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Front Burner Transcript for April 1, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi everyone, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Last week, for the first time, federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh acknowledged the troubled waters that his party has been swimming in.

SOUNDCLIP

JAGMEET SINGH: Let's be clear, there's massive challenges. I've got no illusions about that. There are some serious challenges that we're up against.

JP: Serious challenges, like polls that now have support for his party hovering below 10%. Some data suggests that the NDP could lose three quarters of their 24 seats in the House of Commons, and possibly even official party status. It's a stark decline from just three months ago when they were neck and neck with the Liberals at around 20 points. But long before the recent dramatic reversal in the Liberal's fortunes, which has sucked support away from the NDP, the New Democrats had arguably been struggling for years. Their two elections under Jagmeet Singh in 2019 and 2021 netted them just 24 and 25 seats, barely more than half of what they controlled after the 2015 election, and a sharp fall from grace from 2011 when they became the official opposition under former leader Jack Layton. Today, we want to talk about what all of this means. Why hasn't Singh been able to turn huge policy wins for the NDP into electoral success? Where does the party go from here? And when it comes right down to it, what purpose should the New Democrats be serving in Canada's political landscape? Today I'm speaking to two guests who both follow the NDP closely but have different perspectives on many of those questions. Jordan Leichnitz is a former NDP senior strategist. Hey, Jordan.

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: How's it going?

JP: David Moscrop is a political commentator. David, good to have you back on the show.

DAVID MOSCROP: Thanks so much for having me back.

JP: So David, I'll start with you. How dire of a situation do you think the NDP is in right now, both in this election and beyond?

DAVID MOSCROP: Let's take the snapshot of the moment, with the caveat that things could change, hope springs eternal. Does anyone remember 1993?

JP: [laughs] Maybe.

DAVID MOSCROP: It wasn't a great year for the NDP. You know, they were down to nine seats, they lose party status, and they spend a good amount of time struggling to come back. They'd been shut out of regions where they'd previously done quite well. It effectively collapsed, and so they faced the immediate problem of trying to ward off a collapse. I've seen one confidence model at 338Canada that has them in theory as low as zero seats. I don't think that's likely, but that's how bad in theory it could get. [JP: Wow.] So that's the immediate concern. And then there's a long-term concern of how do you distinguish yourself from the Liberals [laughs] -- because sometimes people say, oh, they're pretty close to the Liberals -- and build a party that can grow. And, let's be honest, I think it would be nice to have them in government. Tall task, especially right now when you're looking at, you know, 11% in the polls.

JP: Jordan, you want to jump in here? How rough a situation do you think the NDP is in right now?

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Yeah, there's no question that this election is a very challenging setup for the NDP. I think that the threat of Trump and tariffs and that whole, really the economic war that we've now found ourself in with the United States, has really scared people. And that has bolstered Liberal fortunes in a way that uh, really, we actually haven't seen such a sharp increase in the Liberal vote, and so quickly in Canadian history. So, there are big challenges in front of the NDP for sure. But I would say that one of the important things to know about the NDP throughout particularly its modern history, is that it's been written off time and time again. And going into an election in an underdog situation is not actually all that unusual. I had the privilege of serving with Jack Layton in 2011. And, you know, I remember in the early days on that campaign, the stories that were being written were very dire. They were stories about not getting people out to events. Um. You know, about a fall in the polls in the early days of that election. And of course, that story ended differently. The NDP did go on in that election to form official opposition. So I think that while the situation is certainly not one that party would have chosen going into this election, there's also still a fair bit of campaign in front of us. And there's going to be an important place for the NDP in this conversation, as there is in-- every time that there's a national crisis in defending some of the things that matter most to Canadians.

JP: Just to push back on that a little bit, I do wonder how you might respond to the argument that we are in a particularly unusual election here, and also how you might respond to some comments made by your former leader recently. So former NDP leader Tom Mulcair wrote an essay for CTV where he said that this election is shaping up to be a two-horse race between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM MULCAIR: In this election, what's happening is that people are looking at the NDP -- and they've been talking to me, by the way. You know, senior, senior NDP people. Saying this time around, I'm just voting Liberal. And I'm hearing the same thing from Greens. And I'm hearing the same thing, in fact, across the country, which is: it is a dual election, a two-horse race. It's coming down to that, and everybody else is just going to get pushed out of the way.

