It wasn’t that long ago that the federal NDP held the balance of political power in Canada. Now, it looks like it will be lucky to hold onto any political power at all. The defection by Nunavut MP Lori Idlout leaves them with just six federal MPs, and that’s without accounting for Alexandre Boulerice’s widely rumoured move to provincial politics in Quebec. If he also leaves caucus, the once-mighty party of Jack Layton will be left with an actual handful of seats, none of which are east of the Manitoba-Ontario border. 

Boulerice, by the way, would be jumping to run for Quebec Solidaire, a party that’s polling a distant fifth in the province ahead of October’s provincial election. But maybe his odds there look better than they do for the federal NDP, which attracted less than five per cent of the vote in Quebec in the last election and seems poised to elect a new leader who barely speaks French. As former NDP national director (and Quebec leadership debate moderator) Karl Bélanger told the CBC last fall, “if you're not able to speak French, to debate in French, you're not gonna break through [in Quebec]. Simple as that.”

At this point, though, they’d take a breakthrough anywhere. After polling consistently in the high teens and low twenties for most of Justin Trudeau’s time in office, the NDP has been consistently stuck under 10 per cent with Mark Carney in charge. The rightward drift of the Liberal government under his leadership should have opened some space for the NDP to recapture progressive voters. But it hasn’t happened yet, even with all the attention and energy a leadership race ought to be generating. 

Some of this is a reflection of poor leadership. Jagmeet Singh was, as I wrote and said many times, a thoroughly disastrous choice as the replacement for Thomas Mulcair, and he will almost certainly go down as the worst leader in the party’s history. Unfortunately for federal New Democrats, his competition there will probably come from his likely replacement, Avi Lewis, who seems determined to make the same mistakes.

Indeed, if you wanted to trace the root cause of the NDP’s decline from official opposition to potential annihilation, you would probably start with the April 2016 federal NDP convention, where Lewis played a starring role. The convention was held in Edmonton, which had become home to a rather unexpected NDP provincial government that was staring down the barrel of Alberta’s latest (and, at that point, most severe) oil price crash. Lewis, in his infinite wisdom, thought that was the best place to advance his “Leap Manifesto,” which called for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. 

The five page document was an early Christmas gift for conservative forces in Alberta, who were still trying to reorient themselves to a world in which they weren’t in power. It helped them frame the Climate Leadership Plan, the Notley government’s signature piece of legislation, as an ideologically driven attempt to dismantle the oil and gas industry rather than pragmatic policy aimed at reconciling economic growth with environmental progress. It also set the stage for renewed conflict between the New Democrats who wanted to govern (and yes, win elections) and the New Democrats who wanted to fundamentally rewrite the rules of commerce, trade and labour. 

Shannon Phillips, who was the NDP environment minister at the time — full disclosure: I worked with her during my time at the Alberta Climate Change Office — is unsparing in her criticism of that decision. “This piece of self-indulgent posturing fractured the party, undermined our credibility, and squandered the party’s momentum after our win in Alberta in May 2015,” she said in a 2025 Substack piece. “It exposed fundamental weaknesses: an inability to engage with complex issues with intellectual rigor; an unwillingness to confront necessary trade-offs; and a retreat into academic theory divorced from the lived realities of working Canadians. From April 2016 onward, the federal NDP has functioned more as an abstract intellectual exercise than a serious electoral force.”

Avi Lewis is poised to become the next NDP leader. He may quickly find out that it's hard to be the voice of conscience in Canadian politics when you barely have a voice.

Maybe Lewis, who finished third in his two previous tries at getting elected to parliament, will succeed in his third attempt. And maybe his unapologetically anti-corporate, anti-business, anti-establishment populism will resonate more with the public than Singh did. That’s a low bar, to be sure, but Lewis is definitely talented enough to clear it. 

Whether he has the talent required to rebuild the NDP into a viable national political party is a much bigger question. It’s one that Idlout answered indirectly with her decision to defect to Carney’s Liberals just weeks after telling reporters that Lewis was “the strongest out of all the other leadership candidates.” 

It’s also a question that provincial NDP leaders like David Eby, Naheed Nenshi and Wab Kinew are surely thinking about right now. Will Lewis and his more strident brand of progressive politics help them win their own elections, or will he be unintentionally providing their opponents with the sort of ammunition that was used for years against Rachel Notley? 

One thing seems certain: a party that once flirted with forming government is now increasingly content to exist at the political margin. Maybe that will make some of its members feel better about not having to compromise their values or water down their beliefs in the search for power. I suspect they’re about to find out that moral and intellectual purity also comes at a cost.

© National Observer