Opinion polls suggest that the trade-union backed New Democratic Party (NDP) will suffer an historic debacle in Canada’s federal election, which is to be held next Monday, April 28. Overshadowed by US President Donald Trump’s threats to annex the country and an ongoing trade war, the election campaign has seen Canada’s social democrats consistently polling in the single figures.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and then Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. From 2019, the minority Liberal government was dependent on the votes of the NDP to retain power, [Photo: YouTube]
For the first time in nearly 70 years, at least 80 percent of the country’s vote will likely be cast for the ruling class’s traditional parties of government, the Liberals and Conservatives—a result not seen since 1958. Far from reflecting popular enthusiasm for these two right-wing parties of big business, the drop in support for third parties is explicable above all by the fact that workers do not see the NDP as offering any serious alternative.
Support for the NDP, which is fraudulently presented in the mainstream media as a party of the “left,” has plunged to below 10 percent—its lowest share in a quarter century. At the last election in 2021, the party polled just over 3 million votes, some 17.8 percent of the total. The collapse in support for Canada’s social democrats has prompted speculation that the party will lose more than half of the 24 seats it won in the last election, stripping it of official party status in parliament. Among the NDP seats said to be in jeopardy are that of party leader Jagmeet Singh, who is standing in the traditional NDP stronghold of Burnaby, a working class Vancouver suburb.
The declining support for Canada’s social democratic party, founded as a successor to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1961, reveals the growing recognition among broad sections of workers of the utterly fraudulent character of the NDP’s claims to represent working people, and that it can advance their interests by pressuring the big business Liberal Party to the “left.”
The Canadian election campaign has unfolded amid an unprecedented global capitalist crisis accelerated by the upheavals caused by Trump’s global trade war and his drive to establish a fascist presidential dictatorship. Trump’s tariff war and threats to annex Canada have severely disrupted the decades-long military-strategic partnership between Ottawa and Washington. The Canadian ruling class has responded by systematically whipping up Canadian nationalism to mobilize workers behind their own trade war measures, while at the same time presenting through their Liberal and Tory mouthpieces plans for a massive post-election onslaught on the democratic and social rights of the working class.
The NDP’s rotten record
The collapse in popular support for the NDP is the bitter fruit of its decades-long tripartite alliance with the pro-war and austerity Liberals and the corporatist trade union apparatus. For the past six years, the NDP has propped up a minority Liberal government, lending its support to every anti-worker policy of the Trudeau government. It backed the profits-before-lives policy from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a $650 billion bailout for Bay Street and big business. The NDP supported the government as it criminalized strikes and eviscerated democratic rights. In response to the outbreak of the NATO-instigated war with Russia in Ukraine, the NDP entered into a “confidence and supply” agreement with Justin Trudeau’s crisis-riddled minority Liberal government to ensure “political stability,” as Singh put it. This enabled the Liberal government to continue its massive military spending increases and prominent participation in the war on Russia, and impose inflation-driven real wage cuts on the working class.
The NDP and unions were instrumental in suppressing widespread opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinians, which the NDP-backed Liberal government fully endorsed. The unions sabotaged the historic strike wave by teachers, rail workers, dock workers, and postal workers, among others, that has swept the country since late 2021, clearing the way for the Liberals to press forward with “post-pandemic” austerity.