JP: He said that the only ballot question that matters is who can take on Trump, and that given what a serious threat this is, the other parties, including the NDP, need to get out of the way. What do you think it says about this election, about the reality the NDP finds itself in that the former leader would say that?

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, Tom hasn't been an active New Democrat for quite a long time. And so I think it would be wrong to say that his comments represent where most New Democrats are at. I don't think they do. They're his view. I don't share it. But what I do think that they point to is a really common argument that we hear in Canadian politics, which is from the two mainstream parties, from the Liberals and the Conservatives, that likes to tell people that they don't have a choice in the election, that it's not practical to vote for the NDP. And I always think really carefully about who that narrative benefits. The NDP, you know, if it didn't exist, you would have to invent it, really. It is so important in Canada that there be a place and a party that speaks to the concerns of working-class Canadians. And that is never going to go away, regardless of what the unique circumstances are of any given election. And I would actually argue that in this election, where we are headed into really uncertain economic waters, where we are headed into a place where we could be seeing significant layoffs, a major restructuring of our economy, now more than ever, it's gonna be important for people to have an option to vote for a party like the NDP that they know is going to stand up for the programs, for the supports, for the things that regular people rely on.

JP: David, do you want to jump in here? Do you think Mulcair has a point?

DAVID MOSCROP: He has half a point, which is a good day for him. [Jayme laughs] Like...

JP: [laughs] Sorry.

DAVID MOSCROP: I was gonna let that sit for a second.

[laughter]

DAVID MOSCROP: Look, he was the leader of the NDP for a period of time. He had a shot at the big seat. He blew it. Now he's a pundit. He's right that we have a polarized election right now that is focused largely, though not exclusively, on Donald Trump. A lot of voters also care about affordability. He's right about that polarization and he's right about that challenge. I think he's wrong about this idea that therefore the NDP ought to get out of the way. First of all, it's a wildly simplistic statement. Get out of the way where? In a race where it's between orange and blue, you want them to get out of the way there to stop Pierre Poilievre? I don't. Right? I think a lot of left voters don't. Maybe he might say this in a red-orange contest, but those are really also hard to identify, uh, and execute a strategic voting plan on. So then it's like, okay, what are you even talking about? And then to Jordan's point, yeah, the NDP delivers things that Canadians want in a Parliament in which parliamentarians are meant to work together to sort out problems.

[music]

JP: So how is the NDP supposed to get traction in this environment right now, right? Like I saw polling from Angus Reid that said 50% of 2021 NDP voters are planning to vote Liberal this year. So whatever policies they may be putting out right now on affordable housing or groceries or other issues that normally are top of mind for Canadians, at the end of the day, like how are they supposed to get traction here? David?

DAVID MOSCROP: [sighs] Oof. I mean. [laughs] It's a tall order. Mark Carney is trying to triangulate. He's trying to run as the kind of business Liberal, or even progressive, conservative, responsible figure who's also announced that he's going to have a, you know, Build Homes Canada program where the government's going to get back into building houses.

SOUNDCLIP

MARK CARNEY: The first part of our plan is to create an entirely new entity: Build Canada Homes. A lean, mission-driven organization that will do several things. First, it will act as a developer on new affordable housing projects. It will catalyze a new housing industry. It will provide financing for affordable home builders.

DAVID MOSCROP: And then, you know, he's going to cut GST on new builds. He's going to introduce a tax cut to help the lower bracket -- and incidentally, all the higher brackets too. But, you know, he's trying to once pluck from the Conservative and NDP side. Everyone's focused on him. And the NDP is trying to get attention, and it's really, really hard to do because everyone's sort of dialed in. And I think if I'm the campaign and I've never run a campaign -- so this is a hypothesis -- I might start to think, oh man, maybe I should just focus on the 15, 16 ridings we think we can win instead of trying to, to go big nationally. And then they kind of slink into perpetual third or fourth place with that kind of mindset.

