The Liberal-NDP marriage ends in divorce

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The Jagmeet Singh-Justin Trudeau marriage has ended after 30 months.

It was never destined to last forever, but in the world of politics, where a week is a long time, the relationship was expected to last until June 2025. It ended on Wednesday, with Singh pulling out of the supply-and-confidence agreement in an unsentimental video posted to social media that, apparently, blindsided the Liberals — a political breakup for the social media age.

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“There were no signs in the relationship that the NDP was going to do this,” said Liberal House Leader Karina Gould.

But, like any troubled marriage, people can only stay together for the kids or to pay the bills for so long.

“In your analogy, Trudeau’s out too much, travelling too much, never home, never looking after the kids, and Singh’s like ‘this isn’t working for me anymore,’” said Jason Lietaer, a former staffer in prime minister Stephen Harper’s office and now president of Enterprise Canada.

The reality, Lietaer argued, is that Trudeau was dragging Singh down with him, and Singh needed to get out to salvage his leadership and his caucus and try to rebuild.

As a result of the alliance, which staved off a potential election, Pierre Poilievre remains the leader of the Official Opposition, and not prime minister, despite surging in the polls, with current estimates suggesting his Conservative party would garner more than 40 per cent of the popular vote. Should the Liberals have fallen in a confidence vote at some point in the past three years, it’s likely he would now be prime minister.

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By at least one metric, according to Sean Speer, the editor-at-large of the online publication The Hub and a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the NDP has won its “greatest accomplishment” via the supply-and-confidence agreement. They hauled the Liberal party towards the political left. And they didn’t need to form government to do it.

“Success should instead be measured by its influence over the centre of gravity of Canadian politics. On this front, it has been enormously successful,” Speer wrote.

Minority governments have operated based on cooperation with other parties before and will do so again

Polls since 2022 don’t show a huge collapse in NDP support. The party has trended between 17 per cent and 21 per cent of the popular vote — there’s no precipitous collapse from 34 per cent support to 25 per cent support, as with the Liberals. But, of course, that doesn’t translate into seat counts, and both the NDP and Liberals are projected, according to polling aggregator 338Canada, to lose a considerable number of seats.

There’s an old joke, in political circles, to the effect that the Liberals are New Democrats, just slower. If there’s a good idea in the NDP stable, eventually the Liberals stage a daylight raid, swipe the idea, get it done and take credit. In this iteration of the power arrangement, the NDP, at least, got to claim some credit for the Liberals incorporating its ideas, instead of being left bemoaning the theft.

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“The NDP has really struggled to have credit in those kinds of situations,” said Lietaer.

These victories, at least according to NDP supporters, are major wins indeed.

“It was never about keeping Conservatives from power,” Kathleen Monk, a political commentator, wrote in an email. “But minority governments have operated based on cooperation with other parties before and will do so again. The New Democrats have been focused on using the leverage they had to deliver relief to people who need it most. This is in the DNA of the NDP.”

There is now a federal dental-care program, covering uninsured Canadians with a household income of less than $90,000, although it arrived neither as fast nor, when launched in 2022, in the form the NDP wanted. (It remains, at least until January 2025, not fully implemented.)

The NDP’s website still boasts a petition saying Trudeau is “all talk no action” on pharmacare, though. Again, the coverage for diabetes medication and contraceptives is perhaps not what the NDP had envisioned when reflecting upon the text of the marital agreement, which promised “progress on a universal national pharmacare program.”

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These major social programs have, in addition to energizing some provincial conservative opposition to more federal spending, provided some ammunition to Poilievre’s conservatives. After all, the dental-care program is expected to cost $4.4 billion each year. A fully implemented national pharmacare system would cost the federal treasury, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, up to $13.4 billion in 2027-28. The $10-per-day universal childcare scheme, which came into effect before the supply-and-confidence agreement but was nevertheless a component of the agreement, is costing roughly $9 billion each year.

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In exchange for all of this, Singh and Trudeau have become the couple nobody quite wants to see arrive at the party, their friends and family whispering that perhaps they’d be better off seeing other people.

“The Liberals have let people down. They don’t deserve another chance,” said Singh in his Wednesday video. “The Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people.”

Poilievre, meanwhile, has painted the two leaders with the same brush.

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“Sellout Singh,” Poilievre has dubbed his fellow Opposition leader, blaming him for the “carbon tax coalition.” The Liberals, approaching a decade in power, have slumped in the polls since summer 2023, with the major policies announced under the supply-and-confidence agreement having little apparent positive effect.

The conventional breakup wisdom is to rediscover old hobbies, make new friends and hit the gym. Already, the NDP has a new slogan: “It’s the people’s time.”

“With the New Democrats now becoming free agents again, they are positioning themselves to take on Poilievre directly. Make the case that they will deliver better health care or get relief for families struggling to pay the bills,” wrote Monk.

“It was a rebranding. It was a refresh. We’re going to see if it’s got enough time to catch and whether or not it’s going to work,” said Lietaer.

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