When delegates to the New Democratic Party convention held on a mid-April weekend in April 2016 relegated then federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair to the scrap heap of history, with 52% of delegates voting in favour of naming a new leader, anyone who follows Canadian politics knew that change was on the way for Canada’s 84-year-old social democratic party.
On Sunday, October 1st 2017 sitting Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh overwhelmingly won the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party, the wishes of the 124,000 party members who had cast a ballot realized, to return the NDP to its historical grassroots advocacy for the interests of working people — a repudiation of the centrist, neoliberal leadership of Tom Mulcair — that a revitalized New Democratic Party was reborn.
Tom Mulcair left Mr. Singh and the NDP with a $4.8 million deficit from the 2015 campaign, and a dispirited, much reduced caucus of 44 members in the House of Commons. Jagmeet Singh had his work cut out for him …
1. Commence an immediate fundraising drive to rid the party of its debilitating deficit, and work towards raising the ten to twelve million dollars the party would need to run an effective campaign in 2019;
2. Set up an office in Ottawa, and work with the caucus to establish a new vision for the NDP that he and the sitting NDP Members of Parliament would enunciate to the Canadian public;
3. Establish a communications strategy that would introduce him to the Canadian public, as the articulate, charismatic, open and authentic leader of a renewed social democratic party members knew him to be, the only federal party truly on the side of Canadians, and not corporate interests;
4. Visit every far flung burgh across Canada, in every province and territory, to introduce himself in person to Canadians.
Sad to say, Jagmeet Singh did not do any of those necessary things.
At no point, prior to the dropping of the writ in the 2019 election did Mr. Singh visit any of the Maritime provinces. When he appeared on TV, most particularly with Rosemary Barton on CBC Newsworld’s Power and Politics, he was argumentative, refusing to answer even the simplest of questions put to him by the moderator. For two years, fundraising appeared to be nowhere on Mr. Singh’s agenda, resulting in a decision by the party executive to, post-election, sell the party headquarters building in Ottawa, to both pay off the 2015 campaign debt, and fund the current campaign.
When the writ was dropped on Wednesday, September 11th, the party was almost broke, 100 candidates had yet to be nominated, and the party lacked infrastructure at the grassroots level, resultant from the lack of funding necessary to run winning and effective local campaigns.
Jennifer Howard, NDP 2019 federal campaign manager & Jagmeet Singh’s chief of staff
When Jennifer Howard, a longtime party stalwart and former Manitoba NDP Minister was hired as the federal NDP’s campaign director in late 2018, on her first day as chief of staff to Mr. Singh, she found a party mired in sagging morale, and a woebegone caucus, 11 of whom had announced they would not run again for a seat in Parliament.
As Nick Taylor-Vaisey wrote in an August 8, 2019 article in Macleans …
The NDP had stalled below 15% in popular support. And the party’s fundraising machine was sputtering: Conservatives had raised $7.4 million in the last quarter of 2018 and Liberals had raked in $6.4 million. New Democrats managed just shy of $2 million, slightly ahead of a resurgent Green party which raised a record $1.5 million. There were quiet murmurs that Singh wasn’t up to the job.
“We were nine months out from an election, and we frankly needed somebody who could take the position from a standing start and get the job done. There was no time for a learning curve,” says Kathleen Monk, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group who worked for Layton and watches the party closely. “Job one: ensuring Jagmeet got elected.”
In 2018, Mr. Singh had hired party stalwart Michael Balagus, a former chief of staff to two Manitoba premiers and a veteran of NDP campaigns stretching back to the ’80s, as his right hand, who was replaced by Ms. Howard in late 2018, when Mr. Balagus returned to his day job as chief of staff to Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath (he stayed on as a “special adviser” to Mr. Singh and the party, though, and continues in that role).
Mr. Singh’s inexperience on a national campaign was coupled with a second frustration for Ms. Howard and Mr. Balagus: many Canadian voters didn’t know what he stood for. Still, senior party appatchiks remained convinced that he was likeable, authentic, engaging and more than up to the task of running an effective national campaign — as has proved to be the case.
“We knew that Canadians didn’t know much about him,” says Monk. “When they had the opportunity to meet him, talk to him or see him, inevitably they were engaged, and found that they really liked him.”
