ANALYSIS: After Breaking Agreement With Liberals, Will NDP Seek an Election Before 2025?

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh arrives on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 19, 2024. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

While NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says that breaking his party’s supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals makes an early election “more likely,” political analysts say the party is not likely to cause an election to be held in 2024

“He’s going to need months and months to make the case that he isn’t just the same description as the prime minister and the Liberal Party,” said Tim Powers, chairman of Summa Strategies.

“Part of the reason they’ve gone down [in the polls]—they think, and probably they’re not wrong—is that they’re so closely aligned with the Liberals. So if an election happens sooner, that is of no benefit to them.”

On Sept. 4, Singh announced that his party had “ripped up” the supply and confidence agreement it signed with the governing Liberals back in March 2022.

Under that deal, the New Democrats agreed to support the government in confidence matters until June 2025. That will be when Parliament rises for the summer just prior to the next federal election scheduled for Oct. 20, 2025. The Liberals, in turn, would support NDP priorities such as pharmacare and dental care.

At a press conference on Sept. 5, Singh said he had broken the alliance because of the Liberals’ unwillingness to tackle “corporate greed” and due to differences around how best to address affordability issues.

When asked multiple times whether he would vote in favour of a vote of non-confidence in the government, which would trigger an early election, Singh responded that he would consider each vote in the House of Commons separately.

Power likened Singh’s decision to break from the Liberal Party as an attempt to escape a sinking ship.

“He’s trying to get a life raft off. The question is whether he goes down like the Titanic, or he gets to shore and is able to redefine himself,” he said.

The Liberals have been trailing the Conservative Party for about a year. They suffered a surprise loss in the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection race in June, losing a seat the Liberal Party had held since 1993 to the Conservatives.

As for Canadians’ federal polling intentions, a Leger poll from August indicated that the NDP lost 5 percentage points of support in a month, falling from 20 percent to 15 percent between July and August. Over the same period, both the Liberals and Conservatives saw a rise in support, going up from 23 percent to 25 percent for the Liberals, and from 41 percent to 43 percent for the Conservatives.

Unlikely to Vote Non-Confidence Until 2025

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has criticized Singh for his alliance with Trudeau. He sent a letter to the NDP leader last week asking him to pull out of the supply and confidence deal. Poilievre has also called on Singh to vote non-confidence in the government as early as September to “trigger a carbon tax election” in October 2024.

Kevin Gaudet, president of BrightPoint Strategy and a former director of opposition research for the Reform Party, also said it is “hard to see” Singh voting to take down the Liberal government this fall.

“Given their state of preparedness for an election, their empty war chest, and their absence of nominated candidates, we’re probably safe [from an early election], at the earliest until March or April,” Gaudet said, adding that the introduction of the next federal budget would be a better opportunity for Singh to vote non-confidence.

Gaudet said that despite the New Democrats’ attempt to differentiate themselves from the Liberals by breaking the supply and confidence agreement, that decision may not be enough to achieve that aim in the minds of Canadians.

“He basically turned a Liberal minority government into what amounted to a majority government,” Gaudet said. “It seems to me that this is going to be the exact same practice, except for the theatre of tearing up the agreement.”

Powers said the Conservatives are likely to return to the House of Commons in mid-September with a non-confidence motion, while Singh is unlikely to vote in favour.

“Mr. Singh is going to have to work pretty diligently to convince people that he has found a new political god, and his name isn’t Trudeau,” he said.