Narrativizing Confidence and Supply: NDP Political Communications during the Supply-and-Confidence Agreement

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.

Even before the election itself, the NDP remained stagnant in polling for the duration of the agreement, hovering consistently between 17 percent and 20 percent of intended voter support. The SACA never provided a boost in support for the party. Our analysis of the NDP’s political communications during the SACA suggests that its messaging was overly negative and confused, emphasizing conflict over co-operation with the Liberal government. While the agreement successfully achieved the passage of legislation broadly aligned with social democratic values, it also had the potential to reframe parliament—challenging “the Canadian obsession with single-party government” (Godbout & Cochrane 2022, 22). The SACA ultimately failed to achieve this broader goal and must assume some of the blame for the federal party’s worst ever performance during the 2025 election.

Singh’s communications were consistently critical of the very government the NDP was supporting, creating a contradiction: if the Liberals and Trudeau were as problematic as portrayed, why maintain the agreement? This tension undermined the NDP’s message coherence and strategic positioning. It is certainly true that a technocratic matter of parliamentary procedure like the SACA would inherently require nuanced messaging, because of the junior supply partner’s dual role in opposition and collaboration (Kluver & Spoon 2020). However, the NDP’s emphasis on conflict and negativity exacerbated the contradictions of its role, deepening the incoherence of its public narrative.

Research Agenda and Theoretical Framework

Political scientists have identified several key challenges faced by junior parties in parliamentary partnerships, both formal in the form of coalition governments, and informal like the Canadian parliamentary SACA, that cause penalties for the smaller party at the next election following participation in such an agreement (Thurk and Kluver 2024). These challenges primarily fall in the domain of communications. As such, we have analysed the social media posts of Singh from March 2022 to September 2024 to make sense of how the NDP navigated these challenges.

Research on “contract parliamentarianism” (the broader category of parliamentary agreement under which the SACA falls) has shown that the “supply” party in such an agreement faces unique communications challenges. These include successfully crafting messaging with regards to the relationship between the partners in the agreement, and landing the narrative that legislation connected to the agreement was passed only because of their input and insistence (IFG 2017).

The specific challenge for the NDP in this agreement was to accumulate credit-claiming capital to be used in the next electoral campaign (Massé and Beland 2024, 516), while maintaining differentiation from the governing Liberal minority government. These competing imperatives formed the nucleus of the strategic logic underpinning the communications deployed by the NDP between March 2022 and September 2024. 

This research is further framed by three contexts which have defined the recent history of the NDP:

• Following LaFrance and McKenna, we frame the NDP as existing in a general context of a crisis of social democracy, shaped by class dealignment, mixed legacies of leftist parties pursuing Third Way ideologies and, as the historical connection to activist, working class voters dissolves, parties increasingly adopt the “tools of other parties – political marketing, opinion polls, or focus groups” (Lafrance and McKenna 2024, 139).
• The NDP pursued a process of professionalization and modernization, beginning in the 1980s and fully implemented by the Jack Layton era of the 2000s, establishing the party’s political marketing machine deployed by a cohort of professional political practitioners, replacing its previous programmatic appeal to the material interests of the working-class (McGrane 2019); (Fodor 2022). This shift from doctrinaire ideological commitments toward a focus on technocratic and data-driven political marketing also occurred in ostensibly social democratic parties around the world over the same period (Mudge 2018); (Schenk 2024).
• Canadian politics has, since the latter 20^th century, settled into a condition of permanent campaigning. This means that electioneering continues between elections and the strategies and tactics of the campaign setting also reign over governing periods for both those in opposition and office (Marland, Giasson and Lennox Esselment 2017). Political parties reinforce and perpetuate this political communications environment both to further their ongoing agendas and, most importantly, to jockey for position in the public consciousness ahead of the next dropping of the writ. One major accelerant of this phenomenon is the frequency of minority governments in Canada, with only two out of the eight governments formed since 2004 being majorities. The inherent instability of minority governments, typically lasting on average between 18 and 24 months, incentivizes parties to maintain an election footing, especially in the realm of political communications.

