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As I write this, I’m in a different place, I’ve left full-time association management and have moved to a different stage of my professional life: One where I can choose who I work with, what projects I lend my time to, and the causes I advocate for.
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One in six Canadians who voted Liberal in last year’s federal election now say they would vote NDP. That’s according to an Angus Reid survey released last week.
At first blush, it might look like the start of a comeback for a party reduced to just seven seats and 6.3 per cent of the popular vote in the last election.
It isn’t. At least not yet.
The question now is whether NDP leader Avi Lewis understands what those numbers mean for his party and its political strategy.
In his first major interview after becoming leader last March, Lewis argued that the NDP now has “wide-open political space” to advance “a really populist left agenda.” The Angus Reid poll suggests he’s looking for votes in all the wrong places.
The wide-open political space isn’t on the democratic left. It’s immediately to his right.
That’s because Mark Carney didn’t make the Liberal tent bigger. He picked it up, stakes and all, and moved it to the right.
Carney’s Liberals now occupy much of the political ground that once belonged to moderate conservatives.
The more the Liberal party occupies traditional centre-right terrain, the more it crowds Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party into Maple MAGA territory.
And as long as progressive Liberal voters continue to see Poilievre as the only realistic alternative, most will hold their nose and park their support behind Carney.
But Carney’s strategy has also created a constituency of Liberal voters who no longer feel entirely at home in the party they supported for years.
That is Avi Lewis’s opportunity.
The Angus Reid survey points to climate policy as the immediate catalyst. That’s hardly surprising after another summer dominated by catastrophic wildfires and growing unease over the government’s retreat from signature climate commitments.
But climate is only the entry point. The larger question is whether progressive Liberals still recognize the direction of a party that has repositioned itself across a much broader range of issues.
Nor is the opportunity confined to defining issues such as climate change. Lewis also needs the political agility to respond to the smaller, more transactional decisions that rarely dominate election campaigns but signal a government’s true colours.
Conservatives attacked Carney for negotiating a bad deal with Washington. They focused on the economics.
The real issue for many progressive Canadians was about living up to the Elbows Up slogan.
The message to them was that when Donald Trump applies enough pressure, the Liberal government folds.
That is an argument the Conservatives are poorly positioned to make because of their own complicated relationship with Trump.
The NDP isn’t.
Lewis could argue that the real issue is not the value of the deal but the effect of repeatedly accommodating an American administration that has made bullying Canada part of its political playbook.
That is a message capable of reaching well beyond the NDP’s traditional base and appeal to progressive Liberals.
For decades, the NDP tried to influence Liberal governments by pulling them leftward and measuring success by the number of New Democratic ideas they adopted.
It was a permanent opposition strategy.
If Lewis truly wants to rebuild the NDP, he has to think less like the leader of a permanent opposition party and more like someone assembling the first pieces of a governing coalition.
That coalition won’t be built exclusively from traditional New Democrats. The Angus Reid numbers suggest that process may have started already.
If one in six Liberal voters switched, the NDP’s support would climb from 6.3 per cent to roughly 13.6 per cent.
When 338Canada projected the NDP at almost exactly that level during the 2019 election campaign, it projected the party would win roughly a dozen seats — that’s official party status.
And it’s before the NDP has made any deliberate effort to attract progressive Liberals.
But political opportunities rarely last.
The Liberal Party’s greatest strength has never been ideological consistency. It has been its ability to redefine the political centre before its opponents do.
Lewis now has an opportunity to respond in kind. Not by abandoning New Democratic values but by giving voice to compatible centrist preoccupations.
To paraphrase Mark Carney, Avi Lewis and the NDP need to see the country as it is, not as they wish it was.
The news last week that Canada and the US had reached a deal that would open the bridge to cross border traffic dripped in irony. A bridge named after the hockey legend whose elbows inspired Canada’s rallying cry against Donald Trump opening only after Ottawa accommodated Washington’s bully tactics.
But the agreement is also a window into how Mark Carney governs.
Trump blocked a completed bridge that Canada financed even if Ottawa had every factual, legal and moral argument on its side. And it was Washington that went into the corners with its elbows up and Canada that turtled.
The bridge is now scheduled to open on July 27. According to media reports, the settlement gives Washington new influence over significant toll decisions while directing half of the bridge’s future net profits to a 15-year regional economic development fund.
Under the original arrangement, Canada expected to recover its investment through toll revenues before Michigan shared in the profits. The new agreement pushes that recovery much farther into the future, although Ottawa has yet to disclose by how much.
That matters because time is the hidden currency of politics.
Carney has shown that he thinks like an economist and governs like a central banker.
That does not make him apolitical. Quite the opposite. He is deeply political — his approval ratings are evidence of this. But he approaches politics as a continuing exercise in trade-offs, optimization and risk management where the future is discounted and the immediate objective is the priority.
Central bankers operate much the same way. They calm markets, restore confidence, contain shocks and prevent today’s instability from becoming tomorrow’s panic.
But a country is not a balance sheet. Sovereignty, credibility and strategic leverage cannot always be assigned a present value and traded for short-term stability.
Observing Mark Carney increasingly suggests that he treats red lines not as principles to defend, but as obstacles to clear.
Consider the Digital Services Tax. Trump halted trade negotiations. Ottawa quickly rescinded a policy years in the making to restart them. The government openly described the reversal as the price of advancing broader negotiations with Washington.
Last week, Carney became the first Canadian prime minister in 26 years to visit Saudi Arabia, reversing a long period of political distance from a regime whose human rights record remains appalling. His explanation had the polished efficiency of a central bank communiqué: “Engagement is not endorsement.” Lecturing governments from afar, he added, is ineffective.
Each decision can be defended on its own merits. Taken together, Carney’s governing doctrine appears to be this: Address today’s problem; leave the consequences to tomorrow.
Carney often says Canada must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Every concession changes the world as it is. Reward coercion today and coercion becomes more likely tomorrow. Treat every red line as provisional and adversaries learn that Canadian resistance has a price, and enough pressure will reveal it.
That may be the lasting significance of the Gordie Howe bridge agreement.
“Elbows Up” promised that Canada would absorb short-term pain to protect its long-term independence. Carney appears ready to reverse that bargain.
He secures immediate relief by transferring the cost, the precedent and the lost leverage into the future.
The bridge will open. Traffic will move.
The government will declare the crisis resolved and celebrate Canada-U.S. trade.
But a bridge can carry more than vehicles. This one carries a warning.
Mark Carney governs as though the future can always absorb one more political compromise.
Keynes may have been right, after all, in the long run, we will indeed all be dead. But that will be cold comfort for future generations.
