“It’s really quite a huge, precipitous fall from grace,” says Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research. “They came very close to forming government in 2015. That wasn’t that long ago.”

Graves is talking about Canada’s New Democratic Party, which, he points out, was even in polling with the Liberal party at the beginning of this year. Now, just four months later, Ekos’s final poll of the campaign has the party in single digits, hovering around nine per cent support nationally, and predicts that it will win just six seats — down from the 24 the party held at dissolution. 

As David Moscrop writes today for the New Statesman, that would be disastrous not only for the left in this country, but for Canada — which he argues needs a left opposition in parliament. 

“I don’t think this was the intent of the voters that switched (to the Liberals), and I don’t think overall Canadians would say we’re better served by having something tantamount to the American two-party state,” Graves says. 

But, Graves warns, the unintended consequence of New Democrats and Greens switching to the Liberals may be to hobble the parties for years to come, and drive Canada toward a two-party system. 

“There’s another irony, a bitter irony, in all this. The platform that the NDP was putting forward, those proposals probably have broader public support in Canada than either what the Liberals or the Conservatives are talking about. For example, about close to 80 per cent of Canadians, a huge super majority, like the idea of a wealth tax.”

There are bright spots for the NDP in other parts of the country, but really the party’s fortunes will be won or lost in the trenches of British Columbia today. While the party is in the single digits in Ontario and points east, it’s polling at a healthier 17 per cent in B.C. — where the party has a number of well-established incumbent MPs fighting to hold on to their seats. Not least of whom is party leader Jagmeet Singh, whose own Burnaby Central seat could be at risk. 

“This new polarized contest for the future, which became dramatically different after Trump started announcing all the shock and awe stuff,” adds Graves, “is going to, at least in the short term, have extremely negative effects for parties like the Green Party and the NDP.”

While the Green Party holds a single seat in Ontario, Mike Morrice in Kitchener Centre, the party’s eager eyes will be focused on a couple of ridings out west tonight. In Saanich-Gulf Islands, party leader Elizabeth May is fighting to hang onto her seat, while up the coast former Green MP Paul Manly is in a dogfight to take back the most interesting riding in Canada, aka Nanaimo-Ladysmith. The Greens are polling at a steady 2 per cent across Canada, except for B.C., where they’re at 5 per cent in Ekos’s final snapshot. 

There’s a lot to be won — and lost — for both parties as results trickle in from the West Coast tonight. Perhaps long after the shape of our next government has become clear. 

Battleground West Coast

A little over a week ago I set out on a tour of some of the battleground ridings on the West Coast. These ridings aren’t likely to play much of a role in determining who forms government, but they could be decisive in charting the future of Canada’s electoral left. 

After all, there’s a scenario in play today in which the NDP and Greens could both be nearly wiped out, leaving Mark Carney as the leftmost pole on Canada’s political spectrum. Coupled with the Conservative party’s drift toward American-style politics, such a scenario, if it were to come to pass, might represent the single largest shift in Canada’s Overton window in decades. 

But the NDP (and Greens) aren’t giving an inch to the Liberals. They may share a voter universe that Graves describes as “promiscuous progressives,” whose votes are cast more against the Conservatives than for any other party, but in many of these ridings they say it’s them or the Conservatives, and Liberal bandwagon voters are likely to just split the anti-Conservative vote. 

From Victoria to Saanich-Gulf Islands, and from Nanaimo-Ladysmith to Burnaby Central, here’s what I found in a week on the ground in the ridings that may determine the future of the electoral left in Canada. 

Strategic voting

It’s a balmy, warm spring evening in Victoria, and I’m starting to wonder if the rumours of the NDP’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated. 

The campaign bus is late, because the campaign bus is always late. Suspense builds. The crowd milling around outside the drive-thru ice cream shop is impressive. All the more so in a city with an urban population of under 100,000 people. 

I’m standing around with a couple local journalists I know. ‘What do you think, 100?’ I ask. “No,” Michael John Lo, a reporter with the Times Colonist snaps back. “You’re too low. At least 150.” 

The advance team has speakers set up, playing music, and as soon as the bus rolls up the crowd starts chanting. They’re hyped. At this point there might be 200 people there. 

When Singh does get off the bus, the energy goes up a notch. He’s dancing, the crowd is dancing, it’s a mood. After some short speeches, Singh joins Victoria incumbent NDP MP Laurel Collins behind the counter, where they serve ice cream cones and selfies to delighted supporters. 