JP: Jordan?

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Look, I think uh, to borrow Dave's phrase, he's got more than half a point there.

DAVID MOSCROP: That's very generous of you.

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Carney, Mark Carney -- Yeah. Mark Carney is positioning himself to be the most conservative Liberal prime minister since Paul Martin, after many years of a more progressive Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau. And I think David's given some of the policy examples for that. I think the one that struck me most was, you know, as the Liberals are rolling out their tax cut policies, they're not exempting high income earners from this. About making sure that, uh, the very richest are going to be benefiting from these policies. And I think that for the NDP in this campaign, what's going to be really important is fighting for space in that national conversation, and the idea that voters don't need to choose between the Conservative Party and a sort of Conservative light option under Mark Carney. And that even if it seems as though the NDP is not in a position to form government this election, that there's value in having more New Democrats in Parliament. And this is where I think Singh and the NDP in particular, over the last couple of years, have a really strong record to back that up. They were a fourth party, just 24 MPs, and they were able to get the largest expansion of Medicare in Canada's history through. They were able do that because they prioritized delivering actual programs to help people, and results that were gonna change the lives of a lot of Canadians in how they worked in Parliament.

JP: You know, you mentioned the Medicare win. They also played an integral role in the dental care program...

SOUNDCLIP

JAGMEET SINGH: All New Democrats, everyone who fought hard for this, we fought and now we can say very proudly, the final phase of the New Democrat Dental Care Plan is being rolled out.

JP: …in the Canada Early Learning and Child Care Act that was pushed through. Ten paid sick days for federally regulated workers. Anti-Scab legislation. Definitely big priorities for a lot of NDP voters. And yet, it seems like those policy wins... well, they haven't translated to electoral gains for Singh and the party, and it's not even clear to me that, like, they get the credit for it. And so what do you think went wrong there?

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Well, I think that voters aren't transactional that way, right? Like, there is never an election that's about the past. It's always about what's coming up, what's in the future. But I would argue that the confidence-and-supply agreement and the wins that the NDP was able to get out of the Liberal government is a -- it's a bit of a slow burn. It's a signal of what the NDP does when they get even the smallest amount of power. And it's a proof point for voters in that they can trust that the NDP will stand up for them, regardless of what the circumstances or the makeup of Parliament is. And, you know, I think it really bears repeating that the only difference between a Liberal government that voted against pharmacare and a Liberal government that introduced pharmacare was the NDP.

JP: David, I just wonder what you think about all of that. And also, you know, this idea that, that like the only difference is the NDP. Like do you think people really know that? Do you think people really think that?

DAVID MOSCROP: Keep in mind that voters are mean, fickle, unreliable, sometimes utterly cutting folks. You know, Winston Churchill helped win the Second World War, and then people were like, All right, you're out. [laughter] Can you imagine? The bar is high on pleasing voters. And if you go back through the history of the NDP, I'm not convinced this is going to really return them anything electorally. I think on the policy substance level, it's wonderful, and ought to be lauded. But go back to Pearson. You know, the NDP helped get Medicare in the first place. In fact, without Tommy Douglas, we probably don't have it. They helped get pensions. They helped get EI. Go through the years. You know, David Lewis pushes Pierre Trudeau on tax cuts for lower earners, on Petro Canada and all kinds of things. But through most of history when the NDP does nice things, they don't really get the rewards of that ever. This is where my, my critiques and my love for the party split. The love is in the quality of the policy that they deliver through a parliamentary program when they're in the commons. Their critique is the fact that they're never able to break through into a major governing party, which I think a lot of people would like to see, but don't see.

JP: And just maybe elaborate for me a little bit more on why you think that is. And in this particular context, if any of the responsibility for the current challenges rest on the shoulders of their leader, Jagmeet Singh.

