Under Jagmeet Singh, New Democrats have never been more obsolete, or more unnecessary. They’ve been outflanked on the left by Justin Trudeau’s cartoonishly progressive government, while Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives have persuaded workers and young people to join their side, leaving Singh to sound ever more ridiculous, as he talks like his ascension to the prime minister’s office is all but imminent.
It would be hard to imagine that Singh truly believes his own hype, but that doesn’t stop him from hyping away. After barely holding on to a seat in Winnipeg during byelections on Monday, edging out the Conservatives, and finishing third in a Montreal riding, where the Tories placed fourth, Singh repeated the claim that only the NDP can “stop” the Conservatives in the next election.
“We have shown you that when we fight, we can win,” Singh said Tuesday, trying to spin the previous night’s results as proof the next federal election is a choice between the NDP and the Tories.
Unfortunately for him, it is all paper in the wind.
Yes, the NDP won in the Winnipeg riding of Elmwood-Transcona, but Poilievre’s Conservatives closed the gap, from losing by over 20 points in 2021 and by eight points in 2019, to just under four per cent. In fact, the outcome Monday was much closer to the vote share during the Harper years. (I went to high school in that riding, and have many friends and family who still live there. It is an area of Winnipeg particularly rich with working-class conservatives of the sort Poilievre has been courting, along with the NDP loyalists Singh has been losing.)
As for the Montreal riding, the NDP and Tories placed exactly as they did in the past election, third and fourth.
Again, Singh must know that the words coming out of his mouth do not match reality, and that his performance would make Winston Smith’s superiors in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth blush.
A certain level of awareness that he is peddling nonsense would at least explain that as soon as Singh said he “ripped up” the supply-and-confidence agreement he had with the governing Liberals, he pieced it back together and hoped no one would notice.
Two weeks ago, speculation was ripe that the Liberals would now have to negotiate on a case-by-case basis, or risk the government falling on a confidence motion. Parliament really would become unstable, perhaps resembling the Stephen Harper minorities.
When the Conservatives put forward a motion of non-confidence in the Liberals to be voted on next week, which would force an election if passed, Singh said he would vote with the government.
It would have been entirely reasonable to assume such a motion would give the NDP some pause before mindlessly backing Trudeau, especially since the Bloc Québécois indicated it would be voting against the Conservative motion.
After all, the NDP leader said on Sept. 6, when he dramatically announced his separation from the prime minister, that “The Liberals have let people down, they don’t deserve another chance.” He also added, thumping his chest, that the Liberals “cannot stop the Conservatives, but we can.”
Singh was given a chance to demonstrate he meant what he said, only to revert back to his typical strategy.
The NDP leader has, for years, been relentlessly attacking the Liberals and the Conservatives on social media, as if it is those two parties who had an agreement, only to vote with the government on any and all money bills or anything else considered to be a confidence vote.
That fundamental arrangement has not changed, nor have the reasons for it been altered to any significant degree.
On Thursday, Singh explained that his reasoning for voting against the Conservative confidence motion included the fact that the Liberals’ pharmacare bill is still winding its way through the legislative process. If the government fell, that bill would die before becoming law.
The notable thing about that is that pharmacare was one of the chief elements of the supply-and-confidence agreement that the government offered the NDP in exchange for confidence support. And, here is the NDP, some two weeks after supposedly ending the agreement, honouring that very agreement, even after the Bloc’s promise to vote with the Liberals relieved the NDP of responsibility for forcing an election.
Incidentally, the addition of the Bloc Québécois to this little coalition-not-a-coalition has a curious historical element, as somewhere, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion is looking on in with envy, as Trudeau has succeeded, where he failed, to create a government backstopped by the “socialists” and the “separatists.”
The chances of an election being held as scheduled next October are, again, increasing. When that happens, Singh’s NDP, currently at around 15 or 16 per cent in the polls, will have dutifully fulfilled its obligations to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals.
National Post