As I leave I text a friend in Victoria to ask what he thinks. He throws cold water on my impressed face, noting that Victoria is a big university and government crowd, people who, he says, are big strategic voters. He thinks the Liberals will take the riding. 

I gave University of Victoria journalism professor Sean Holman a call. “What we’re seeing in the polls,” he says, “is that a lot of the Liberal strength is based on the consolidation of votes in the center and on the left in the hands of the Liberal Party.” He believes the election will hinge on perceptions within that voting block. If there is a sense of certainty that the Liberals will win, that voting block may fragment as people pursue moral, as opposed to political, choices.

“Among the people that I talk with there is a real anguish right now over who to vote for. To vote for the NDP, or to vote for the Liberals, and will that vote count? Will that vote matter nationally? That is, I think, the question that a lot of people are grappling with, and I don’t know the answer exactly.” 

The most interesting riding in Canada

It’s a Tuesday evening in Nanaimo, in what I’m calling the most interesting riding in Canada, and I’m in the second row at an all-candidates meeting in a cozy theatre at Vancouver Island University. Stephen Welton, the local candidate for the People’s Party, is not receiving a friendly reception, but that hasn’t stopped him from calmly and carefully explaining why he thinks climate change is merely an unproven theory. 

The crowd’s reception teeters on the edge of productive at times — in one case when a supporter of Welton’s in the audience follows up a question seeking evidence for climate change by shouting about chemtrails — but despite clear disagreements, the event has brought members of this community together, and got them talking to each other. 

“Most people in the crowd didn’t agree with [Welton],” explains Michael MacKenzie, the debate’s moderator, on a call later that week, “But that’s what we want. We want people to show up and say things that other people don’t agree with, and we want it to be a productive exchange.” 

But one important person was missing, among the demographically varied crowd of roughly 150 who showed up to hear from their candidates. Conservative candidate Tamara Kronis, like Conservative candidates across Canada, isn’t participating in unscripted public events. She also isn’t talking to the press, or at least, not to me. Email and phone messages left with her campaign were not returned. According to some polls, she’s the frontrunner, but she’s more like a ghost to many of the people I spoke to in Nanaimo. 

“I understand strategy,” says MacKenzie, a professor of political studies at VIU and the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership. “We have to engage in all kinds of strategy, no matter what game or sport we’re playing, but you have to also uphold the spirit of the game.

“Not showing up to public events where you’re supposed to engage with the people who are voting for you, or you might represent, is not upholding the spirit of democracy in any way, right? Yes, we should expect people to act strategically and do what they need to, or what they think they need to do to win. But you have to play with the right spirit as well, and that’s not what they’re doing, in my view.”

I’m impressed. With the event, with its organizers, and with the community. This feels like an example of democratic engagement done right. And I can’t help but think that there were votes to be had in that room, if only Kronis hadn’t been too afraid to show up. 

A tale of two incumbents

“I haven’t found any riding that’s as much of a four way race as this one,” MacKenzie tells me. “Last time in 2021 we had all of the same five candidates. So it’s really very much a rematch. In 2021, the Liberal party didn’t get that many votes, they were around 13 per cent, but because of the rise in the Liberal fortunes nationally, the liberal candidate is now competitive. 

“So what we have are really two incumbents. Lisa Marie Barron is our current representative, or she was before the dissolution of parliament, so she’s the NDP representative. But before her, Paul Manly, for the Green Party, was the representative in this area. So we have two former representatives with good name recognition in the community running against each other, a rising Liberal Party and a Conservative candidate who, by current projections, is in first place. So it’s a very interesting race!” 

The quick roundup of what I saw was that incumbent NDP MP Lisa Marie Barron was the best prepared. She spoke fluidly, with a practiced warmth. In this room she and Manly drew the loudest applause. And for his part, Manly was the most impassioned speaker. When he got going on an issue he cared about, as he did in a fiery response to Welton’s challenging of climate science, you could see a passion shine through that’s not always at the heart of our politics — but should be. 

“The NDP have core support and deep roots here,” Barron tells me in an interview after the candidates forum. “The Liberals have not been in power here since 1940, and the same representative has run for the fourth time and come in fourth. So I think people are looking at what’s happening locally and realizing here in this riding a vote for the Liberals is a vote for the Conservatives.”