DAVID MOSCROP: So, you know, if we rank Singh in the pantheon of NDP leaders, he probably ranks somewhere at least in the middle. If not, you know, slightly -- history might view him even more favourably, you know, on the parliamentary side, because of the policy that the NDPs were able to extract from the Liberals in the last few years. On the electoral side, the party has been in a bit of a... is a bit, a bit stagnant. It's declined from its high. But let's be fair and not judge it off its all-time high. Let's judge it off historical average, and they're, like, fine. It's just fine. It's like takeout from Pizza Pizza. It's just fine, you know? It's fine. But [Jayme chuckles] if you want to see growth, then we get into the critiques. And when I critique the party, I critique it from the structure of long-term growth, where I want to see a party build a machine, a grassroots movement, a conscious ideological movement that changes minds, and mobilizes people to win, let's just be honest, 38-39% of the vote that you need to form government in this country. On that measure, I think Singh has been unsuccessful, even if he's been successful in the parliamentary measure.

JP: And just, why? Why has he been unsuccessful? Like, what do you want to lay at his feet here?

DAVID MOSCROP: There's a couple of things that -- and this critique goes all the way back to Alexa McDonough.

SOUNDCLIP

[news clip]

REPORTER: She shocked New Democrats when she won the federal leadership in 1995.

ALEXA MCDONOUGH: Someone has got to pull the wool out of those Liberal ears!

[crowd cheers]

REPORTER: She was the first woman leader in Canadian history to build a federal party into something bigger electorally, more than doubling NDP seats in 1997 and establishing a strong presence in the Maritimes that would last a generation.

DAVID MOSCROP: One is the professionalization of the party. Uh, and this critique is typically levelled by the left wing of the party, the activist base of the party, who says, through the '90s and 2000s, the NDP professionalized as a party. They relied too much on pollsters and consultants and the power of the central office, to the diminishment of the power of the grassroots and the connection with social movements. And that sort of hit its height in the period where they had a shot at forming government, because they really needed to batten down the hatches and, you know, behave yourself because you might be the government. And so there's a kind of technocratic movement that also coincided with a movement towards third way politics that we also see in the late '80s, '90s in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Unites States, Bill Clinton. Chrétien. Even McDonough. Tony Blair is the kind of, um, the saint of this, or the, or the devil, depending on your side. And that has, so the critique goes, diminished the NDP as a distinct workers party, class-based workers’ party. And why not go back to that rather than be Liberal light, goes the critique. And I think it's a fairly reasonable one.

[music]

JP: You guys were talking before we started recording about how this is the first time you're having this argument that you normally have behind closed doors, out in the open. [JORDAN: Yes.] I'm going to take a guess that this might be a point where you guys diverge. Do you want, do you want to--

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Absolutely.

JP: Yep. Here we go.

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Yeah. I would say this is what, this is where David and I have part-- we, you know, David and I have been having this argument for a good 20 years as friends together. And yeah, this is where we part company. I think... you know, I think there's a couple important pieces of context that's missing from that analysis. And the first is a global one. So, the challenge in connecting with working class voters on a really broad basis is not unique to the NDP in Canada. We see it across the United States with the Democrats. We see it across Western Europe. Social democratic parties are struggling to keep their connection with the working class, and the right has made a really strong and specific bid for these voters over the last few decades. And so there is an important context there that I think is missing from that analysis, and we're not immune to those forces here in Canada either. I think it also misses that the NDP brand and the NDP as a party is strong across Canada. When you look nationally, the party is in government or in official opposition in six provinces across the country. There is a strong and resonant presence of the NDP, not just in the downtown core of wealthy cities, but in resource producing regions, in rural areas, all across Canada. And I think the question of professionalization and whether it's a good thing for a party to use modern electoral tools, uh, yeah, of course it is. This isn't an exercise in being the conscience of Parliament. The NDP doesn't do anybody any favours when they lose. Successful progressive politics is not just about believing in a better world, but it's actually about electing the leaders and the people who can do that work to make that world a reality. And so in that sense, I think it's really important that the NDP adopt modern tools and use those to the end of uh, of winning. And the question of whether the party is left enough or whether it's too centrist, I don't think that that's the issue. The bigger question is the party needs to decide if it wants to be a workers' party, representing as it does right now all kinds of communities, including those rural communities, including resource region, one that's competitive in every part of Canada. Or if it wants to be an educated urban elite party. And only one of those is a growth strategy. And I think it also bears pointing out that right now and in this current election, the NDP is actually losing voters to the right, not to the left. So, we have to be a little bit cautious, I think, when we talk about whether something is left enough, because there's often a bit of a battle of symbolism here over and above outcome. So I would say that getting results for regular people who need help is always gonna be more important than meeting some arbitrary test of whether the party is left enough in language and whether it's using the right terminology that, you know, maybe only people in universities are using. I don't think that that is the way forward for the party.

