At NDP headquarters, they're celebrating their election-night demolition
BURNABY, B.C. — News teams had come to Burnaby to document failure. To bear witness to that rare occurrence of a political party immolating in full view of the Canadian public.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh had struggled the entire campaign to receive more than a cursory mention in a race that was effectively fought between the two main parties , Liberals versus Conservatives.
But every media outlet sent a crew to watch his end, even APTN, the Aboriginal station, and Noovo, from Quebec. By evening’s end, the attendee-to-journalist ratio in the room was roughly two-to-one.
“People are concretely better off because of our work over the last eight years, and no election result will ever diminish that,” Singh said Monday night in his concession speech that was read almost verbatim from teleprompter, including the part about how his wife Gurkiran is “my rock.”
The defeat, by any metric, was catastrophic . The worst seat count in the party’s 62-year history. Singh was decimated in his own Burnaby Centre riding, coming in a distant third. Scores of longtime voters abandoned New Democrats to place their vote with a Liberal party headed by a literal investment banker.
But despite all this, the small crowd at NDP election headquarters was not particularly downcast. There were no tears. No screams of anguish as the results came in. No venom for the leader who had failed them.
Most attendees, in fact, were rather chipper. Although Singh and his entourage quickly disappeared, most others simply headed to the onsite bar; festivities didn’t wind down for hours after the concession speech.
“We could still hold the balance of power,” said Kareem Hassib, vice president of the University of British Columbia NDP club. The party would soon be getting a new leader, and with the Conservative upsurge “the NDP has an opportunity to differentiate itself,” he added.
Jäger Rosenberg, candidate for the riding of West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, said things weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been. “Some polls had us as low as three seats,” he said. Rosenberg, 18, was one of several NDP candidates who brought his parents to the election night event.
Rosenberg, 18, hails from Gibsons, the town famous as the shooting location of the series The Beachcombers. He was one of several NDP candidate to have brought his parents.
In mid-December polls had briefly favoured him to win the riding, until election night ultimately delivered a decisive Liberal victory.
Rosenberg had also been a candidate in the October provincial election, where he describing encountering voters who assumed that he was canvassing for U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris, apparently unaware that the election was in a different country.
This time around, he said the NDP was similarly up against an electorate not totally in tune with the players. “Unfortunately, people didn’t know the local candidates,” he said.
The avoidance of total decimation was also good news to a longtime New Democrat wearing a “Make America Go Away” shirt. “If this party loses official status, we’re f-cked,” he said. And that seemed likely to happen, with just seven seats secured, based on the unofficial count late Monday night, well short of the minimum of 12.
Although Singh has been known to use the phrase “when I’m prime minister” while leading the party, the federal NDP is not a political organization that is designed to hold and wield power. The party’s oft-cited peak accomplishment is that its founder, Tommy Douglas, pushed a Liberal government into instituting medicare.
As such, where any other party would see ruin and desolation, these NDPers were relatively happy with how everything had gone. Whatever the seat count, they’d still managed to convince a Liberal government to put dental care and pharmacare on the books, programs that even the Conservatives had promised not to demolish.
“I’m a consequentialist; I care about outcomes,” said Hassib.
Campaign volunteer Maxine Howchin said that Singh “did good work,” saying he “didn’t get nearly enough credit for what happened behind the scenes” during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in regards to the scale and accessibility of emergency payments for workers.
In a campaign that has seen all the major parties wrap themselves in the Maple Leaf, the NDP has been no exception. The stage in the Crystal Ballroom at the election-night event in Burnaby was flanked by a row of neatly folded Canadian flags, and there was an eight-foot-tall backlit Canadian flag for selfies.
This was in vivid contrast to the scene at party headquarters after the 2021 election, when Singh delivered his speech in front of an image of him holding up an orange “Every Child Matters” shirt, referring to the tragedies at Indian residential schools.
Nowhere to be seen Monday night was a keffiyeh. In a campaign that had seen the NDP lean particularly hard into the issue of Gaza , not a single attendee to NDP HQ wore any of the usual regalia of the anti-Zionist movement: There were no watermelon-slice brooches , no “Free Palestine” buttons.
If the NDP had triggered an election just six months ago by joining Conservatives to vote no-confidence in the Liberal government led then by Justin Trudeau , this all would have been very different. Polls in December showed that it was the Liberals who were fated for a single-digit seat count. The Conservatives would have won a majority, but with the NDP leader in Stornoway in charge of the opposition, and the Liberals banished to a political wilderness from which they might have never returned.
Yet several people at Monday night’s event said this outcome was better.
“Honestly, I don’t ever want Conservatives in power,” said Mitch Biagioni, a volunteer on Singh’s Burnaby Centre campaign. “Liberals we can work with.”
Biagoni said one of his first political memories was hearing that right-wingers wanted to ban the video game Mortal Combat. He said he’s never particularly like conservatism ever since.
National Post
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