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On the night of the April 2025 federal election, Jagmeet Singh stood in Burnaby and conceded his own seat. He had received 18.1 percent of the vote in a riding the Liberal candidate won with 42.1 percent. He announced his resignation as NDP leader before the night was over — the first NDP leader since David Lewis in 1974 to lose his own seat on election night. Nationally, the party fell from 24 seats to fewer than 12, losing official party status in the House of Commons for the first time in decades.1
To look at that result and conclude only that Singh failed is to miss the larger story. The NDP's collapse was a decade in the making, it was accelerated by structural forces Singh did not create, and it was compounded by strategic choices the party — not just its leader — made together. The talent to prevent it existed within the party. It was, largely, left waiting.
What Singh Actually Built — and Who Got the Credit
Before the postmortem, a record. Jagmeet Singh led the NDP into a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Trudeau Liberals in March 20222 and extracted from that agreement the most significant expansion of public healthcare in Canada since Tommy Douglas built medicare itself.
The Canadian Dental Care Plan — a direct NDP demand — began covering approximately 2.4 million Canadians, with an estimated 9 million eligible once the program is fully implemented.3 For the first time since 1984, a federal government legislated a new pharmacare framework, covering diabetes medications and contraception.4 The NDP also secured anti-replacement worker legislation at the federal level, prohibiting the use of scabs during strikes at federally regulated workplaces — a fight organized labour had waged for decades.5 These are not minor achievements. They are the kind of durable policy wins that define a party's legacy.
And yet: The Liberals received the political credit. The Conservatives attacked the spending. The NDP was trapped — associated with the unpopularity of a government it had propped up, without the public identity that would have allowed it to claim ownership of what it had won. Singh ended the confidence agreement in September 2024.6 It was too late. The political damage had compounded over two years.
This is the political trap that minority parliaments set for smaller parties: If you use your leverage, you become responsible for the government's failures. If you don't, you're irrelevant. Singh chose leverage, won real things for real Canadians, and lost his seat. That is not a simple story of failure.
The Headwinds No One Named Honestly
Jagmeet Singh was the first person of colour to lead a major federal party in Canadian history.7 This fact was noted, celebrated at the time of his 2017 leadership victory, and then largely treated as irrelevant in the years of criticism that followed. It was not irrelevant.
Media coverage of Singh throughout his leadership disproportionately focused on aesthetics — his turban, his clothing, his social media presence, his wedding — in a way that coverage of white party leaders consistently does not. The commentary that framed his TikTok activity as a character flaw rather than a campaign strategy was applied to him with a regularity it was not applied to Justin Trudeau's much-discussed personal brand or Stephen Harper's carefully curated hockey-dad imagery. Whether this pattern reflected conscious bias or structural habit in how Canadian political media frames non-white leaders is a question worth asking directly. It was rarely asked.
In Québec — the province Jack Layton cracked with the 2011 Orange Wave, sending 59 NDP members to Ottawa8 — Singh never gained comparable traction. The dynamics were multiple and well-documented: The niqab controversy that had defined federal politics in 2015 left visible minority leaders navigating a specific political minefield in Québec that white leaders did not face in the same way. The NDP's Québec base, built on Layton's personal charisma and a moment of unusual political alignment, evaporated after 2011. Singh was handed the ruins and asked to rebuild what had taken Layton a decade to construct.
None of this is to say Singh was above criticism. He was not. The grassroots critique — articulated most clearly by the people who knew the party best — pointed to something real.
Charlie Angus and the Critique the Party Needed to Hear
Charlie Angus served as the federal Member of Parliament for Timmins—James Bay from 2004 to 2025 — over two decades of representing a northern Ontario riding that is as far from a safe NDP seat as any in the country. Before that he was a punk musician, a journalist, and an organizer. He was, in the estimation of many inside the party, precisely the kind of NDP figure who embodied what the party was supposed to be: Rooted in labour, direct in speech, unafraid of the fight, and constitutionally uninterested in performative politics.
Angus ran against Singh in the 2017 leadership race. He lost. He continued as an MP, continued as one of the most effective opposition voices in Parliament — his work on Indigenous rights, on big tech accountability, on corporate power was substantive and largely unrecognized outside the people who were paying close attention — and then, before the 2025 election, announced he would not run again.9
After the collapse, Angus said what others had been reluctant to say plainly: The NDP had become too 'leader-focused,' had chased TikTok metrics instead of rebuilding its grassroots, had drifted away from the working-class economic politics that were its historical reason for existing. He ruled out a leadership bid. But his diagnosis was the clearest available, and it was the diagnosis of someone who had spent twenty years doing the actual work.
The party that ran against 'gatekeepers' and 'elites' on social media had, in Angus's reading, forgotten how to knock on a door.
The Evidence That Was There All Along: Kinew and Stiles
While the federal NDP was losing its footing, two provincial NDP leaders were demonstrating that the party's underlying appeal — when grounded in concrete policy and grassroots organization — remained very much alive.
