Looking For Votes In All The Wrong Places
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.
The recent debate over the Gordie Howe International Bridge shows what that opportunity looks like.
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.