NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh announced on Sept. 4, 2024 that he is pulling his party out of its supply and confidence agreement with the minority Liberal government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh are pictured in Ottawa on June 1, 2022.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is pulling his party out of its supply and confidence agreement with the minority Liberal government and will decide on a case-by-case basis whether to support the government on confidence matters.
Some New Democrats have been openly speculating of late about ending the deal, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote a letter to Mr. Singh last week asking him to walk away from the pact with the Liberals.
Mr. Singh made the announcement via a video posted online Wednesday. He was not immediately available to answer questions from the media.
A senior official said the government was only notified by the NDP that they were ending the deal as the news broke. The official accused the New Democrats of showing weakness by walking away from a progressive agreement when items like the pharmacare policy are far from complete.
The Globe is not identifying the official because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
The announcement does not mean a federal election is imminent, but it does add uncertainty as to whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government will survive until the next scheduled election in the fall of 2025. The government could fall at any time in the event that it loses a vote on a confidence matter such as a budget or an opposition motion specifically expressing that the House of Commons has lost confidence in the government.
“Today I notified the Prime Minister that I have ripped up the supply and confidence agreement,” Mr. Singh said in the video.
He said Canadians are fighting a battle for the future of the middle class and the Liberals have let people down.
“There is another, even bigger battle ahead. The threat of Pierre Poilievre and Conservative cuts. From workers, from retirees, from young people, from patients, from families – he will cut in order to give more to big corporations and wealthy CEOs,” he said.
“The fact is, the Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people. They cannot be change, they cannot restore the hope, they cannot stop the Conservatives. But we can.”
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He pledged that, as prime minister, he would fix health care, build affordable homes and stop price gouging by large corporations.
In a news release, the NDP said the end of the deal does not automatically send voters to the polls. The party said “the NDP is ready for an election, and voting non-confidence will be on the table with each and every confidence measure.”
Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Singh announced the deal in March, 2022, after the Liberals won another minority mandate in September, 2021.
The parliamentary co-operation agreement did not create a formal coalition government, as it did not involve NDP MPs sitting in cabinet.
Instead, the deal involved NDP MPs pledging to keep the Liberals in power through support on confidence votes in exchange for policy action on various NDP priorities.
The policy elements of the deal included launching a new dental care program for low-income Canadians, various housing measures, legislation to ban the use of replacement workers during a lockout or strike and support for national pharmacare legislation.
That legislation, Bill C-64, which has been approved by the House of Commons and is currently before the Senate, would authorize the federal government to cover a limited pharmacare program focused on contraception and diabetes medications under certain conditions.
Until the spring, Mr. Singh and his senior team were publicly adamant that they would stay in the deal to secure the promised policy wins.
However, the legislative portion of those planks, such as pharmacare and the anti-scab legislation, have all passed the House, leaving little for the New Democrats to work on. In the meantime, the pressure to stop propping up the Liberals has increased.
A senior NDP official told The Globe and Mail that internal discussions had recently turned to a timeline for cancelling the deal rather than getting the most out of it.
The official cited the fact that the legislation has largely been completed as the main reason for the shift.
The Globe is not identifying the source because they were not permitted to disclose the internal deliberations.
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Over the summer, the Conservatives launched an ad campaign attacking Mr. Singh as a “sellout” and accused him of propping up the government solely to ensure he reaches his pension qualification next year. Mr. Poilievre held a news conference last week urging the NDP to cancel their deal with the Liberals and trigger a fall election campaign.
Beyond supporting the government on key legislation such as budgets, the NDP also played a critical role in helping end debate on items when the Conservatives filibustered in the House. They also helped the Liberals in committees by ensuring legislation wasn’t delayed there and sometimes backed the government in blocking contentious committee investigations or hearings.
Just last week, Liberal House Leader Karina Gould told reporters she believed the NDP would stay in the deal until its agreed-upon end date next June.
“I’m fairly confident that that agreement is a good agreement, it’s a strong agreement, and we’ll get to the end of June,” Ms. Gould said at the Liberal cabinet retreat in Halifax on Aug. 27.
There are currently 154 Liberal MPs, 119 Conservatives, 32 Bloc Québécois MPs, 24 NDP MPs, two Green Party MPs, three independents and four vacancies in the House of Commons.
Two by-elections will be held on Sept. 16 – one in the Montreal-area riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, the result of the departure of Liberal cabinet minister David Lametti, and another in the Manitoba riding of Elmwood-Transcona, previously held by the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie.
The NDP official characterized the Manitoba by-election as a must-win for the party and said the party is competitive in the Montreal race.
Two other ridings are now vacant, and by-elections will need to be scheduled. Liberal MP John Aldag announced this year that he is stepping down from his B.C. seat of Cloverdale-Langley City to run provincially for the NDP.
On Tuesday, Andy Fillmore announced he has resigned as the Liberal MP for Halifax in order to run for mayor.
While the deal with the Liberals has led to policy wins for the NDP, it hasn’t boosted the party’s fortunes among the electorate, leaving it with only a “moral victory,” said Nanos Research founder Nik Nanos.
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Since the deal was struck, NDP support has stayed in the high teens or low 20s. Comparatively, the Conservatives have dramatically increased their lead over the Liberals, and now sit around 40 per cent while Mr. Trudeau’s party is in the mid 20s.
The popularity of elements like the dental care program has led the Liberals to claim it as their own when they defend their record in government, but Mr. Nanos said such policies don’t rank high on the priority list when the top concerns are paying for rent and covering basic needs like groceries.
He said Mr. Singh had to end the deal with the Liberals to create distance with the government before a federal election. But he said the party should have also ensured that it add distance between Mr. Poilievre’s demand that the NDP pull the plug on the deal.
“This validates that Pierre Poilievre is in the political driver seat and that Singh needed to do something because there are probably a lot of members of the NDP caucus who are worried about how closely the NDP might be associated with the Liberal government,” Mr. Nanos said.
He said the end of the deal marks the unofficial start of the next election cycle and the focus of attention on Parliament Hill will shift to whether each confidence vote will trigger a national campaign.
“Every politician gets to choose whether they want to play politics or whether they want to serve Canadians,” he told reporters in Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland, where he was making a funding announcement related to a national school food program. “And I certainly hope that the NDP will stay true to its fundamental values, which is making sure that Canadians get the support they need, and keeping away the austerity, the cuts and the damage that will be done by Conservatives if they get the chance.”
Mr. Trudeau said he has had “many, many” conversations with Mr. Singh in recent years about working together on policy issues such as child care and dental care.
“I look forward to conversations with Mr. Singh about how we’re going to continue to demonstrate that confident countries invest in their citizens, invest in their future, because that’s what we’re doing,” he said.
Mr. Poilievre dismissed Mr. Singh’s announcement as a “media stunt” and noted in a statement that the NDP is not saying whether it will vote non-confidence in the Liberal government and trigger an election.
“Two years ago, Sellout Singh sold out workers and signed on to a costly coalition with Justin Trudeau that hiked taxes, ballooned food costs, doubled housing costs and unleashed crime and chaos in our once safe streets,” he said, adding that Canadians need “a carbon tax election now.”
Mr. Poilievre is scheduled to speak with reporters Wednesday afternoon in Nanaimo, B.C.