Wab Kinew became Premier of Manitoba in October 2023, leading the NDP to a majority government and becoming the first First Nations premier of a Canadian province. Since then, he has maintained the highest approval ratings of any premier in Canada, signed interprovincial trade agreements in response to the US tariff war, and delivered fiscal management disciplined enough that Manitoba is projected to post the strongest deficit position in the country in 2026-27.10 At the federal NDP's leadership convention in Winnipeg in March 2026, Kinew's nearly twenty-minute address drew eight standing ovations.11 The crowd was not responding to a politician. They were responding to proof that the party's vision could actually govern.
In Ontario, Marit Stiles has led the provincial NDP since 2023 through conditions that would test any opposition leader — Doug Ford's majority government, a snap election in 2025, and the defection of a deputy leader to the federal Liberals in 2026. The party held Official Opposition status for a third consecutive time, a first in its history. More significantly, the Ontario NDP ended 2025 having raised $7.9 million from 106,000 individual donors — more than Doug Ford's Conservatives and the Ontario Liberals combined, for the second year running.12 That fundraising base is not a digital metric. It is 106,000 people who gave money because they were asked and they believed. That is a grassroots, and it is intact.
Kinew and Stiles represent something the federal party lost sight of: The NDP's electoral ceiling rises when it shows people a government that works, not a movement that talks.
Where Does the Party Go From Here
On March 29, 2026, the federal NDP elected Avi Lewis as its new leader. He won 56 percent of the vote on the first ballot — the largest margin and the largest absolute vote total in NDP leadership history, including Jack Layton's original victory in 2003.13
Lewis comes from the family that built the party. His grandfather David Lewis helped found the NDP and led it federally. His father Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP in the 1970s. Avi Lewis himself has never held elected office. He is a documentary filmmaker — best known for The Take and This Changes Everything, made with his wife Naomi Klein — and a broadcaster who worked for the CBC and Al Jazeera English.14 He arrives with no legislative record to defend and no parliamentary positioning to explain.
His platform is explicitly democratic socialist: Public ownership of grocery distribution, a postal banking system, a public pharmaceutical manufacturer, a tax on ultra-high wealth, and a Green New Deal modeled as two percent of GDP investment in climate infrastructure — projected to create one million jobs. These are not moderate positions. They are a deliberate return to the ideological territory the party occupied under Tommy Douglas and David Lewis, updated for an economy shaped by monopoly power, climate crisis, and the collapse of affordable housing.
Whether Lewis can translate that platform into a parliamentary presence is the central question. The party enters this chapter without official status in the House of Commons. It has a new leader who has never been elected. It has a provincial infrastructure that, in Manitoba and Ontario at least, remains organizationally strong. And it has a set of problems — Québec, the labour movement's fractured relationship with the party, the structural tendency of progressive voters to park their votes with the Liberals when they feel threatened — that predate Singh and have not been solved.
What the NDP has going for it is the simplest argument available in Canadian politics right now: The housing crisis is real, affordability is collapsing, climate change is accelerating, and neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have a structural answer for any of it. The Liberals manage these problems. The Conservatives deny or defer them. The NDP, at its best, proposes to actually solve them — through public investment, public ownership, and the kind of large-scale economic intervention that built the post-war middle class.
That argument did not save Jagmeet Singh. It may be the argument that saves the party he led.
The Fair Accounting
Jagmeet Singh was not a perfect leader. No leader is. The decision to sustain the Trudeau government through the confidence agreement cost the party its independent identity at exactly the moment when that identity mattered most. The focus on social media engagement over organizational depth was a strategic error that experienced voices within the party warned about. These criticisms are fair.
But Singh also governed from a position that no previous NDP leader had occupied: He was visibly different from every leader in the House of Commons, in a country with an uneven and sometimes dishonest relationship with its own diversity. He extracted real policy from a majority government that had no obligation to give it. He built dental coverage that will outlast the criticism of his tenure. And he did this without the benefit of a party infrastructure that was ever truly rebuilt after 2015.
The NDP has never been particularly good at honouring the people who did the work without winning the prize. Jack Layton is remembered as the architect of the Orange Wave — the people who organized for twenty years in ridings that never flipped are not. Charlie Angus built one of the most substantive parliamentary records of any MP of his generation and retired without a portrait in the caucus room that captures what he actually did. Wab Kinew is governing one of the most complex provinces in the country with consistent approval and quiet competence, and his name appears in federal NDP conversations primarily when someone needs to remind the room that the party can win.
A party that cannot see its own talent clearly cannot ask voters to trust its judgment. The NDP's next chapter depends on whether it has learned that lesson; whether it can build an organization rooted in what it has always claimed to believe - led by people who mean it, and focused on the people who have always needed it most.
The talent is there. It always was.