Can Canada’s Left Survive Trump’s Second Term?
The NDP helped build Canada’s welfare state. Now, under pressure from Donald Trump’s tariffs and a shifting political terrain, the party risks electoral annihilation as voters split between technocratic centrism and right-wing populism.
Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh, pictured following his address to reporters outside Annamoe Mansion in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on April 23, 2025. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Since its founding in 1961, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) has never formed a federal government. But through a mix of policy advocacy, union alliances, and grassroots organizing, it has helped shape Canada’s political landscape — pushing issues like worker’s rights, strong public services, and robust social welfare into the national mainstream. In recent years, the party has also placed greater emphasis on the concerns of First Nations communities and other historically marginalized groups.
A recent concrete result of this influence was the national dental care program, launched last year. The initiative — now covering more than 1.7 million low-income Canadians — was made possible by the March 2022 confidence-and-supply agreement between the NDP and Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government.
But such cooperation has drawn criticism — even from within the party — with some accusing the NDP of getting too close to the Liberals. Last September, party leader Jagmeet Singh ended the agreement, accusing Trudeau of weakness and failing to defend the interests of ordinary people.
Many saw the move as a revival of the party’s identity, and some even speculated that the Liberal government might fall and the NDP could mount a breakthrough campaign. But that was before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Now with polls set for April 28, the election is dominated by Trump’s shadow. Canadians appear eager to elect a majority government with a clear mandate to stand up to a more menacing United States — a dynamic that rarely benefits third parties.
While the Conservatives — once the big poll leaders — are losing ground, the NDP is facing the possibility of near-total collapse. According to the latest projections, the party is on track to win no more than five seats nationwide. That’s an improvement from earlier forecasts that had them down to just one, but still a dramatic fall from the twenty-five seats won in the 2021 election.
Left Out
This could turn out to be the NDP’s worst election of the twenty-first century. The party is also at risk of losing its official party status in the House of Commons, which requires a minimum of twelve seats. If that happens, the NDP would forfeit key advantages — not just in funding but also in parliamentary visibility — and would be forced to fundamentally rethink its strategy and operations.
Singh himself is struggling in his riding of Burnaby Centre, a seat in British Columbia where the party usually performs well. According to projections from 338 Canada, Singh could finish third on Election Night, behind both Liberal and Conservative candidates.
After leading the party through three elections — delivering respectable but unremarkable results — it would be surprising if Singh chose to hang on. For now, he insists he’s “absolutely” certain to keep his seat. “I’m confident that I’ll be able to serve the people of Burnaby Central,” he said.
Notably, Singh has stopped positioning himself as prime-minister-in-waiting. Instead his campaign now focuses on urging voters to elect more NDP MPs to hold the government to account. “[The Liberals] only deliver when New Democrats have had the power to make them deliver,” he says. Unfortunately, the party may have squandered its best chance to force change last fall, when it ended its agreement with Trudeau’s Liberals but declined to trigger an election.
The NDP’s decline is not new, but it has intensified in recent months. The Trump tariff crisis — and the accompanying fears of annexation and recession — have dominated the campaign, leaving Singh struggling to get traction.
The ballot question for this election is clear: Who is most capable of leading Canada through a turbulent relationship with its southern neighbor? That question has pushed traditional NDP priorities — like affordability, health care, and housing — further down the list of voter concerns.
Historically — especially in times of crisis — many NDP voters have opted to back the Liberals, often to block a Conservative victory. That trend appears to be repeating itself in 2025. While Mark Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, is hardly a left-winger, he passes the competence test for many voters concerned about Trump’s trade war and threats to Canadian sovereignty. “I support the NDP 100 percent, but I think my vote could better serve the Liberals this time — and only this time,” said one Toronto voter.
Even former NDP leader Tom Mulcair — himself a centrist, even by the standards of the party’s shift away from labor — argued in a BNN Bloomberg op-ed that this is a two-horse race. With Canadians focused on electing a government capable of confronting Trump, Mulcair declared that parties without a serious shot at forming government should step aside. “If you can’t seriously say you’re going to form a government that can take on Trump,” he wrote, “then get out of the way and let the only real contenders have at it” — singling out the NDP, Green Party, and Bloc Québécois.
Identity Crisis
The NDP’s footing is firmer at the provincial level. The party currently holds power in two provinces: Manitoba, under Wab Kinew — one of the country’s most popular premiers — and British Columbia, under David Eby. Kinew has passed robust labor legislation and built a strong public profile. Still, the Manitoba Federation of Labour recently gave his government a C+ on its workplace health and safety record — citing some progress but emphasizing that much more needs to be done. While Kinew has signaled a break from Tory austerity, labor advocates argue that a go-slow approach won’t be enough to reverse decades of erosion in workplace protections.
Eby, for his part, may represent an NDP electoral win, but it was razor-thin. As with its federal counterpart, the BC NDP has traded its working-class base for a coalition of urban professionals and NGOs — offering a vision of social democracy increasingly unmoored from labor.
Yet even with these provincial footholds, the path to federal relevance remains elusive. Policy successes — and their shortcomings — at the provincial level don’t easily translate into national momentum. And both premiers, despite their victories, face tensions that mirror the federal party’s deeper crisis: a fraying connection to labor and growing uncertainty about who the NDP is really for.
Like other social democratic parties across the Global North, the party is grappling with declining poll numbers and growing disaffection among its former supporters. The NDP’s historically mixed base of organized labor and agrarian voters has frayed, with blue-collar support flowing to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party and its promises of lower taxes and bigger paychecks. In BC, Conservatives are now actively targeting ridings held by the NDP.
The party is also burdened by legacy of Third Way politics, which fragmented its class base through technocratic centrism and market-friendly reforms. In recent years, this has been compounded by the rise of liberal moralism across much of the center-left — an ethos more fully embodied by the Liberals or the US Democrats though not entirely absent from the NDP. Some analysts argue that reclaiming relevance will require confronting both economic oligarchy and cultural elitism. So far, Singh has been conspicuously indifferent to economic issues like job creation and growth — an absence that underscores the party’s broader strategic drift.
A Leadership Problem?
Once seen as a rising star in Canadian politics, Jagmeet Singh entered the federal scene as a breath of fresh air. But the excitement surrounding his leadership has long since faded.
When he took the reins of the NDP in 2017, Singh was expected to broaden the party’s appeal — especially with younger and suburban voters in major urban centers. His savvy use of social media, particularly TikTok, helped mobilize new voters. Today even as he continues the strategy — posting, for example, a “Get Ready With Me” video while pitching voters — the effect is more routine than revelatory.
Since replacing Thomas Mulcair as leader, Jagmeet Singh has struggled to rebuild the momentum the party last enjoyed under Jack Layton. During the Orange Wave of 2011, Layton led the NDP to 103 seats and Official Opposition status — a historic high. Singh has not delivered comparable results.
Singh is also the longest-serving leader of the three major parties. Both Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney are relatively new to their roles. Poilievre became Conservative leader in 2022; Carney became Liberal leader only last month.
Still, the NDP’s challenges go deeper than leadership. After this election, the party will need to develop a compelling narrative and a coherent program that can endure once Trump no longer dominates the political scene. In an era of fiscal restraint, simply proposing new social programs and pressuring a liberal minority government to adopt them will no longer suffice.
The question the party now faces is not just how to win votes — but how to remain relevant.