NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been on his usual summer tour, trying to show the flag, insist that he’s still relevant, and on this particular summer, hoping to raise awareness for his candidates in the two upcoming by-elections in Elmwood—Transcona in Manitoba, and LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in Quebec. The former is traditionally an NDP stronghold so there is less cause for concern there, but the NDP are running a known local city councillor in Verdun, which has been a traditionally strong Liberal riding, but after what happened with Toronto—St. Paul’s, the Liberals should not be taking anything for granted, which is possibly why they decided to appoint a hand-picked candidate for the riding rather than go through a nomination race, though that same calculation could bite them in the ass as they alienated some of the local Liberals who had been organizing for such a competition, and who wanted a say in who was going to be on the ballot. Regardless of the by-elections, Singh has a lot to prove this summer, but we’ll see how much of it is able to penetrate.
Part of the summer tour has been a process of making announcements of things that he is trying to push the government to do, but they have not exactly been very well thought-out or even feasible. For one, Singh is demanding price caps on certain grocery items while he rails about grocery CEOs, completely ignoring that the prices for groceries have been impacted largely by global factors—the largest has been climate changes, as droughts impact food-producing regions, in Canada and abroad, with a few floods or hurricanes thrown in for good measure, and the lasting impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that has hurt global wheat and cooking oil markets. The profit margins of grocery chains have remained stable throughout the recent bout in inflation, and while said grocery chains are not blameless for prices, they are not the cause. In addition, talking about price caps as inflation is back down to the control range is nonsense economics, not that wage and price controls ever really made sense, nor did they last work in the 1970s when they were introduced. But hey, I guess “Zap, you’re frozen!” was due to make a comeback at some point.
Singh is also trying to insert himself into the housing debate, fully ignoring that this is almost entirely provincial jurisdiction. This week he was talking about federal measures to curb “renovictions,” where landlords will evict long-term tenants under the rubric of needing to do renovations so that they can then increase rental prices. Singh put the blame for this entirely on “corporate landlords,” which is a reach, and then promised “federal incentives” to “force municipal legislation” to ban the practice, even though it’s actually the provincial governments who control landlord-tenant legislation. The very notion that federal “incentives” can force municipalities to do anything is pretty risible, considering that even the Housing Accelerator money the federal government is currently offering can’t even stop certain cities from hiking their development charges because they think they’ll bring in more money from them than they would get from the feds. The fact that Hamilton brought in renoviction measures locally is hardly indicative that this would or could even work in other cities, and this has a whiff of Singh trying to pump the tires of its mayor, Andrea Horwath, because she was his leader when he was an Ontario MPP, never mind that she was possibly the most useless party leader in recent memory. (I should mention that the Liberals also promised federal action to stop “renovictions” in their last platform, but never spelled out what those measures were, and they seem to have disappeared from their agenda).
Singh’s line that both the Liberals and Conservatives made housing unaffordable not only ignores the broader societal factors—that housing is treated as an investment vehicle for retirement, creating the incentives to constrain supply in order to drive up property values—but it also conveniently turns a blind eye to all of the provinces who had NDP governments that also did little to improve affordability, even at a time when it was not as outrageously bad as it is currently, particularly given that housing is largely a provincial responsibility. Oh, but that doesn’t fit his simplistic narratives, where everything is the fault of corporate villains, and the NDP’s class warriors will set everything right solely through the application of political willpower—just as soon as they get access to that Green Lantern Ring hidden in the PMO.
If anything, this looks a lot like desperate promises made by a floundering leader who is in trouble, not coincidentally because more than a quarter of his caucus has announced that they are either not running again in the next election, or have already left. His attempts to sound tough about the Liberals and their record fall flat because his party are in an agreement to prop them up until the next scheduled federal election, and while he is getting parts of his agenda accomplished as a result of said agreement, his attempts to take ownership of them are also falling flat because he and his caucus have done literally none of the work, and have largely been patting themselves on the back for pushing on an open door, and a lot of voters can see that.
The polling has also borne out an unusual phenomenon that the NDP vote hasn’t risen while the Liberals have taken a beating, and it’s hard not to put much of the blame for that on Singh, whether it has been his inability to connect with an audience, his alienation of the working-class voter that used to be competitive in a number of ridings, or his refusal to understand what his own job is. Most of the time, Singh appears to be gunning for Doug Ford’s job rather than Justin Trudeau’s, and perhaps it’s time that he just owns up to it and return to the arena of provincial politics where he started, lest he alienate even more of his own caucus, lose even more voters, and continue to take up space in federal politics, fighting on provincial issues.
