Weekend reads: Man of the people

Jagmeet Singh makes a bid to win back working Canadians

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This week, the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh announced that he’d “ripped up” the supply-and-confidence agreement that was keeping Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government in power until June 2025 — making international headlines and opening the door for an election in the weeks or months to come. “The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to stop the Conservatives and their plans to cut,” Singh posted on X. “But the NDP can. Big corporations and CEOs have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”

In an accompanying video, Singh framed the future election as an epic battle between himself and an existential threat, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Singh’s rhetoric was widely mocked, as is typical for many of his comments on Twitter. Seemingly untroubled by the reaction online, Singh soon followed up: “I see PP has tweeted. He sounds worried. He should be.”

The NDP leader appears to be channelling a kind of pugilistic leftist populism — an approach that may well have resonated with our economically-stressed electorate, were Singh’s assertions not so obviously divorced from reality.

It’s worth recapping the facts here: The NDP, once the party of working Canadians, has, for an extended period of time, propped up a government that’s presided over a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, and an opioid crisis, as well as a spiralling immigration system that’s exacerbated our housing and healthcare woes, and, in the case of the Temporary Foreign Worker program, depressed wages for low-wage workers and made it harder for young people to find entry level jobs. (All as the federal government approved a huge increase in corporate tax write-offs.)

Aside from that enormous elephant in the room, there is another, often overlooked consideration: The NDP’s stance on federal vaccine mandates. The party took the position that civil servants who declined vaccination should face discipline, or even termination. “We have to be clear that the health and safety of Canadians must come first,” Singh said in an emailed statement to The Globe and Mail, back in August of 2021. “To get as many people vaccinated as possible, we need to back up the commitment with actions.” The ensuing mandates, which some unions opposed, cost thousands of Canadians their livelihoods — in the public sector and, after the precedent was set, in the private sector as well. I suspect people will not forget that.

Nor will they forget that the NDP supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act — however “reluctantly” — which was deployed against non-violent truckers, whose views many outside the laptop class sympathized with.

Singh’s House of Commons speech about the most consequential crisis in modern Canadian history claimed that the protesters went to Ottawa “to overthrow a democratically elected government.” The speech remains on the NDP website, uncorrected, despite the fact that the Public Order Emergency Commission heard from law enforcement officers running intelligence operations on the ground that they saw no evidence of ideologically-motivated violent extremism, or any direct threat to national security. And despite the fact that the Federal Court has since found that the government acted illegally.

I am fully aware of how unpopular such arguments are in certain circles — but outside of elite discourse, they do hold considerable sway. Surely the NDP knows that, even if the Liberals do not.

One might have expected the NDP, then, to keep their heads down during these past few years and redouble their efforts to improve the material conditions of Canadians’ lives (including getting the ground-breaking dental care plan through).

But during a period in which bread-and-butter issues like food costs could not have been more pressing, the party has bizarrely elected to uphold the status quo while throwing endless shade at a prime minister they themselves are keeping in power. I agree with The Line’s Matt Gurney when he writes that “it would be good if our political leaders didn’t act in ways that are overtly and palpably ridiculous.”

Now that the Liberals are well and truly on their way out — and the Conservatives are busy courting the working-class vote that’s historically belonged to the NDP — Singh hopes he can win back the supporters he abandoned.

There may be someone in the NDP that’s capable of pulling this off. But it is unlikely to be Singh, who, throughout his political career, has frequently come across as the exact opposite of a working-class hero.

Pierre Poilievre has been quick to remind the country that Singh attended an expensive private school in Beverly Hills. (Beverly Hills, Michigan that is, a fact the recent Conservative attack ad does not make clear.) But it is Singh himself who cultivated an image as a sartorial star — a man about town as opposed to a man of the people. It is Singh who elected to don Versace bags and appear in GQ magazine and pose for ads in Rolex watches (shot by none other than rock star/photographer Bryan Adams). It is Singh who branded himself by his bespoke suits.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that is not likely to play well with, say, your average steelworker. Who politicians are now understanding they can’t ignore.