The LPC-NDP Agreement: Delivering for Canadians Now

In January 2022, negotiations for a supply-and-confidence agreement between the Liberals and NDP took place in the fallout of the 2021 federal election stalemate, and amid the Convoy occupation of Ottawa that induced a leadership change among the Official Opposition Conservative Party. Strategically, the main Liberal objective in entertaining such an agreement was the stability it afforded the government. For the NDP, it sought to build a legislative record ahead of the next election in which the party would optimistically present itself as the main progressive option for government (Massé & Beland 2024, 499).

The SACA was formally announced by both parties and the PMO in a document entitled Delivering for Canadians Now on March 22^nd, 2022. The agreement contained 7 major commitments:

1. Building a better healthcare system
2. Making life more affordable for Canadians
3. Tackling the climate crisis and creating good paying jobs
4. Creating a better deal for workers
5. Continuing to move forward on truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples
6. Delivering a fairer tax system for the middle class
7. Strengthening our democracy

The Office of the Prime Minister’s announcement included language framing the agreement as a conscientious response to perceived excesses of partisanship in recent Parliaments (PMO 2022). It also, however, stressed the continued independence and separate identities of the two parties. The second paragraph of the announcement indicated the dilution of partisanship between the two parties that underlay the agreement: “Politics is supposed to be adversarial, but no one benefits when increasing polarization and parliamentary dysfunction stand in the way of delivering these results for Canadians” (PMO 2022) [emphasis added]. It goes on to say that “the Liberal Party of Canada and Canada’s New Democrats have agreed to improve the way we approach politics over the next three years for the benefit of Canadians. Both parties hope that by approaching this Parliament more collaboratively, we will be able to deliver on these shared policy objectives before the next general election” (PMO 2022) [emphasis added]. Here, we see the desire to eschew excessive partisanship and the discursive framing of the SACA, to move beyond the polarization and dysfunction that emerges in a Parliament directed by default adversarial attitudes.

Both parties were presented in the agreement as seeking to increase co-operation as the key to improving the function of federal politics until the next scheduled federal election, were the agreement to be maintained. These sections of the announcement clearly indicated positive sentiments, establishing collaboration as the solution to the recurring challenge of perceived parliamentary dysfunction that impedes legislative progress on policy priorities shared by the two parties.

There are also elements within the announcement that lay out the boundaries of the SACA, wherein the NDP remained formally outside of the executive and dismissed the formation of a coalition government with the Liberals. It was made clear that “the agreement is not about compromising either party’s core beliefs or denying their differences,” and that “the NDP may oppose” elements of the government’s agenda outside of legislation formally tethered to the agreement and matters of confidence.

Singh’s communications were consistently critical of the very government the NDP was supporting, creating a contradiction: if the Liberals and Trudeau were as problematic as portrayed, why maintain the agreement?

The communications strategy of the NDP during the SACA sought to strike a balance between these competing messages; “improving the way we approach politics” through behaving more “collaboratively,” while also maintaining the “adversarial” nature of politics (as it is “supposed” to be), never “compromising” the party’s “core beliefs” or hiding their policy and ideological differences with the Trudeau Liberals.

In analysing the NDP leader’s posts on social media related to the SACA, we argue that an appropriate balance between these two strategic communications imperatives, co-operation and conflict, was not found. Overall, the heavy emphasis on negative sentiment and conflict failed to present the SACA as a mechanism to undo polarization and parliamentary dysfunction. The frequent criticism of the governing Liberal Party–justified or otherwise–particularly in communications directly lauding legislation linked to the agreement, ultimately rendered incoherent the NDP’s decision to supply the necessary votes to maintain the confidence of the House.