JP: David, do you want to hit the tennis ball back at all there?

DAVID MOSCROP: A little bit. I mean, I -- Jordan's, first of all, right. Most people don't see themselves as ideologues. They wouldn't identify as socialists or as capitalists or as Liberals or whatever it may be. I mean, they don't think like that. They think like, oh, how do I get my kid's lunch packed and my butt to work today and then in time-- home in time to clean up, you know what I mean? Like they're, they're thinking about much more immediate, pressing, real things than ideology. But ideology is there nonetheless. So on the left thing, I don't think of that as a purity test we ought to apply and, you know, who's saying what and and how, but rather, what kinds of policies do we see from the party? I look at the NDP right now and the last couple years and say to myself, okay, the vote has held well enough. But it's a period during which I would have expected the NDP to be poised to grow. Because people were angry. They were frustrated about affordability. [JP: Mm-hmm.] They were feeling like they were getting screwed. There was an opportunity to raise class consciousness to say, yeah, there's two classes. There's the working class, and then there's the people screwing the working class: the capitalist class. Why not seize this moment and try to raise that class consciousness, to plug it into this, this growing anger and frustration, and to cash it out electorally? And if I were the NDP right now running a campaign, I would be talking about building things. You know, why isn't the NDP, 24/7, on, 'You want to build? We're going to build. We're going build energy. We're going to use the state to build homes. We're going to build every last thing you could possibly want because workers like to build things. And while we're at it, we're also going to start talking about shifting the balance of power so that workers, the people doing this building, don't just get a fair deal from the welfare state, but actually control and own their workplaces.' In short, we're back to socialism, right? 'We're going to transform the environment so that workers not only get a fair wage, get a union job, get something to build, but also get to control their workplace and the fruits of that workplace.' Like really, really go for it. That's distinct. That's empowering. That's the party I want to see. An aggressive, worker class consciousness party that's not afraid to take huge swings.

[music]

JP: Just before we go, one last question. You know, talking about the purpose of the NDP in this particular election, do you guys think that they might have, um, a little bit more success here if Jagmeet Singh just made a really honest pitch that he wasn't going to form government, and actually what he wants to do right now is to get enough seats to keep the Liberals in check because they're headed for a majority? Or do you think that that might not resonate that much in this current environment because people might not want to gamble, um, with like a more strategic vote in that way, considering the threats that we're facing from the U.S.?

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: I don't think it ever works for a party to concede the election before the election is over. And I don't think that that's also inspiring for voters, right? But I do think it's important for the NDP to underline what the value of sending more New Democrats to Ottawa is; what Canadians can get when you have a strong NDP contingent in Parliament to hold the government to account. So I think that there's a strong case to be made there. I also think that in this election, when people are concerned about the threat from Trump in the United States, it is important for the NDP to point out that a lot of the things that we view as making us Canadian, things that we hold really close to our hearts in our politics -- that's things like the idea that you don't need a credit card when you go to the doctor, that we have a strong social safety net. That we have pensions, things like maternity leave. Um. All of these things come because there has been a strong and active New Democratic Party that has not allowed itself to be written out of that history. So, there is also a mantle of nationalism for the NDP. There is a way that the NDP can speak to what it is that makes us Canadian and the value of those things in this moment, even though people are quite rightly concerned about what the future is going to hold. It's going to be better if there's more New Democrats in Ottawa to protect those things.

JP: Okay. That was really interesting. Thanks guys so much. That was awesome.

JORDAN LEICHNITZ: Thanks for having me.

DAVID MOSCROP: Thanks. Have a great day.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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