- 2025 Federal Election Assessments and Observations – Luke Savage
- The Protean Politics of Social Democracy: New Democrats at a Crossroads? – Bryan Evans & Matt Fodor
- Narrativizing Confidence and Supply: NDP Political Communications during the Supply-and-Confidence Agreement – Dónal Gill & Ryan Mohtajolfazl
- The Changing Class Basis of Canadian and Social Democratic Futures – Matthew Polacko, Peter Graefe & Simon Kiss
- A Social Democratic Canadian Foreign Policy – Jennifer Pedersen & Simon Black
- Labour and the NDP: Revisiting the Past, Looking to the Future – Larry Savage
- OPINION: NDP Leadership Race Should Look to History on How to Change Canada – Clement Nocos & Dave McGrane
This special issue of Perspectives Journal comes in the wake of the New Democratic Party of Canada’s worst federal electoral performance in its history and amidst a leadership race to replace former party-leader Jagmeet Singh. It also follows the NDP’s release of its own 2025 election post-mortem, the Review and Renewal Process Final Report.
As difficult as it may be, any analysis of the recent electoral fortunes of the federal NDP must attempt to parse factors unique to a particular election from longer term dynamics—both internal and external—impacting the viability of the party, from those that characterize the impasse of social democratic politics globally. Is Canadian social democracy at such a crossroads, between global Third Way trends and a socialist revival demonstrated by electoral gains in Latin America and New York City? While not an easy task, collectively the contributions to this special issue attempt to do just this.
Kicking us off, Luke Savage diagnoses what went wrong in the 2025 election, one shaped by “extraordinary conditions and singular developments,” including the threat to Canadian sovereignty posed by Donald Trump, the replacement of the unpopular Justin Trudeau with Mark Carney as Prime Minister, and the cost-of-living crisis. Savage argues that New Democratic Party renewal cannot be reduced to a “rebranding exercise” and breaking the logjam of two-party politics requires a “creative populist strategy” rooted in both “the engaged participation of a mass membership and the kind of bold, left-wing program that is impossible for the Liberals to appropriate or co-opt.”
Bryan Evans and Matt Fodor situate the current state of the federal NDP within the long historical trajectory of social democracy in Canada and Western Europe, including its relative acceptance of many of the tenets of neoliberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent loosening of ties with working-classes and organized labour. As Evans and Foder write, “the 2008 Global Financial Crisis should have been an opportunity for social democracy to re-connect with its wavering working-class and trade union constituents.” Yet it is a populist, ultra-nationalist, and increasingly authoritarian right-wing politics that has been the main beneficiary of neoliberal capitalism’s legitimation crisis, as social democratic parties failed to respond to the 2008 crisis with transformative politics, and in many cases around the world, advanced brutal austerity. Evans and Foder call for a radical, explicitly anti-neoliberal refoundation of social democracy, but are sober about the challenges from capital to any such agenda, the type of political formation necessary to overcome them and the necessity of transforming and democratizing the state so that it has the capacity to implement radical social democratic policies.
Even still, in the NDP’s own communications strategy leading up to, and during, the 2025 federal campaign, Canadians could not be blamed for confusion of the party’s policy gains and goals, given attempts to provide clarity on the 2022 Parliamentary Supply-and-Confidence Agreement. Dónal Gill and Ryan Mohtajolfazl provide an empirical analysis of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s social media posts and the confoundingly negative tone towards the SACA that the party signed on to as a junior parliamentary partner. According to Gill and Mohtajolfazl, “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.”
As Thomas Piketty and his collaborators have demonstrated through empirical study, the traditional class-based alignment of politics in western democracies has broken down. In the mid-20th century, lower-income and less educated voters largely supported left-wing parties, while wealthier and more educated groups leaned right. This pattern has fractured. Matthew Polacko, Peter Graefe and Simon Kiss explore the working-class vote in Canada, observing that while the NDP has never won a plurality of working-class votes, it has historically done better with the working-class than with the wealthier, educated, professional classes. Yet, working-class support for the party has weakened in recent elections and collapsed in 2025. Polacko, Graefe and Kiss argue that to reverse this trend, the NDP should aim at combating alienation and disaffection among working class voters, “with stronger economic populist appeals and an economic strategy that promises direct material gains for workers.” But this approach is not without contradictions, as the authors identify “potential flashpoints” between these suggestions and the need to also rebuild support among routine non-manual workers and professionals who have moved to the Liberal Party.
As Goran Therborn wrote in Dissent at the turn of the century, “Social democracy has always been a national project, usually with a veneer of internationalist rhetoric and transnational sympathy, but never drifting far from the ‘national interest.’” Nevertheless, leaders of 20th century social democracy, such as Sweden’s Olaf Palme, Jamaica’s Michael Manley, or the NDP’s own Ed Broadbent, envisioned a democratic socialist internationalism that extended beyond mere rhetorical support for equality among the world’s peoples and nations, and for democratizing international institutions, such as the United Nations.
