Mitch Heimpel: The NDP can't recover until they pick a path

Are they the party of the union hall or the faculty lounge? Because trying to be both stopped working.

The Canadian Press.

By: Mitch Heimpel

The NDP's leadership race is now open. It promises to be a thing of morbid curiosity. The first candidate to be the subject of leadership speculation — activist Yves Engler — has never held public office and is known mostly for spouting controversial views, including questioning the genocide in Rwanda.

Engler looks to be joined by two-time election loser and former CBC and Al-Jazeera personality Avi Lewis, and Heather McPherson, the lone member of the current NDP caucus apparently interested in the top job.

If you are wondering, gentle reader, how a party that is presently in government in British Columbia, Manitoba and (effectively, if not by name) the City of Toronto, while also serving as the official opposition in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario, can field such a meager offering of candidates, I promise you that you are not alone. And this is something worth considering.

Part of the problem is that it is a thankless task to lead a political party without official status in the House of Commons. So heavy hitters like current Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew or former Alberta premier Rachel Notley may be inclined to pass. That’s just a political reality the NDP will have to live with and there isn’t much more to be said on that point.

But perhaps as big an issue for the NDP, and one that is worth some real attention, is the possibility that the party, in its federal form, simply has too big an identity issue to function properly, or at least to recover to anything like its former stature.

The NDP that many of us grew up with is, broadly, a left-wing populist party with social-democratic tendencies. It represented heavily unionized towns and cities from coast to coast. Chances were good, if the local economy depended on a mine, a mill, or a major factory, that there was a solid NDP base of support. That started to shift in the late ’90s as deficit-fighting Paul Martin budgets made the Liberals look more like a centrist, pro-business party.

Given this shifting reality, New Democrats started to push into the new fertile ground of Canada's largest cities, in an attempt to become the party of not just the union hall, but the faculty lounge. The NDP also had the incredible good fortune of a leader — Jack Layton — who could manage a coalition that broad. The party has not been similarly blessed since.

The electoral calculus that animated this version of the NDP was simple. Since New Democrats saw no challenge to their existing working-class base, they felt empowered to steadily encroach on the traditionally Liberal enclaves of urban cultural elite. It was all upside — they didn’t feel that they had anything to lose by trying.

It worked. The 2011 Orange Crush was driven by Quebec, to be sure, but it had a healthy assist from the urban centres of the country.

But this cultural cleavage at the heart of the NDP was always there. And, as our politics have shifted in recent years from an alignment that has spent the entire post-Great Depression era debating the size and cost of government, to one where class and cultural conflict are more prevalent, this is very much an existential problem for the NDP.

The current federal New Democratic Party has seven seats in the House of Commons, five short of official status. That’s bad. But I’ve spent most of my working life thinking about polls and looking at riding-level data, and I think this is worse news for the party: None of the 10 closest ridings in the 2025 election featured an NDP runner-up. Two of those races (Nunavut, and Vancouver Kingsway) featured a New Democratic incumbent coming perilously close to losing their seat. It is not an exaggeration to say that the current NDP is closer to having five seats than it is to having 12.

The question of what seat would be the NDP’s eighth, or ninth or tenth, is not an easy one. The tendency of most political parties that have experienced a setback like the NDP has been to make a list of ridings where they have a long previous incumbency, because that tends to be a riding with fundraising resources and a volunteer base. In the NDP case, that would include a riding like Brian Masse's old riding of Windsor West.

But this neglects a key factor of incumbency. It’s not eternal. Sometimes when a riding is gone, it's just gone.

I got to watch this happen in my hometown. The first "political" picture of me that I can recall — I have since been unable to find it — is of a two-year-old me standing behind an Elizabeth Witmer PC campaign sign on my grandparents' lawn, driven far enough into the ground that only my forehead and a mop of ginger hair remain visible above the top. This was during the 1990 Ontario election. Witmer held the seat for so long that by the time she resigned in 2012, triggering a byelection, I was working at Queen's Park, and would actually work on that campaign.

The PCs had held the riding in opposition and government for 22 years, but in that election, we lost it. Waterloo has not rejoined the PC fold since, in spite of three consecutive Ontario PC majority governments. And though I hate to admit it, we haven’t even come close.

An NDP seeking to win back seats from the Conservatives in populist fights in the resource towns of northern B.C., or Vancouver Island or northern Ontario, isn't going to win friends and influence people with a focus on the kind of dead-end identity politics that they rolled out with their leadership rules. Fighting over whether someone's signature ought to count because of their gender, or their sexual orientation, is the kind of cultural politics that doesn't play in an area with an older population and a comparatively small number of public-sector white-collar union workers.

Similarly, an NDP that wants to fight its way back to relevance through the Vancouver suburbs, lower Vancouver Island, the Winnipeg core, and downtown Toronto (where it has been shut out for a decade) has to turn itself into a left-wing irritant that is unrelenting in waging both a cultural and economic campaign on the Liberals' left flank. The kind of politics that continually forces the Liberals to watch their left flank has an audience in the urban cores of the country where there are a high percentage of younger, unionized white-collar government workers, and other voters who share their values. A place like Peter Julian's former seat in New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville, or the long-time NDP bastion of Victoria, become the next step for that kind of party.

But they can’t continue to try and be both of these things at the same time. Which are they going to choose? The NDP leadership race will begin settling some of that. Different leadership contenders will have different ideas about how to restore the NDP to something more than the Tommy Douglas-Jack Layton Memorial Society. There are legitimate left-wing criticisms of the current Carney government to be had. A rebuilt NDP could also present a serious cultural challenge to the Conservative conquest of the working class.

But I very much doubt its ability to do both of these things at the same time. That would be the job of two different political parties.

And right now, the NDP is barely one.

Mitch Heimpel is a former senior advisor to federal and Ontario Conservative politicians.

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