NELSON: It's the West that will pay the price of Jagmeet Singh's disaster

Chris Nelson is a Calgary-based journalist who writes on the political scene

Appropriately in future years Canadians might only recall Jagmeet Singh’s tenure as NDP head honcho, while waiting with nervous trepidation for a root canal.

Yes, getting the Liberals to throw Singh that small bone of agreeing to provide almost free dental care for a narrow subset of Canucks — something we couldn’t afford as a nation, of course — was the sum total of his pay-off for keeping the Justin Trudeau regime in power, way past its best-before date.

Had he done what the majority of Canadians wanted a year or so ago and refused to continually back the Grits’ seemingly endless minority rule, then today our country wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of another Liberal government. (That Donald Trump-inspired craziness wasn’t in play back then, only the Trudeau record.)

But as they say, payback’s a bitch. And it looks as though Singh’s going to experience his, courtesy of the looming general election vote.

OK, that might be small consolation for Albertans if indeed unelected Prime Minister Mark Carney manages to fool enough folk to continue in the role with an actual mandate. But these days there’s not a great deal of justice rolling our way, so watching the NDP and Singh obliterated at the ballot box might provide at least some cold comfort.

And yes, such a result looks ever more likely.

Come on, did Singh lack the mental wherewithal to figure out his party only does well nationally when the Liberals falter? That there’s a swath of swing voters that move between the Grits and Dippers? That the two are competitors, not allies?

Apparently not, because he spent much of his time during the leaders’ debate last Thursday attacking the Conservatives. Hello? Tory boss Pierre Poilievre isn’t prime minister. Yes, he’d like to be, but hope doesn’t count for much in politics.

OK, trying to irritate Poilievre with constant interruptions as he was trying to make a point probably gave Singh a warm and fuzzy feeling. But to many of us it just made him look rude; while any points scored with such a wild, scattershot approach stacked up in the Carney win column, not the NDP’s.

It was like watching a desperate drowning man grab ahold of a concrete block hoping it would help his already negligible survival chances.

Why employ such tactics? Maybe because the Dipper boss was the Liberals’ tame poodle for so long he simply couldn’t bring himself to finally bite the hand that relentlessly fed him those endless platitudes and accumulated nonsense: only so they could remain in power, while NDP support drip, drip, dripped away.

So, how bad could it get for the NDP come election night? Oh, very bad indeed. If sitting in that dentist chair they’d hear those dreaded words: ‘sorry, but it’s too late: they all must come out.’

Polls are a tad dodgy these days but with just over a week to go, a cross section of the major, unaligned outfits paints a fairly consistent picture.

Averaging the numbers: Liberals lead with 43 percent, Tories at 39, the NDP at eight.

As a reminder: in the last 2021 federal election the Dippers got close to 18 per cent of the vote. That gave them 25 seats. At their current polling they’d end up with about seven. The rest would go to the Liberals. Singh himself could lose his Burnaby Central seat in BC to Grit candidate Wade Chang.

Oh, remember those Dipper glory days? Back under Jack Layton in 2011 they scooped almost 31 per cent of the vote and sent 103 MPs to Ottawa, becoming the official opposition to Stephen Harper’s government.

Why did that happen? Because the Liberals, under Michael Ignatieff, imploded as those usual Grit votes transferred to Layton.

How daft or arrogant do you have to be not to see that correlation? Liberals up, NDP down and vice versa.

With a week to go the Tories poll better than in the last election, yet still trail the Liberals, who are merrily gorging themselves on former NDP voters.

The poodle’s done his job. He’ll take that fat, federal pension: his party will get the root canal. Sadly, thanks to his lack of backbone, Alberta could find itself sitting in the adjoining dentist chair.

Chris Nelson is a Calgary-based journalist who writes on the political scene.