In a cold and wet on Tuesday morning in Vancouver, the leader of the NDP Jagmeet Singh and a handful of candidates for the NDP stopped behind a podium to make an announcement of policies on the construction of houses.
But the approach was quickly changed to the viability of the party since its support has taken a serious peak before the federal elections of 2025.
The NDP won 25 seats in the 2021 elections, more than half of which were in British Columbia, where the party can usually have strong support.
On April 8, 2025, the CBC survey tracker was projecting that the NDP would win in most of the four seats, throughout the country, in the next elections. While that sounds serious, it is actually in the form of a unique seat projected the previous week.
A political party needs at least 12 members chosen in the House of Commons to be a recognized party or have an official party status.
When journalists asked him if he could win his own leadership of Central Burnaby, where surveys show a probable victory for liberal candidate Wade Chang, Singh dodged the question, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to share regular campaign messages around the importance of this election and failures in other parties.
When asked for the second time, the NDP leader said: “Absolutely.”
“I am sure I can serve the people of Burnaby Central.”
Support to liberals
Singh himself has stopped saying that he is running to become the Prime Minister of Canada and, instead, he is now focusing his campaign on asking Canadians to choose more parliamentary.
Murray Rankin, former deputy of the NDP and a MLA of BC NDP, has expressed his support for the liberal candidate Taleb Noormohamed in Vancouver Granville, according to an endorsement published in X by Noormohamed.
In a Opinion article for BNN BloombergThe former NDP leader, Tom Mulcair, acknowledged that the 2025 elections are a two -horse race, since Canadians vote for a government who hope they can challenge the president of the United States, Donald Trump, his commercial war and his threats on Canadian sovereignty.
“When I was the leader of the NDP, I used to see when I heard the liberals warn about” dividing the vote. “It seemed as right, as if ‘the vote’ belonged to them,” Mulcair wrote.
“But now I hear even the ‘dippers’ of a lifetime (as we call each other joke), that the risks for Canada are so great that in these elections they will help and vote for the liberals.”
Jagmeet Singh took to the streets of his ride Burnaby to try to boost his group’s fortune. The surveys show that the new Democrats are fighting, threatening the Singh seat itself. Chad Pawson of the CBC has more about the thrust of the NDP.
Fall of the NDP
The Simon Fraser University political scientist, Sanjay Jaram, said that three factors have led to the almost collapse of the NDP: the tariffs, the desire of the public that their votes import and the fact that Singh is the oldest leader of the three main games.
Singh has been the NDP leader since 2017, while Pierre Poilievre took over the Conservative Party in 2022, and Mark Carney became a liberal leader last month.
In those seven and a half years, Singh’s NDP has not yet formed a government, and although it has certainly influenced significant changes in the House of Commons, the game does not have its own history to run, Jeram said.
The tariffs, in particular, have closed the NDP, said Jaram.
“Many people vote simply as what they think will better manage that issue,” he said, something that can be difficult for Singh to claim, given the strengths of the other parts.
Vancouver’s voter Al Henry, said he would consider voting for the NDP if he thought he had an opportunity to win the elections, but worry that his vote would not count for much. Instead, he is voting strategically, he said.
“I just hope Poilievre not between,” he said.
Jaram said this is not an unusual concern.
“This tends to be, when it comes to that, people who recognize that this is how the system works,” he said. “They want your vote to import. They are choosing depending on how you can import my best vote.”
