As Carney Redraws the Political Map, Where Do New Democrats Go?

Seven seats. No party status. No research bureau. No guaranteed questions in the House. No vote on committees.

For the second time in its history, the federal NDP has lost official recognition in Parliament.

And the 2025 election is the worst seat result ever.

Now what? Asked if they would consider the NDP in a future election, only 13 per cent of Canadians said they “definitely” would, according to a poll published by the Angus Reid Institute on June 9.

A party that recently forced a shift in national policy on health care, labour rights, daycare and dental plans from a third-party position finds itself watching the future of Canada unfold from the back row, thinned, their voice now too faint to shape any outcome.

Not because the NDP lost. Let’s face it, the NDP never wins federally. Only diehards and dreamers even dare to think it can.

So no, the NDP is never defeated just because it loses.

Its raison d’être has always been to pull governments leftward in minority moments — when influence matters more than power.

The NDP is in serious trouble now, though, because it’s been spurned by its traditional frenemies, the Liberals. Frozen out.

It’s often said the Liberals campaign to the left, then govern to the right. But Mark Carney’s Liberals haven’t only cast aside the NDP and Greens — they partnered with the Conservatives. A union not seen since 1917.

This week the NDP’s federal council meets to decide how and when to launch a leadership race. So far, the debate has surrounded timing — is it better to get a strong voice in the House now, or quietly rebuild the party first and worry about the leader later?

The path they choose will send a critical signal. Because the NDP’s recovery depends on whether the progressive left still wants a party of its own — or is willing to survive on the scraps of an almost unprecedented Liberal-Conservative alliance.

If that alliance holds, it will reshape Parliament and Canadian politics.

It will also create a void that might just recharge and reconfigure the New Democratic Party.

And that is the NDP’s chance to write their own elbows-up testament of values, if they can.

The NDP is in trouble

After the last election, the party didn’t just lose seats; it lost cohesion.

In May, three sitting MPs — Leah Gazan, Lori Idlout and Jenny Kwan — publicly called out the party’s executive and national council over how they handled the appointment of Don Davies as interim leader, saying the process was undemocratic and opaque.

On the ground, the picture is worse.

Hundreds of ridings are ineligible for campaign expense rebates after the collapse.

This month, a group of organizers and former MPs told donors to stop giving to the central party altogether.

Let the money go where it matters, they said — into the hands of people still knocking on doors, still printing flyers, still holding together what’s left of the grassroots. They’re calling themselves Reclaim Canada’s NDP.

They’re not trying to burn it down. They’re trying to salvage what the fire didn’t take.

During the election, Conservatives peeled off about 151,000 NDP supporters — mostly blue-collar union workers — roughly five per cent of the party’s vote, according to Ipsos. That shift alone cost them 10 seats.

“If you know anyone who works in the trades, you know they’re not exactly boosters of, well, intersectional gender theory,” says Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the right-leaning Western Standard.

“A lot of that unionized, blue-collar workforce may have seen a democratic socialist party’s defence of their economic interests as trumping whatever social-political disagreements they might have. But that’s consistently broken down over time.”

And credit where it’s due. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s speech writers knew how to hit a nerve. His stories — of a waitress working three jobs who can’t make rent, a unionized brewery worker who can’t put clothes on the backs of his three kids, millennials with full-time jobs who will never be homeowners, the slow death of the promise that an honest day’s work should be enough to keep the lights on and the children fed — landed exactly where they were meant to.

The policies were vague. The punchlines came in rhyming couplets. The tone was overwrought, even schmaltzy.

But for people who were struggling, who usually feel invisible to elites in politics, it felt like Poilievre, who branded himself as the adopted son of humble schoolteachers, could see them. You could close your eyes and almost feel Poilievre was channelling Jack Layton.

Meanwhile, “the New Democrats ran a brutally out-of-touch campaign because it was all focused on the leader and his personality, and that he was a fighter,” said former NDP MP Charlie Angus — who, for the record, says he will not run for the party’s leadership.

“But people wanted someone who was there for them. The NDP leader was talking about himself; Canadians were talking about us.”

Of course, in the end, it wasn’t Poilievre who siphoned off the lion’s share of NDP support. It was the Liberals. Nearly 600,000 votes. Seven more seats. Gone.