Barron and Manly both had strong performances, and there was certainly no love lost between the two. They sparred back and forth over the authorship of a proportional representation bill presented by Barron in the last parliament, but based in some part on work advanced by the Greens. Manly argued that he had written the bill she introduced, which Barron vehemently disputed. Manly would apologize later that week for overstating his case. 

Manly is well known nationally as thea former NDP candidate, who was blocked from running due to his father’s pro-Palestinian activism under former leader Tom Mulcair. That led him to the Greens, and he was elected first in a by-election and then in a general election before losing the seat to Barron in 2021. That makes him the second Green MP ever elected in a general election. He tells me the NDP left him back then, and he remains steadfast in his support of Palestinian human rights. 

Like Elizabeth May, he’s got in-house polling that shows he’s second in the riding to the Conservative candidate, and he’s leaning hard on the strategic argument. In an interview in his converted storefront on an industrial strip earlier that day, he tells me he’s the only candidate who can beat the Conservatives in Nanaimo. 

“All the polling shows me in second place. Whether it’s 338 or our own polling, and we’ve done a series of polls with Oracle Research, large sample sizes, over 600 people, and every time I’m right on the heels of the Conservative candidate.” 

The Liberal candidate, Michelle Corfield, is a First Nations woman and business owner. When she got going off script, as in an impassioned defence of the CBC, she was a powerful speaker and was able to whip up the crowd. But she made a rookie mistake, which is hard to understand considering she’s now a four-time candidate, and spent the bulk of her time reading from the Liberal platform and/or prepared notes. To make matters worse, she was not a fluid reader. 

She should ditch the notes and speak from the heart. 

She might just win this election. After all, I do believe this is a four way race, and Liberal momentum can pave over a lot of deficits. But I don’t think too many in this room were won over by her uneven performance. 

Welton was a calm and effective advocate for his ideas. Good on him for that. But those ideas, like rejecting climate science and shutting down immigration, were never going to be well received by this audience. 

I catch a ride home from an older woman who has a Manly sign on her car window. She tells me she expects him to win. I will say, there are an awful lot of Manly sings on lawns in Nanaimo. 

All eyes on Nanaimo

Earlier that week I’d gone for a walk on Nanaimo’s picture perfect waterfront with a group that included a union local president with a major public sector employer in the area. (And yes, I did get the Nanaimo bar ice cream cone with a Nanaimo bar on top, and it was great.)

She tells me she’s always been an NDP voter, but she’s voting Liberal this time out of fear of Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. She also tells me that she’s received no communication from her union about who to vote for, in stark contrast to the last provincial election when the union pushed hard for their members to support the NDP. 

Later that evening I’m eating alone in a hotel restaurant when I overhear a conversation between a younger and older man at a nearby table. They are clearly employed in some maritime industry. 

“You can’t trust the Liberal media,” says the older man. “They keep pushing these fake polls. If the Conservatives don’t win, you’ll know it was rigged.” 

His companion nods sagely as I resist the temptation to identify myself as a member of the benighted media, and defend the honour of public opinion polling. 

Spending Earth Day with Elizabeth May

I spent a beautiful Saturday tagging along with Elizabeth May as she attended an Earth Day fair in Saanich and an all candidates forum in Saanichton. I wrote about this in my campaign notebook, and I don’t want to repeat myself, so you can read more about that day here. 

My takeaways were that May has indefatigable energy reserves, and you don’t want to tell her something she disagrees with, because she’ll explain exactly why you’re wrong. She also likes to put potato chips in her tuna sandwich, has worn her sneakers down from an uneven gait, making her relentless energy even more impressive, and is surrounded by a team that believes deeply in her political project. 

Unlike this candidates forum, the one in Saanich-Gulf Islands was not demographically diverse, with all but a handful of attendees sporting grey or white hair. As is tradition, the Conservative candidate was absent. The Liberal candidate, a man by the name of David Beckham (really), is argued to have some momentum. But I wasn’t overly impressed by him. The NDP candidate, Colin Plant, has some lovely handmade signs, but at the Victoria event he sidled up to me to ask if I was coming back to his riding and if I had time to interview him. 

“Never a great sign for a campaign when they’re asking us to cover it,” mused a fellow journalist. 

For what it’s worth, I attended the Saanichton all-candidates forum with a local friend who was kind enough to drive me around. He sat in the hallway outside the room, working on his laptop during the meeting. 

