(LifeSiteNews) — In the April 2025 federal election, the New Democratic Party was nearly wiped from the Canadian electoral map. The NDP was reduced to seven parliamentary seats, five short of the 12 needed to gain official party status. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, one of the worst politicians in recent memory, lost his own seat. The once-proud standard-bearer of Canadian Leftism was reduced to a mere 6 percent of the popular vote.
An autopsy of the NDP reveals any number of comorbidities. Justin Trudeau flanked them by pivoting hard to the Left under the Liberal banner. Singh desperately licked Trudeau’s boots and propped up his minority government for months, likely in a bid to pass the minimum threshold necessary to get his parliamentary pension. The Conservatives – to their own electoral detriment – relentlessly hammered Singh’s NDP, reducing vote-splitting on the Left.
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But even interim NDP leader Don Davies admitted recently that his party’s obsession with woke identity politics has been an electoral millstone around the party’s figurative neck. In a recent podcast interview with TVO host Steve Paikin, Davies mused that the party’s priorities have drifted in recent years.
“I think what the NDP has to do is a really good navel-gazing,” he told Paikin. “Are we talking about the right issues that are affecting kitchen tables in Oshawa or Trois-Rivières or Kamloops? Are we really understanding what working people are going through? I’m looking forward to the discussion in our party to see if we can reorient ourselves so we can tell workers, ‘We get you; we’ve got policies that will make your lives better.’”
Of course, this is precisely what the activists who run the NDP do not wish to do. As the National Post noted, Davies “said he also recognizes that, at the same time, issues facing white, straight male workers are ‘not the same’ as issues facing a worker who is a lesbian and a woman of colour and the party should find a balance between reflecting those different interests.” The NDP once claimed to be the party of the working man, but there aren’t a lot of construction workers or oil riggers flocking to the party’s banner.
As it turns out, the NDP has learned nothing. Just days after Davies’ navel-gazing conversation with Paikin, the party announced the requirements for the upcoming leadership race to select Jagmeet Singh’s replacement. Candidates must collect 500 signatures from party members, with at least 50 from each of the country’s five regions – the Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, the West, and the territories. But there’s more:
Rules indicate that at least 50 per cent of the total required signatures must be from NDP members who do not identify as a cisgender man – meaning a male whose reported gender corresponds to their reported sex at birth. The party also requires a minimum of 100 signatures be from “equity-seeking groups” such as racialized members, Indigenous members, members of the LGBTQ+ community and persons living with disabilities.
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As the Post noted with magnificent understatement: “The party did not immediately respond when asked how officials would reasonably verify if members identified as cisgender men or as being part of ‘equity-seeking groups.’”
Indeed, how could they? With LGBT groups recognizing a minimum of 72 genders, what is to stop some aspiring leftist from adopting any number of identities? In Latin America, male political candidates – with straight faces and internal chortles – have adopted LGBT identities in order to qualify for just such quotas. Very few of these identities are actually known to the average Canadian, and virtually none of them are independently verifiable. They are, after all, about internal feelings – and these feelings are both unquestionable and sacred.
Don Davies, in other words, recognizes that without the “straight white working man” that the NDP once relied on, the party is doomed. A few days later, his party released requirements for new aspiring leaders mandating that at least half of the signups cannot be straight white males. They didn’t quite word it like that, but their intentions could not be more clearly conveyed – or more clearly heard.
After a series of debates that I am very much looking forward to, the NDP will vote for the new leader in March 2026 via ranked ballot. Currently, Edmonton MP Heather McPherson and leftist activists Yves Engler and Avi Lewis are expected to run.