Potential NDP voters this time aligned strategically as much to stop the Conservatives as to elect Carney.

“In any other election in my lifetime, the Conservatives, with the vote they had, would’ve won a massive majority,” said Fildebrandt. “But Carney has, at least for this cycle, consolidated the left.

“Which appears on its surface to be bizarre, because he ran a more moderate campaign to the right of Justin Trudeau.”

“The Trump election upended everything. And suddenly we needed a wartime prime minister,” said Angus. “Pierre Poilievre didn’t shift gears. Jagmeet Singh didn’t shift gears. But Mark Carney — he ran elbows up, full Mike Myers. He made himself the guy for the moment.”

“People were afraid. That’s why they voted for him.”

Canadian voters are punishing but forgiving

History tells us that political death in Canada needn’t mean an end. Often it’s more of a sabbatical.

In 1984, the Liberals dropped from 135 seats to just 40. That was the worst collapse in Canadian history.

Until 1993. That’s when the Progressive Conservatives fell from 156 to two. Jean Charest was one of the two who survived, forced to endure jokes about his wife sleeping with half the Tory caucus.

Then, in 2011, it was time to punish the Liberals again. They lost 43 seats, falling from 77 to 34.

Each collapse came with its own post-mortem: scandals, arrogance, policy drift.

The common thread was this: when Canadians are pissed, they don’t circle back. They scratch you from the lineup — for a game or two.

But they’ll eventually let you back on the ice. So what should the NDP be doing next to earn their way back into the game?

Mark Carney already is offering their voters plenty of reasons to feel betrayed and to see the need for a vigorous, principled and effective progressive federal party well represented in Parliament.

Carney’s pivots on progressive issues

Consider Carney’s apparent reversal on climate change. When he ran the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, he made corporate polluters sweat, told the world that climate risk is financial risk, helped launch the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero and wrote two whole chapters in his book Values about why we had to bend the emissions curve — or break under it.

He walked the halls of Davos like a prophet in a power suit.

So when Canadians handed him a minority — three seats shy of a majority — you’d think the math would point left. The Greens were offering. The NDP was available. Progressives thought they’d be courted — maybe even needed.

Instead, Carney turned around and gave his dance card to the Conservatives.

“I thought a minority Liberal government would want to court the votes of the NDP and the Greens,” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May told me, in early June before the controversial Bill C-5 or One Canadian Economy Act was pushed through Parliament.

“They don’t care about our votes. They’re gonna get the Conservative votes.”

Carney didn’t just pass them over. He shut the door.

“They pretty much froze the New Democrats out entirely,” said Charlie Angus. “I don’t believe Carney’s done any outreach whatsoever. He doesn’t come from politics. He may think he’s got a mandate, but that’s not how things are done.

“You’ve got to build goodwill with everyone. You know, Stephen Harper called Jack Layton all the time. They were the polar opposites. But Harper knew you’ve got to talk to all people.”

And that might be the real surprise. Not that Carney partnered with the Conservatives, but that after all that climate talk, all that values talk, all that global credentials talk, he didn’t even call the people who were ready to help.

“I don’t want to condemn Mark Carney as no different than Poilievre or Harper. He could be a climate champion,” said May. But if he is, he sure is keeping it under wraps.

“The only thing he’s done on climate so far is cancel the carbon tax, which was the one thing the Liberals ever did that was actually working.”

Carney promised to move fast — and he did.

The One Canadian Economy Act, which gives cabinet sweeping powers to fast-track “national interest” projects by skipping environmental regulations and laws, passed into law in record time. Only two weeks.

The Greens, the NDP and the Bloc allied against the bill. That disillusionment isn’t restricted to the Ottawa bubble.

With the One Canadian Economy law in place, Carney is now promising to speed up the building of energy projects as quickly as you can say “I voted Liberal.”

The list of environmental organizations turning on him is growing by the day: Citizens’ Climate Lobby, 350.org, Leadnow, the David Suzuki Foundation, For Our Kids, MiningWatch Canada, the Climate Action Network, West Coast Environmental Law, the Canadian Environmental Law Association. All have made public statements calling out the Carney government.

Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada: “Mark Carney ran for prime minister as the banker who cared about climate change, but with Bill C-5, he is governing like Stephen Harper on steroids.”

