While the entire political fauna was watching the fate of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this summer, the future of the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, had become just as precarious by having become too intrinsically linked to him. The time had come for Mr. Singh to dissociate himself as best he could from the unpopular Liberal leader. This week’s divorce, signed with the end of the collaboration agreement with the Liberal Party, was well advised.
But the symbolic and above all electoralist break, delivered in an unintelligible manner by Mr. Singh, leaves his party in a mess from which the most senior authorities of the New Democratic Party were precisely hoping to extricate themselves.
The political gymnastics were immediately expected to be complicated: renege on the agreement with the Liberal government without preparing to overthrow it immediately. Mr. Singh was to criticize Mr. Trudeau after having supported him unwaveringly for two years. And accuse him of having “abandoned Canadians,” while his government created the social programs that the NDP boasts of having taken from it. An acrobatics clearly beyond the reach of the current NDP leader.
More than 50 minutes of press conference were not enough for him to explain coherently the timing of the premature termination of the agreement. The coming months, during which Mr Singh will have to continue to contort himself in preparation for the next election, will further undermine his credibility.
By disassociating himself from the burden that his association with the Liberals had become, Mr. Singh is trying to present the NDP as the only alternative to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. But the bar is high, and risky, as his party approaches byelections that are far from certain to win — in Montreal, but especially in Winnipeg, where the Conservatives are threatening to take a seat that has been NDP for 45 years, plus a brief blue interlude.
The NDP’s strategy as a voice of change could quickly fail these early tests. And Jagmeet Singh’s leadership would be further weakened, as his party stagnates in the polls and could lose a third of its seats if trends continue.
Whatever happens after the September 16 vote, the New Democrats and Liberals will prefer to play against the clock in the hope that Pierre Poilievre’s popularity will wane a little.
Threats by opposition parties to bring down a minority government often do not lead to immediate execution. In 2009, former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff warned Prime Minister Stephen Harper that his “time [était] “finished”; the government was only overthrown 20 months later… The scenario of a spring election therefore remains the most likely.
Because the Bloc Québécois also comes out the big winner from the end of this romance between the Liberals and the New Democrats. Faced with a lone minority government, Yves-François Blanchet’s party has regained all its negotiating leverage. Especially since Justin Trudeau’s troops cannot do without the support they have left in Quebec, the last electoral refuge of the Liberal Party of Canada. The Bloc will have to rise to the occasion, by bargaining its support for a possible confidence vote, and seize the opportunity to obtain tangible and lasting gains for Quebec.
For Justin Trudeau, parliamentary stability has just ended. But that of his own leadership has been solidified, due to the lack of predictability sufficient to trigger a race for his succession. Which comes at just the right time, a few days before a meeting of his caucus, which, against a backdrop of the impression of desertion by the director of the Liberal election campaign and Minister Pablo Rodriguez, could have turned out to be even more hazardous.
Rid of his centralizing partner, who led the charge of interference in provincial affairs, it is to be hoped that Mr. Trudeau will finally give up his perpetual encroachment on Quebec’s exclusive areas of jurisdiction. And that he will begin a belated refocusing to put an end once and for all to his budgetary irresponsibility.
The union of Liberal and NDP forces will ultimately have served only Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party, by confusing the two progressive parties of government into a single political offer that has become increasingly insipid for many bitterly disappointed voters. Their divorce alone will not change anything. Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh are solely responsible for their misfortunes.