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Introduction

As the post-Second World War liberal international order gives way to a right-wing reactionary internationalism, the task of reimagining social democratic foreign policy and a progressive internationalism is more urgent than ever.

Canadian socialists have certainly experienced a different foreign policy trajectory than contemporary left-wing and centre-left parties around the world. While today’s German SDP takes a zeitenwende towards increased militarism, reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, left-wing governments in Latin America, such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay look to a new multilateralism. Through this multilateralism, countries in the Global South have demanded respect for international law in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but Canada’s foreign policymakers have lagged as they scramble to figure out their continued dependency on a far-right US government.

The 2022 Parliamentary Supply-and-Confidence Agreement (SACA) between Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government and the New Democratic Party (NDP) under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh was a watershed moment for Canada’s social democratic party. The party entered the agreement with two strategic goals: (1) to implement legislation aligned with its ideological agenda, and (2) to present itself as a “legible alternative” (Massé & Beland 2024, 499) to the governing Liberals on the progressive side of Canadian politics. However, the political communications deployed by Singh during the SACA was marked by incoherence, undermining the NDP’s legibility as a viable left-wing governing option. The 2025 federal election results confirm the agreement’s electoral failure: the NDP won only 7 seats with 6.3 percent of the vote.

Introduction

Canada’s 2025 federal election delivered a painful result for the New Democratic Party. Entering the campaign with 24 seats, the NDP ultimately won just 7 and lost Official Party status in the House of Commons for the first time since 1993. What accounts for this outcome and could it have been avoided? How does it compare to other electoral ebbs throughout the party’s history? What are the NDP’s prospects, and to what extent does the 2025 result risk consolidating a US-style duopoly between Conservative and Liberal parties for Canadian federal politics in the longer term? With these and other related questions in mind, this essay will offer a broad assessment of the 2025 federal election and its aftermath, and several more general observations about the NDP. As the party conducts its leadership race and debates the path forward, my modest aim for this assessment is to engage some of the key issues and questions raised by the 2025 NDP campaign, beginning with a broad survey of the election itself.

Today, the concept of “national security” is a staple of our political vocabulary, common in everyday language and entrenched in official institutions such as the National Security Council. But it was not always thus. Total Defense by Andrew Preston, a Canadian who is now a history professor at the University of Virginia after nearly 20 years on the faculty of Cambridge University, traces the rise of this concept and how it displaced earlier notions of national defense during the course of the 20th century. It is an important history, and one with underappreciated implications. 

The book’s subtitle—The New Deal and the Invention of National Security—distills its thesis: the concept of national security as we know it today (involving military and foreign policy matters not limited to territorial defense) coalesced during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Before the New Deal era, “national security” was used relatively rarely, and often to refer to something more like economic and political stability or, in the 19th century, national unity versus sectional interests. But in the 20th century, a new vocabulary was required to grapple with increasingly grave foreign threats that did not involve the imminent invasion of U.S. territory. Such a vocabulary was largely lacking in World War I, but the term “national security” emerged in the years leading up to World War II. 

We no longer live in a republican regime, properly speaking. We are instead governed by a class of administrators whose claim to rule is based on expertise rather than the consent of the governed. As Ronald J. Pestritto argues, President Trump’s administration has embarked “on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.” It’s hard to disagree with Pestritto’s observation that, in a more constitutionally sound world, we would not have to rely on the executive branch alone to do this heavy lifting. But as the saying goes, here we are. Whatever one might think of the current occupant of the White House, he is elected by the people—which is more than can be said of federal bureaucrats and judges. Ironically, those who complain most loudly about assaults on “our democracy” are least committed to restoring it.

Foreword: This is not a typical Stained Glass Woman article.

While it talks about a few identities that are much more common among trans people than they are in the general public, it is not, directly, about anything to do with being trans.

While the Federal New Democratic Party could never rely on a majority of union members’ votes, that support now appears as elusive as ever. Indeed, formal ties between the NDP and the labour movement are considerably weaker than they were at the time of the party’s birth in 1961. The crisis of social democratic electoralism, the impact of campaign finance reform, and ongoing concerns about the party’s electoral viability have all contributed to a weakening of the union-party link.

However, the loosening of ties between labour and the NDP has not shifted the landscape of labour politics in the direction of a more left-wing brand of working-class politics as some on the labour left had hoped. Rather, the opposite has occurred, as evidenced by the clear emergence of fair-weather and transactional alliances with Liberals and Conservatives as the main alternative to traditional partisan NDP links in the realm of electoral politics.

History and Institutional Links

When the NDP was founded in 1961, it was heralded as the political voice of Canada’s labour movement. Born from a partnership between the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the party’s architects envisioned the NDP would realign Canadian politics along a left-right axis and unite workers under a single political banner. Yet, despite the initial fanfare, the relationship between the NDP and unions was never as strong as many assumed—and in recent years, it has only grown weaker.

Introduction

The international conversation about social democracy is quite focused on electoral sociology: What blocks of voters support social democratic parties? Can parties craft new electoral coalitions between the working-class, public-sector workers and even professionals? Do these coalitions undermine the parties’ commitment to economic redistribution by favouring more middle-class issues?

The conversation about social democracy in Canada has had much less to say about which voting blocs or electoral coalitions the NDP is pursuing or ought to pursue. After the near complete desertion of its electorate in the 2025 election, it is crucial to ask what coalition of supporters the federal NDP has been able to attract over the past couple of decades, what challengers it faces in retaining those supporters, and what tensions exist within that coalition. We pay particular attention to working class voters. They have historically been an important voting bloc for the NDP. The supposed desertion of the working class from the NDP to the Conservatives has also been an effective trope for political opponents making the case for the NDP’s loss of relevance.

The discussion below draws on a number of recent analyses we have conducted on the relationship of socio-economic class to voting behaviour in Canada over the past half century, relying on the Canadian Election Study. We emphasize that the NDP has some cards to play to reconnect with working class voters, especially around redistribution and economic populism.

This special edition of Perspectives Journal poses the question: “Canadian social democracy at a crossroads?” This framing suggests only presently has Canadian social democracy arrived at such a fork in the road. Yet the history of other social democratic parties in the Global North, including that of the CCF-NDP, points to other periods where other forks in the road appeared, and consequential political choices made. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, socialist and labour parties were established around the world with the goal of the socialist transformation of society. Throughout the latter 20^th century, this transformative vision largely disappeared. Social democratic political parties that survived during this period no longer sought the whole transformation of society and instead pursued a pragmatic management of capitalism. The consequence for social democracy, in changing its pursuits, has become the contemporary decline in working-class support, declining leadership and representation of people from working-class backgrounds, and the weakening of once firm relationships with trade unions. (Rennwald 2020, 3). The CCF-NDP historical experience is not unique among these global historical trends for social democracy.