NDP

Will there be another political orange crush? Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh sure hopes so.

In 2011, the New Democratic Party of Canada, led by Jack Layton, became the Official Opposition in the House of Commons in a stunning orange surge. The historic win coincided with a Conservative victory and a Liberal collapse.

While an upcoming byelection in Montreal is being viewed as a test of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, the same could be said for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — whose party is trying to hang on to one seat while fighting to take another away from the Liberals.

The NDP is holding a caucus meeting in Montreal on Tuesday. New Democrats likely will use the opportunity to discuss plans for the upcoming parliamentary session in the wake of the party’s move to pull out of its confidence-and-supply agreement with the Liberals last week.

One has to give full marks to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh for recognizing that Einstein was right when he defined “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Having clawed his way up a few percentage points from the high teens his party polled in the 2021 election, Singh is clearly annoyed at his inability to breakout of the 20 per cent support range, as per the latest Nanos poll.

This would have been a bread and butter issue for the old left.

Jagmeet Singh’s advisers must have scripted a line for him to repeat every time a reporter asked his reason for pulling out of the NDP’s deal to support the Liberal government, and he repeated it doggedly. But it wasn’t really an explanation. It didn’t explain much of anything, and it wasn’t supposed to.

Mr. Singh didn’t point to any bargain that was broken or new development. He said the NDP got a lot done under the supply-and-confidence agreement, “but it became very clear to me that Justin Trudeau was too beholden to corporate interests to go further.” After two and a half years of an alliance, Mr. Singh had apparently discovered the Prime Minister’s true nature.

Jagmeet Singh had a valid response when he was asked at a press conference in Toronto on Thursday whether the confidence-and-supply agreement he signed with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had been worth it.

The NDP leader said that when he thinks about the deal he remembers two people: Brianna, a mother of five kids who was able to take them to the dentist for the first time; and, Sue, a cancer survivor who had lost her teeth in treatment and burst into tears when the dentist told her he was going to give her back her smile.