However, as some the largest social democratic parties in Western Europe today, including the UK’s Labour Party and Germany’s Social Democrats, stand complicit in Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, even rhetorical support for such an internationalism is no longer a guaranteed feature of contemporary social democratic politics. It is against this backdrop, that Jennifer Pedersen outlines the case for the revitalization of a pragmatic progressive internationalism. Unlike the UK Labour Party or German SDP, the federal NDP has been the “conscience of parliament” on questions of Palestine and international human rights more generally. As Pedersen makes clear, without official party status, the NDP will struggle to remain relevant on issues of foreign policy, but with the Carney Liberals attempts to appease the Trump administration by ramping up military spending, flirting with the idea of a Golden Dome, and otherwise bending a knee to the US in matters of global affairs, the NDP’s defence of peace, cooperation and international solidarity is needed now more than ever.
Brock University Labour Studies professor Larry Savage provides a sober assessment of the NDP’s relationship, both past and present, with organized labour. Savage argues that there never was a “golden age” of party-union relations, and despite the labour movement’s central role in the founding of the party, the NDP’s links to unions were never as organizationally strong as labour or social democratic parties in Western Europe. Still, unions have continually played an important role in the internal life of the party and in mobilizing resources in elections. For a variety of reasons, Savage argues, “the party can no longer credibly be described as the political arm of the labour movement,” but that does not mean he sees no future for organized labour in the NDP. For Savage, both the party and the labour movement must respond to right-wing populist appeals to working-class voters, unionized and non-union, “with alternative vision and understanding of the economy that directly addresses their material interests in ways that unite workers through shared class interests.”
Lastly, Perspectives Journal editor-in-chief Clement Nocos and editorial committee member David McGrane suggest to NDP leadership candidates to look to history on how to make future transformative change. Originally published online in October 2025, Nocos & McGrane point to the Broadbent Institute case study, One Hundred Years of Progressive Influence: Social Democracy in Canada, on how to use power and politics to continue social democracy’s imprint on Canadian society. They implore leadership candidates, “to demonstrate how they would counterbalance the Americanization of Canadian politics with the weight of the working-class behind them.”
The NDP will surely rebound from the disastrous results of the 2025 election. However, whether social democracy can once again become a transformative force in Canadian politics is an open question. Furthermore, one should not equate the fate of a social democratic party with the fate of social democratic ideas and the institutions that ground them. As poll after poll shows, despite the ups and downs of NDP fortunes, policy ideas such as wealth taxes and public programs such as Medicare maintain popular support among most Canadians.
We collectively face climate chaos, soaring wealth and income inequality, inter-imperial rivalries, and the emergence of a US imperialism—while no less bellicose and violent than in the past—that no longer clings to the fig leaf of liberal humanitarianism or seeks to uphold some imagined rules-based order. And capitalism, as ever, remains a crisis prone and fundamentally undemocratic way of organizing our economy. As socialists we know that the politics of the centre is no match for the challenges that face humanity. We do, it seems, face a choice between socialism or barbarism. And yet, experiments in rejuvenating left-wing social democracy in the Global North, which have taken the form of movements to reform and radicalize existing center-left parties or the creation of new political formations to the left of these parties, have a decidedly mixed track record. And from the varied experiences of Syriza in Greece, to Podemos in Spain, to Corbynism 1.0 in the Labour Party and 2.0 with Zarah Sultana in ‘Your Party,’ to the Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democrats in the United States, to La France Insoumise in France and Die Linke in Germany, it is difficult to draw any generalizations, never mind something as concrete as a political formula for the revitalization of the democratic left in Canada. While there is always room for mutual learning and knowledge sharing across borders, projects for such revitalization will necessarily be context-specific and must grapple with the particularities of national political cultures, party systems, social movement-party relations, histories of struggle, and so on.
But while we must acknowledge the limits and failures of the old working-class parties, the NDP has much to gain by looking backward while moving forward. The socialist strategists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries set out to build large-scale, class-based movements. They sought to build parties that were not simply class-focused, but class-rooted. As many of this issue’s contributors might agree, it is not enough to say the NDP must return to a focus on winning working-class votes; it must play a role in the making of a working-class, in all its diversity, with the capacity to organize across difference, defends its interests in the streets, in the workplace, and in parliament, and transform the state. In other words, as Evans and Fodor urge, the party must play a role in class formation.
As critics of the NDP’s “professionalization” have argued, a party of the left cannot simply be a party like the Liberals or Conservatives, but with a left-wing platform. Just as early social democratic parties did not seek to structure and organize themselves along the lines of existing liberal and conservative parties, the NDP must fundamentally be a different kind of party; one that is deeply engaged in a grassroots community organizing, political education and class formation; not leaving this vital work to organized labour and social movements alone. Yes, modern politics demands a modern party with the capacity to fundraise, communicate effectively, conduct research and polling, and build strong field organization come election time. But, if the party is to become a vehicle for radical social transformation, and not simply moderate reform, it must not just move closer to labour and social movements but become a movement itself. We hope this special issue makes a small contribution to rethinking and revitalizing the social democratic/democratic socialist project in Canada.