To make up ground, Ms. Howard, Mr. Balagus and Ms. Monk decided that Mr. Singh had to focus on affordability issues: “jobs and job creation, pharmacare and health care, policy ideas that are the core of New Democratic strength,” says Monk, who adds that Singh’s likeability draws a sharp contrast to both Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau.
By July 2019, eight months into Howard’s run as chief of staff, the party remained solidly in third place (and even fourth in the occasional poll). Its second-quarter fundraising was still dismal: $1,433,476 from 14,936 donors, a fraction of the Tories’ $8.5 million haul from more than 50,000 Canadians — and behind even the Greens, who raised about $4,000 more than the New Democrats.
Click here for the most recent update of Eric Grenier’s federal election CBC Poll Tracker.
But that was then, and this is now.
According to the latest CBC Poll Tracker (above), Jagmeet Singh and the NDP are set to win 38 seats in the House of Commons, and should Mr. Trudeau manage to raise his seat total to 134, the federal Liberals and the New Democratic Party working together would constitute a comfortable majority, with Mr. Singh holding the (so-called) whip hand, allowing the NDP to work with the Liberals to implement its six priorities: universal pharmacare and universal dental care just two of the NDP’s priorities.
Despite a lack of the NDP’s traditional on the ground campaign structure, the people of Canada have decided that they like the cut of Mr. Singh’s jib, and seem prepared to elect enough federal NDP candidates to Parliament to allow Mr. Singh to hold the balance of power in Ottawa.
All of which has to be heartening news for beleaguered NDP candidates running for office in Ottawa. And in British Columbia, most particularly, incumbents Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway), Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East) and Peter Julian (New Westminster-Burnaby) in Metro Vancouver (Jagmeet Singh is all but guaranteed to hold on to his seat in Burnaby South), and on Vancouver Island, Randall Garrison (Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke), Gord Johns (Courtenay-Alberni), Alistair MacGregor (Cowichan-Malahat-Langford) and Rachel Blaney (North Island-Powell River), not to mention Kootenay NDP incumbents Wayne Stetski (Kootenay-Columbia), and Richard Cannings (South Okanagan-West Kootenay).
Environmental activist and hard-working, work around the clock Vancouver Granville New Democratic Party candidate Yvonne Hanson out campaigning on Kitsilano’s West 4th Avenue, with her dedicated and experienced co-campaign managers, Riaz Behra and Derrick O’Keefe (“we could come up the middle and win this thing,” says Derrick!).
Eric Grenier’s CBC Poll Tracker has the NDP winning as many as 19 seats across the province of British Columbia come the evening of Monday, October 21st, which has to be heartening news for the campaigns being run by the entirely necessary to elect to the NDP caucus in Ottawa, Christina Gower (Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam), Taylor Bachrach (Skeena-Bulkley Valley), campaigner extraordinaire Svend Robinson (Burnaby North-Seymour), Bonita Zarrillo (Port Moody-Coquitlam), environmental activist Yvonne Hanson (Vancouver Granville), Leigh Kenny (Vancouver Quadra), and Breen Ouelette (Vancouver Centre), and over on the Island, Bob Chamberlin (Nanaimo-Ladysmith), who could take the seat away from Green incumbent, Paul Manly — given that the NDP campaign is on the ascendancy, while the Green campaign is — as has been the case since the writ was dropped — in free fall, with Elizabeth May (as wonderful a person as she is) running one of the most unfocused & confusing (“we don’t whip our candidates”) national electoral campaigns in Canadian political history.
All will be revealed late in the evening of this upcoming Monday.
Decision Canada coverage from earlier in the week …
Reflections on a Shit Election, Part 1, The 2019 federal election turns around in its final week, leaving the door open to the hoary prospect of an Andrew Scheer-led regressive Conservative government;
Reflections on a Shit Election, Part 2, A defense of Justin Trudeau as a progressive, and electing him to a second term of office, in a minority government, propped up by Jagmeet Singh’s NDP and Elizabeth May’s Greens (which would be the best of all possible election outcomes).
C’mon back tomorrow for Reflections on a Shit Election, Part 4.
