were very focused on making sure we had the resources for the campaign, but
you also have to have resources between campaigns,” McGrath said. “That’s what I think is at the top of my list (of priorities) right now.”
Alexandre Boulerice, the NDP’s deputy leader and its sole MP in Quebec, said the party’s effort in that province also suffered from a lack of campaign volunteers and organizing staff.
“It’s a different kind of investment of resources,” he said. “You can have, I would say … a little bit less publicity on Facebook and a little bit more organizers in the field.”
In Boulerice’s mind, the party also failed to deliver a strong “closing argument” to voters. Many people like Singh and the party’s platform planks, such as taxing the rich and bringing in pharmacare, but the NDP failed to show them exactly how it would enact such ambitious policies in government, Boulerice explained.
“We don’t have to present Jagmeet anymore,” Boulerice said. “But what exactly the NDP will do — I think that (in) the next campaign, this is what we have to focus on: what we will do for you and exactly how.”
One area in which the party could have done a better job on presenting its policy was climate change, said two defeated NDP candidates who agreed to speak on condition that they were not named.
That’s because of the NDP’s “mixed messages” on climate, one candidate said, pointing to Singh’s position on the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline — the NDP opposes it but wouldn’t necessarily cancel the project — and the B.C. NDP’s stance on old-growth logging.
The second candidate said they were asked repeatedly by voters in their riding about an analysis published by Marc Jaccard, a climate policy expert at Simon Fraser University, who gave the NDP poor marks for failing to adequately explain how the party would attain its promise to cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions beyond what the Liberal government is committing to do.
But Laurel Collins, who was re-elected for a second time in Victoria, defended the NDP’s climate plan and rejected suggestions that its policies were too vague or that the Liberals won over more voters concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“It is so frustrating. I will take no lessons from the Liberals, who continue to fail on the climate file,” Collins said, pointing to the Trudeau government’s failure to cut subsidies to fossil fuel companies and the fact that Canada’s annual emissions have actually increased slightly since the Liberals came to power in 2015.
“It was very clear that the NDP put forward a bolder, more ambitious plan.”
Yet even Singh admits that the way the party’s broader goals were communicated could have been improved.
“That knowledge, or knowing about our plan, was something maybe that … people weren’t as clear on, even though we had a clear plan,” the leader said.
“So I think that’s something that we can do more work (on) to make sure people know: ‘Yeah, we do have a plan. We’ve got a strong plan on a lot of the problems that people are facing.’ ”
In the end, this election was a “building campaign” for the NDP that stopped the downward trend the party has experienced since 2011, Howard said.
Now the party just needs to make sure it builds to something better.
“It was very clear that the NDP put forward a bolder, more ambitious plan.” LAUREL COLLINS VICTORIA MP