The federal NDP’s disastrous election showing was the result of years of decline worsened by an obsession with identity politics and a fatal decision to keep Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in power, says new leader Don Davies.“We had the worst result in the history of our party going back to the CCF,” Davies said in an August 28 interview with Ontario broadcaster Steve Paikin. “One of the few advantages of being burnt to the ground is you get to recreate your foundation.”Blacklock's Reporter says the NDP was reduced to just seven seats in the April 28 election, stripped of party status in the Commons and shut out east of Manitoba. .Davies said the collapse was not just about one bad campaign but the culmination of a 14-year slide from 103 seats in 2011 to single digits this year.Davies acknowledged the party lost touch with working-class voters by focusing on symbolic debates rather than bread-and-butter issues. “When we’re talking about drag reading in libraries or trans-women in sports, I don’t think we’re talking about the real issues most working people are struggling with. Can they pay their rent? Can they buy a house? Can they buy groceries?”He admitted the NDP’s 2022 supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals was political poison. The party tore up the agreement in September 2023, only to continue voting confidence weeks later, a contradiction that Davies called “the beginning of the end” for former leader Jagmeet Singh. .“Your average Joe on the street can spot a contradiction like that a mile away,” he said.Davies, a former Teamsters lawyer, credited Conservatives with doing “a pretty good job” of appealing to blue-collar voters and said the NDP must return to its roots if it hopes to survive. “We have to ask ourselves, have we veered too much from our class-based analysis to identity politics? My own view is that we have,” he said.Singh, in his final press conference before resigning in April, said he refused to pull the plug on Trudeau’s minority government because he could not accept the idea of Pierre Poilievre forming a majority. But Davies said that decision sealed the NDP’s fate. “Because of the supply-and-confidence agreement we were tied to the Liberals in a way that did impact us,” he said. “It was the beginning of the end.”
