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Michael Taube: NDP leadership race looks dismal. Will anyone even vote?

Potential candidates are not well-known, and do not vary much in terms of favourability

By Michael Taube
Published Jul 11, 2025
4 minute read
279 Comments
Jagmeet Singh, left, and Ruth Ellen Brosseau
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, left, announcing in April that former two-time MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau would seek a return to office in the Quebec riding of Berthier–Maskinongé. Brosseau is now a potential leadership candidate. Photo by Jagmeet Singh/Facebook
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    1. Comment by LT M.

      "Singh’s leadership is the main reason for the NDP’s decline. He took the massive electoral gains earned by the late Jack Layton in the 2011 federal election, and partially maintained by Tom Mulcair until 2017, and almost immediately turned them into dust. That takes talent, and not the good kind."

      Let's take a look at NDP electoral results going back to before 2011 to evaluate this contention:

      2008 (Layton): 37/308 seats, 36 by dissolution

      2011 (Layton): 103/308 seats, 95 by dissolution

      2015 (Mulcair): 44/338 seats, 39 by dissolution

      2019 (Singh): 24/238 seats, 24 by dissolution

      So prior to the 2011 election, the NDP's baseline was 37 (or 36 depending on point of reference) seats out of 308. Then, after Layton took the party to 103/308 in 2011, the NDP won 44 seats out of 338 under Mulcair's leadership in 2015. The NDP's percentage share of seats after the 2008 election was 12.01%, 33.44% after the 2011 election, then in the 2015 election they won 13.02% of the seats in the HoC. This is a very generous interpretation of "partially maintained."

      Furthermore, the NDP was down to 39 seats out of 338 at dissolution before the 2019 election, a number almost identical to what the NDP held before the Orange Wave of 2011 when there were fewer seats overall in the HoC . In other words, the NDP's electoral gains of 2011 had all but disappeared by the time Singh actually led the federal NDP into an election.

      There are plenty of fair criticisms of Singh's electoral record. It is reasonable to note that the NDP lost 15 seats in his first election as leader (to say nothing of the historic loss of 2025). But to argue that he oversaw the loss of Layton's 2011 gains is completely inaccurate.

    2. Comment by Sammi Hood.

      Justin was crafty, he engineered uniting the left by making the NDP irrelevant after his coalition agreement with Singh, Carney benefited from those votes. If Freeland hadn't skewered Justin I believe he would have won the election using the same genius elbows up, anti-Trump campaign platform. I'm sure he believes it too and it probably burns him that if he could have hung on a few weeks more after Trump came on the scene with his tariff threats, talk of 51st state, etc he could have ridden the wave of the dramatic change in polls as urban Canadians wrapped themselves in the Liberal-red flag of Canada vs the evil Trump. I know a lot of people disagree, they feel that Justin was done no matter what.

    3. Comment by Michael Ufford.

      One of the best results from the 2024 election was the virtual transformation of Canada into a two party state. No country needs more than two parties for a healthy democracy. One party in power and another ready to take power. The other parties are boutique, special interest groups that focus on single issues: labour, the environment, or regions. These issues, important as they are, do not merit a political party. And the negative effect of multiple small parties is to distort the will of the people at election time with mathematical anomalies.

    4. Comment by William Hall.

      The NDPs biggest problem is it does not have credibility with the public. Provincial NDP governments like the one in BC (and previous train wrecks in other provinces) give voters a sense of what a federal NDP government might look like, and it's not good. Every election they push the same tired, disproven policies - raise taxes on business, higher deficits, shut down oil and gas, make "the rich" pay more, and so on. Singh actually pulled the NDP further to the left, rather than moving towards the centre as Tom Mulcair wisely attempted to do.

      The fact is, for most voters including myself, the NDP brand is toxic.

    5. Comment by Charles White.

      It is not just federally that the party is done in by Liberals. Notley created a “big tent” NDP that invited Liberals. Nenshi, a Trudeau style Liberal, ate up the party from within including dissociation from the NDP. Hence the Alberta NDP is a literal shell covering the reconstituted Alberta Liberal Party.

      Manitoba reminds me of the classic pragmatic prairie socialist party that I respected and occasionally voted for (notably Notley’s father) and will likely succeed. BC is the Newer Democratic Party that is so extreme from pragmatism that it will likely guarantee its extinction next election.