Ecojustice’s Charlie Hatt: “This rushed and poorly vetted law could tie our country’s future to fossil fuel industry megaprojects that won’t protect us from the threat of Trump or help us face the growing dangers of climate change and the biodiversity crisis. We hope we’re wrong.”

The One Canadian Economy Act flew through Parliament so fast it also knocked reconciliation sideways. Some First Nations Chiefs who travelled to Ottawa to testify at second reading didn’t even get to give evidence to the committee — their spots were cut for lack of time.

First Nations are not necessarily against development — the issue was they felt cut out of the democratic process.

It took Stephen Harper six years to spark a cross-country Indigenous protest movement called Idle No More. But Carney? Well, Carney unravelled the Liberal party’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples and revived Idle No More in only six weeks.

Opportunities for a revived NDP

Criticize Carney for moving too fast, and he — or any Liberal with their media lines at the ready — will remind you of the auto workers, the folks at Dofasco and Algoma, the farmers who can’t sell their crops.

And that tracks — at first. In Values, Carney centres the labour movement as part of the moral scaffolding that once held Canada up.

He warned that inequality eats away at civic life and leans on international bodies to confirm what most workers already know: fairer societies are stronger.

Carney never explains how Canada got here — or how we kept sinking.

And, as it turns out, that matters. Because Carney appears to be more sympathetic to some layoffs than others.

The Globe and Mail has reported that Carney is planning deep, multi-year cuts to the public service — and some programs along with them that voters may not have expected to be on the chopping block.

Carney is proposing up to $19 billion in cuts — about 15 per cent over three years, set to shrink further by 2028. And like everything else he’s done so far, he’s in a hurry. Departments must submit their revised spending plans by Aug. 28.

These proposed reductions carry over from the previous government’s “Refocusing Government Spending” initiative. More than 10,000 federal jobs were cut last year.

But Carney’s version is moving even faster. What took years of public consultation in the 1990s is now being compressed into a 60-day timeline, as ministers are pressed to identify deep cuts.

“Canada’s public service isn’t a piggy bank we can dip into whenever the government wants to fund new projects,” said Public Service Alliance of Canada national president Sharon DeSousa, who says program delivery to Canadians will be affected.

“Whether it’s dental care, services for Indigenous communities, environmental programs or public sector jobs — everything is on the chopping block except military spending,” said Canadian Union of Public Employees national president Mark Hancock.

And it’s true — while Carney trims salaries and programs at home, he’s ramping up military spending, selling it as job creation. But more likely, the elbows-up PM is just appeasing the United States. Donald Trump is demanding $61 billion from Canada to join his missile defence system, and pushing NATO allies toward a five per cent defence spending benchmark.

This is Carney’s first run at elected office, and he’s surrounded by people with far more experience — labour organizers, Indigenous leaders, climate advocates, business veterans who know how to push and pivot, and seasoned provincial politicians with their own agendas. There’s been a quiet willingness to give him time to find his feet.

“I’ve told people on the left, ‘Listen, the guy has a mandate,’” said Angus. “It’s all hands on deck, so I’m willing to give ’em a chance. I think it’s early days.”

Fildebrandt says Conservatives, too, are holding their breath for a moment. “I think a lot of people are still in wait-and-see mode, like which Mark Carney is going to show up? Is it the guy who wrote Values? Or is it the guy on the campaign trail?

“He’s probably not going to win over many Conservatives to vote for him, but he’ll defang the visceral hatred that Conservatives had towards the Liberal party under Trudeau.”

The thing is, Carney’s approach so far suggests he’s more interested in steering than listening.

Just as the Conservatives built a coalition of the disgruntled and the disenfranchised on the right, the left could do the same with those Carney is quietly pushing out of the tent.

Indigenous people and their allies who believed in reconciliation.

Public sector workers. And the working class who lived without dental plans, daycare and drug benefits before the NDP forced them on Trudeau.

Environmentalists and climate activists who are watching protections disappear.

There’s real tension between climate justice and resource economies, between sovereignty and state solutions.

In Values, Carney seemed to think such an alliance was possible and also a solution.

“I felt the collapse in public trust in elites, globalization, and technology, and I became convinced that these challenges reflect a common crisis in values, and that radical changes are required to build an economy that works for all,” he wrote.

If Carney no longer believes that, there is room for any political party who does to sweep in and defend that space.