The night before, he had told me he was so annoyed by May that he was considering voting Conservative just to get rid of her. He thought the Green Party would be better off if she lost. But, after absently listening to the candidates speak for several hours, he ended up casting his vote for May. 

She has a certain undeniable appeal in person. An energy that sneaks up on you. 

Lost in Burnaby

It’s the hottest day of the year so far in Vancouver, and I’m walking through a garage-heavy section of Burnaby, in the shadow of the skytrain tracks. To be honest, I think I might be lost, and check the map several times. 

It hasn’t been particularly easy to reach the NDP this campaign. Which doesn’t shock me. I worked out of Quebec HQ in the 2011 ‘Orange Wave’ campaign, in a past life where I was a union organizer and partisan operative, and the party’s press strategy wasn’t great back then. It doesn’t seem to have changed much. 

But my time is limited, so I did some digging online to find the address of Jagmeet Singh’s campaign office. I’m mostly here in Burnaby to talk to voters, but I might as well pass by and see what I can find out from the staff team holding down the fort. 

I walk in and am greeted by a cavernous office space, filled with at least a dozen people on this weekday afternoon four days before e-day. I’m greeted with a wide smile by a woman standing near the door, and I can see the volunteer intake spiel spooling up in her eyes. 

I introduce myself as a journalist, and that smile turns to a look of dark concern. I’m spun around and swiftly escorted out of the office to see two media staffers set up on card tables in the sunny parking area outside. They want me to talk to Glen Sanford, the party’s B.C. director, and one of them goes to check in with him. I’m invited to remain outside. 

I guess I can’t blame them. In these days of Rebel Media and other provocateurs identifying themselves as journalists, it’s fair to worry when someone identifies themselves as a journalist. 

But it’s also hard not to wonder what they don’t want me to see. Maybe nothing, but when you usher a journalist out of a room, they start to wonder why. An occupational hazard. 

Glen and I have met before, over a decade ago, and he’s as gregarious and charming as I remember him. 

We have a brief chat in front of some Jagmeet signs out front. He tells me their internal metrics are as positive as they’ve ever been, and they’re confident they’ll win on election day. 

He points to a sign reading “BC votes NDP to stop Conservatives,” and tells me they’re going up across the province in a final week attempt to work strategic voting in their favour. 

From there, I head further into the riding of Burnaby Central, and post up on a bench in front of a Dollarama. It’s hot as hell in the sun, but it’s easy to ask people if they have a minute to talk about the election as they come out. Most decline, all politely, but after a couple hours between the Dollarama, a 7-11 and the Metrotown mall I’ve gotten around two dozen folks to speak to me. 

And I have nothing of great value to report. A lot of frustration with the system and parties generally, some supporters of Singh, some supporters of his Liberal opponent and one or two Conservatives. 

The most interesting conversation I had was with a young man wearing oversized sweat pants and an undershirt, who sat down on the bench next to me not knowing he’d just consigned himself to getting quizzed on politics. 

He told me it was his first election, and he was unsure of who to vote for. He said his parents were big Singh supporters, that they loved the NDP, but that his friends were mainly Poilievre fans. It’s an interesting data point, in light of recent polling showing strong Conservative support among young men. 

NDP and Green parties facing collapse

“It’s also linked to a very high rise in attachment to country,” Graves, the pollster, tells me, “which had been at a 35 year low, and all of a sudden the threat that the country could be annexed, and I think many Canadians were looking at that and saying ‘Oh, I don’t really want to follow that path the Americans are on.’ 

“I think that’s what caused a large number of NDP voters and Green Party voters and even some traditional Progressive Conservatives and Bloc voters in Quebec as well to move. They went to the Liberals. I don’t think under normal circumstances it would be a permanent transition at all, but I wonder, under these circumstances, whether those parties will be in a position to recover, particularly if it looks like the Liberals are going to get a majority.”

Ricochet’s coverage of the 2025 federal election is supported in part by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund, an initiative of the Michener Awards Foundation, the Rideau Hall Foundation and the Public Policy Forum. You can help us do more award-winning journalism by signing up for our free newsletter, and becoming a monthly donor. You can also watch our election night livestream, featuring an expert panel of all-star journalists, real-time results and correspondents across the country — presented in partnership with Canada’s National Observer.