OTTAWA—For a party born of Prairie populism, the NDP’s loss of official party status isn’t merely a setback—it is an identity crisis.

The immediate explanations are familiar: miscalculated messaging, trade war and tariffs, and an ascendant right. But these are surface readings. The deeper issue lies at the party’s core: its philosophical swing. By positioning the party as a vehicle for brokerage politics, the NDP has neither secured the trappings of power nor retained the loyalty of its traditional base.

This paradox is most glaring when set against the party’s provincial record. In British Columbia and Manitoba, New Democrats govern with clarity of mandate and measurable policy ambition. Yet federally, the party has become indistinct as neither the voice of principled dissent, nor a credible alternative government. The gap is not one of competence, but of conviction.

With the goal of broadening the party’s appeal, federal NDP leadership has adopted the posture of Liberal centrism. The result is blurred lines, policy convergence, and disenchanted voters. 

Regaining trust won’t come through rebranding exercises. It will require a decisive break from the status quo—starting with a leader grounded not in Ottawa’s political pageantry, but in community engagement and the lived realities of hard political work.

This means any path forward must rethink the metrics of leadership. Bilingual press clips and parliamentary polish don’t mobilize the electorate or help shape housing policy with shift workers and single mothers. The NDP must reclaim its organizing tradition—one anchored in sidewalks and storefront campaign offices. Riding associations, sidelined by Ottawa-centric control, should be empowered to demand platforms shaped by grassroots priorities.

Ideally, the party’s next leader will come from the regions where the NDP has lost ground: the Prairies, Quebec, or Atlantic Canada. It should be someone who understands the erosion because they’ve lived it, door-knocked through it, and can speak credibly to the disconnect between national spin-doctoring and local reality, and between a comms strategy and a street protest.

That kind of political renewal is not unprecedented. After John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives lost power in 1963, the party toggled between Red Toryism and market orthodoxy before new leader Brian Mulroney fused them into a governing coalition in the early 1980s. The Liberals, too, after their 1984 wipeout, remade themselves by replacing Pierre Trudeau-era idealism with Jean Chrétien’s managerial pragmatism when he took the party’s helm in 1990.

The key is to root reinvention into solid philosophical footing. The NDP’s current weakness reflects an institutional atrophy: its declining capacity to channel social movements into clear parliamentary purpose. Where it once stood at the nexus of labour, anti-poverty, and peace activism, today the party finds itself eclipsed on both sides—by the Liberals on progressive, socially-conscious messaging, and by the Conservatives on working-class grievances.

Provincial New Democrats, meanwhile, offer instructive examples. In B.C., the NDP has indexed the minimum wage—already the highest in the country—to the annual rate of inflation and expanded tenant rights and protections. In Manitoba, Premier Wab Kinew’s breakthrough victory in 2023 was built on coalitions—urban and rural, Indigenous and settler, young and elderly. These examples are not the politics of performance, but of steady brick-by-brick reconstruction.

At the federal level, however, the NDP risks becoming a party of parliamentary positioning rather than movement-building. That is one of the reasons why voter disillusionment has grown. As Martin Lukacs notes in his new book, The Poilievre Project, it’s the Conservatives—not the NDP—who now speak to blue-collar voters, albeit through culture wars, not class solidarity.

Yet the basic values of democratic socialism in Canada remain relevant. To advocate for them is not to renounce the pursuit of power. It is to redefine it. Political power is a cumulative process. It is built from trust, not from standing behind podiums and press conferences. It is earned on the picket lines, in community centres, and at kitchen tables all across the country.

If Canadians want the Liberals, they will vote for them. If they are angry, they’ll vote Conservative. The NDP’s opportunity lies elsewhere: among those who seek the politics of personal dignity, not deferral. That is, those who are juggling multiple jobs in Scarborough, Saskatoon, or Surrey, as they watch the wealth gap widen with each passing quarter.

In her 2003 collection of essays, War Talk, Arundhati Roy wrote: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” The NDP must decide whether to attune itself again to that breath—to the patient work of building a just society—or continue chasing relevance in the House of Commons’ corridors.

Political parties aren’t revived by saviours. They are rebuilt by workhorses—who organize more than they opine, building trust one doorstep at a time, in small towns and city blocks alike. That’s where the NDP must begin the next chapter—with sweat equity, not soundbites.

Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal public service. He has also held executive positions with the governments of Ontario and British Columbia.

The Hill Times

 

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