Methodology

The work of Thurk & Kluver (2024) and Kluver & Spoon (2020) has highlighted the electoral risks for “junior” or “supply” partners entering contract parliamentary arrangements. Deft political communications are required to avoid these pitfalls.

As a junior partner, the NDP had to navigate a weaker communications delivery mechanism compared to the bully pulpit of government available to the Liberals (Thurk & Kluver 2024). It also had to maintain ideological and partisan differentiation with their senior partner in an era of permanent campaigning (Marland, Giasson and Lennox Esselment 2017), despite their entanglement in a formal parliamentary arrangement. Lastly it was imperative to “accumulate credit-claiming capital” (Massé and Beland 2024, 499) for legislation passed because of the agreement. Strategically, this generates two primary communication lanes for the junior partner in a supply-and-confidence-agreement, especially vis-à-vis their senior partner in government: (i) the party can frame their work in Parliament through the lens of co-operation and (ii) use a frame of conflict and obstruction.

The NDP leader’s social media posts reviewed have been categorized with a simple quantitative sentiment analysis. This is a process of determining the emotional tone of a text, categorizing it as positive, negative or neutral. The codebook below presents the indicators associated with a generally negative (conflict) or positive (co-operation) sentiment in communications relating to the SACA itself, or legislation related to the formal agreement. The sentiment analysis has been coded as such to map onto the macro-strategic communication available to the NDP during the period of the SACA. Positive posts align with a broad message of parliamentary co-operation and productivity, whereas posts coded as negative emphasise conflict, dysfunction, or obstruction.

We analysed selected social media output of NDP leader Singh for the duration of the agreement, from  March 22^nd, 2022 when the agreement was announced to September 4^th, 2024 when the NDP released a video signalling that Jagmeet Singh had “ripped up the Supply and Confidence Agreement.” 362 posts from Instagram and 454 from Twitter/X related to the 7 commitments outlined in Delivering for Canadians Now and the SACA itself more generally were analysed. Given the centrality of the leader to the NDP’s communications strategy, especially under Singh’s leadership, although the process had begun in the Layton era (Fodor 2022), we chose to quantitatively analyze the social media output of Singh alone. When reviewing political communications from the party’s social media channels, there was a very high level of direct duplication of materials from Singh’s account, rendering deeper analysis of the former largely redundant. TikTok posts were excluded from this analysis, despite Singh being the most influential leader on the platform with over 878,000 followers, because the account was deactivated part way through the SACA period in February 2023 in response to geopolitical security concerns raised by government officials.

Table 1 – Codebook

Analysis

Singh’s Instagram posts between March 2022 and September 2024 display a strong majority of negative sentiment when communicating around the SACA and legislation attached to it. Only 28 percent of posts maintain positive sentiments, highlighting co-operation through the lens of wins regarding passing laws, constructive policies, or giving people hope. 72 percent of posts contained a broadly negative sentiment that emphasized conflict, deploying rhetoric that blames or vilifies other parties, or stresses intractable problems like high rent and rich companies making big profits. This indicates that Singh’s Instagram posts during the SACA, assessed through simple sentiment analysis, overwhelmingly framed the parliamentary agreement though a lens of negative discourse that stressed conflict and persistent challenges, rather than a co-operative discourse characterised by positive sentiments of achievement, hope, and empowerment.

Chart 1 – @jagmeetsingh Instagram post sentiments, March 2022 to September 2024

Chart 2 – @theJagmeetSingh Twitter/X post sentiments, March 2022 to September 2024

On Twitter/X, the sentiment analysis of Singh’s posts indicates an even higher level of posts coded as negative. 83 percent of the tweets are negative, with many focused on parliamentary and policy conflict with the Liberal and Conservative parties. Only 15 percent of the posts contain a generally positive sentiment, while 2 percent of posts are neutral in the sentiment conveyed. Twitter/X is thus the platform where Singh pushed a more negative strain of messaging, focused on differentiating the NDP from its counterparts in Parliament. This difference in content sentiment between Instagram and Twitter/X demonstrates, to some extent, the medium determining aspects of the message. Singh’s content on Instagram featured a mix of negative sentiment highlighting conflict with messages that contained positive sentiments of hope, solidarity, and empowerment. Twitter/X, on the other hand, was mostly used to hammer home a generally negative sentiment discourse of parliamentary conflict shaped by intractable ideological and policy differences between the NDP, the Liberals, the Conservatives, presented as obstacles to the NDP’s progressive vision.

