— | National Post

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After years of bristling at the idea of “vote splitting,” former NDP leader Tom Mulcair has effectively warned NDP supporters not to split the vote in the 2025 election.

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In a March 24 op-ed for Bloomberg News, Mulcair warned that the threat of U.S. President Donald Trump is too dire for Canadians to vote for third parties, and that the coming election should be a race “between the Liberals and Conservatives.”

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“If you can’t seriously say you’re going to form a government that can take on Trump, then get out of the way and let the only real contenders have at it,” he wrote.

Mulcair was leader of the NDP between 2012 and 2017 — a period that saw the party form the Official Opposition against the government of Stephen Harper.

It was also a position in which Mulcair often had to resist charges that a vote for his NDP served only to split the progressive vote to the benefit of the Conservatives.

Mulcair acknowledged as much in his Bloomberg column, writing, “When I was NDP leader I used to bristle when I heard Liberals warn about not ‘splitting the vote.’ It seemed so entitled, as if ‘the’ vote belonged to them.”

According to Mulcair, what’s changed this time is the extraordinary threat from the United States, which he called a “threat to Canada’s existence.”

The election was triggered in large part by an on-off trade war initiated by Trump’s administration. This — along with Trump’s repeated threats to absorb Canada as the “51st state” — is why Mulcair recommended that third parties such as the NDP be treated as an “afterthought.”

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“That’s why this is shaping up to be a race between the ruling Liberals and the opposition Conservatives, with little room to spare for the others,” he wrote.

Mulcair also noted that the NDP are polling at all-time lows, making the party uniquely irrelevant in determining the shape of the next federal government.

In an Angus Reid Institute poll released the same day as Mulcair’s column, the NDP were polling at a record low of seven per cent. If these figures hold until election day, it could translate into a caucus of only one or two seats; the worst-ever showing for the party.

The Angus Reid poll was also one of the first to confirm that the hemorrhaging NDP support is a direct result of traditional NDP voters stampeding to the Liberals. The survey found that of respondents who had voted for the NDP in 2021, 50 per cent intended to vote Liberal this time around — against just 35 per cent who intended to vote NDP again.

“Now I’m hearing even from die hard, lifelong ‘Dippers’ (as we jokingly called ourselves), that the risks to Canada are so great that in this election, they’re going to be helping and voting for the Liberals,” Mulcair wrote in his Bloomberg column.

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Although Mulcair praised NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh as a “valiant warrior,” he noted that there is no longer much daylight between the parties, given that the NDP has been singularly responsible for propping up the minority Liberals through much of the last four years.

“It’s very hard for (Singh) to convince progressive voters that the Liberals are elitist bums when he’s been in the sack with them for the last few years,” wrote Mulcair.

Mulcair faced a slightly different situation than Singh when he led the NDP into the 2015 election.

Not only did Mulcair enter the campaign as the official Opposition leader, but polls initially showed the NDP within reach of winning at least a minority government. “We’re the only party that can beat Conservatives,” Mulcair said on the 2015 campaign trail.

In the end, however, Mulcair’s chances of becoming prime minister were skunked by the exact same phenomenon he is now advocating against his NDP successor.

Halfway through the 2015 campaign, progressive voters defected en masse to the Liberals, ensuring a majority government for the Liberals, and a loss of 51 seats for Mulcair.

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Mulcair’s column also took shots at the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois, whom he similarly accused of being too weak to maintain relevance.

In the case of the Bloc, Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty are ironically having a deleterious effect on the party’s usual case for Quebec sovereignty. Ever since the start of the trade war, support for Quebec independence has been falling almost as quickly as national support for the NDP.

Wrote Mulcair, “many Quebec voters are turning to (Liberal Leader Mark) Carney because they want someone with the experience to handle the economy… and Trump!”

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