Canada’s NDP Should Stop Making Excuses and Find Ways To Win
There’s wide support for the kind of social-democratic policies Canada's New Democratic Party should be offering, but the party is afraid to put forward a bold left-wing program that can inspire supporters. The NDP’s history shows how it’s possible for a left party to succeed against the tide.
Jagmeet Singh at the Ontario Federation of Labour Convention in November 2017. (OFL Communications Department)
In 2021, the New Democratic Party (NDP) celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. For six decades, Canada’s social-democratic party — formed through a merger of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress — has challenged the Liberal and Conservative parties for power in federal and provincial elections alike.
During those six decades of activism, the NDP has never quite lived up to the hopes of its founders. The party may have chalked up some victories at the provincial level, in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. However, it rarely gets more than 15 percent of the popular vote across the whole country.
In its history, the NDP has never formed a government, and only led the opposition once, after an electoral surge in 2011 that proved to be ephemeral — the so-called Orange Wave. As things stand, the Liberals have to cooperate with the NDP in Parliament, having fallen short of an overall majority in 2019. But polling models predict that the Liberals will scale that hurdle next time around, depriving the NDP of its current influence.
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