This strong discursive emphasis on conflict rather than co-operation could therefore be considered a strategic miscalculation that confused and, ultimately, undermined the party’s ability to capitalize on the gains won by the agreement. Rather than leveraging the SACA to frame the NDP as an effective collaborator in Parliament responsible for tangible progressive legislative wins, Singh’s messaging confused by routinely positioning the party in direct opposition to the Liberal government.

This strategy, while arguably necessary to maintain ideological differentiation and protect the NDP’s social democratic base, failed to address the broader communication challenges faced by junior partners in contract parliamentary agreements as discussed above. Consequently, the opportunity to reframe Parliament as a constructive and co-operative institution was lost, potentially casting voters toward the anti-system politics of the right-wing populist message being delivered with consistency and vigour by the Conservative Party’s leader, Pierre Poilievre.

It is notable that this discourse of conflict is conveyed in a sampling of 208 Twitter and 187 Instagram posts that emphasize conflict rather than co-operation specifically with the Liberal Party and/or Justin Trudeau, despite Singh and the NDP supporting the minority government. Again, it was a somewhat reasonable approach for some communications to appear oppositional given the NDP’s need for credit-taking of legislation achieved under the SACA, but negative sentiments made up the overwhelming majority of posts on all analyzed platforms. This can be considered far too excessive for the purposes of credit-taking, and has evidently led to incoherence in the public perception of the NDP’s involvement in the SACA.

For example, on nine occasions during the mid-way point of the SACA in Fall 2023, Singh tweeted some version of the message: “We can’t trust those who caused the problem to fix it.” Many of these messages explicitly and deliberately cast the Liberal Party with the Conservative Party as those who “caused the problem” and therefore “can’t be trusted to fix it.” Examples of constructive discourse that highlight co-operation over conflict include Singh’s posts on April 9^th, 2022, in which he framed legislative progress on dentalcare and pharmacare by “using our power to hold the Liberals accountable.” Messaging more in line with this kind of tough-but-collaborative relationship between the parties d better communicate the value of the political decision to enter the SACA than the unilateral criticism of its parliamentary partner.

This contrasts with consistent messaging from the Summer and Fall of 2023, which saw frequently negative posts, accusing Trudeau and the Liberals of lying, teaming up with the Conservatives, and a heavy emphasis on “force” or “forcing” the Liberals toward any legislation connected to the SACA. An alternative form of this latter message, which is almost certainly unavoidable given the still partisan dynamic between the two parties, was used on June 13^th, 2023, when Singh tweeted that the NDP were “pushing (emphasis added) the Liberals to act immediately and deliver pharmacare.” 

By continuously framing legislation secured through the SACA within a narrative of dysfunction, opposition, and obstruction, the NDP struggled to present itself as a constructive force in Parliament. Despite having played a direct role in key policy achievements, such as dental care and pharmacare legislation, its messaging appears to have undercut its ability to claim credit effectively. This discordant approach meant that the benefits of the agreement were overshadowed by persistent criticisms of the Trudeau government, making the NDP’s participation seem contradictory to its own rhetoric.

The results of the 45th federal election demonstrated the consequences of this misstep. The NDP’s significant electoral losses reflect the failure to translate legislative collaboration into a positive and electorally advantageous narrative. In emphasizing conflict and embedding a narrative in which parliamentary co-operation is pursued with reluctance and difficulty, the party lost credibility as a legible alternative.

References

Click here for a full list of references.

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