The New Democrats and the Working-Class Vote

On election night, in Burnaby, an emotional Jagmeet Singh stepped down as NDP leader having lost his own seat while the party went from 24 to seven MPs.

Before Singh spoke, Sussanne Skidmore, president of the BC Federation of Labour, highlighted his accomplishments in fighting for dental care and pharmacare.

“I'm proud to be a New Democrat because we're the party of working-class and everyday people,” she said to cheers and applause. “Unions and workers founded this party. It is our home, and it is our movement.”

As a Vancouverite who grew up in the Cariboo, I was surprised to hear Skidmore say this. I grew up among the working class — ranchers, mill workers and mine workers. Even though they benefit from some of the things the NDP has advocated for, like dental care, I don’t see many of them voting orange or feeling represented by the party.

In B.C., 10 NDP MPs lost their seats. While half of them went to Liberals — like Port Moody-Coquitlam and Victoria — half went to Conservatives. Across the country, the NDP lost more of its seats to Conservatives than to Liberals.

Of those who voted NDP in the 2021 election, 55 per cent voted Liberal, 27 per cent NDP again and 13 per cent Conservative, according to data from Ipsos election-day exit polls shared with The Tyee.

How did this party fall out of favour with so many workers it purports to represent?

Roots in the labour movement

The NDP was founded in 1961, with support and funding from the labour movement, as an alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives, which were viewed as parties of big business.

It came from a sense that “workers needed their own political vehicle to advance their interest,” said Larry Savage, a professor of labour studies at Brock University.

But despite its support from union leaders, the NDP has almost never had a monopoly on union-member or working-class votes, Savage said. Only once — in the 2011 orange crush with Jack Layton at the helm — has it garnered the most union votes.

“You'll often hear people say the NDP is the political arm of organized labour, or it's the workers' party,” said Savage. “But there is a disconnect there, because if it's the party of organized labour, why has it never won a plurality of union votes, except for once?”

Both globally and provincially — like the United Kingdom’s Labour Party or the BC NDP — labour parties have progressed enough to squeeze out centre parties and become an opposition to conservative parties. But not Canada’s federal NDP.

Instead, Canadian politics have been defined around religion, nationality and region, said Peter Graefe, a political science professor at McMaster University.

“It was really hard for a party to try and convince people that politics should be about left and right, about redistribution, about workers’ rights,” he said.

Orange votes turn blue and red

Savage said some union and working-class voters have traditionally voted for the Conservative party, despite its notoriously anti-labour policies.

More recently, Conservative parties have tried to appeal to the working class, portraying themselves “as working-class champions, as union friendly.”

It started with former Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole (who ran and lost in 2021) but was “perfected, I think, by the Doug Fords of the world,” Savage said.

And even though Pierre Poilievre lost this election, the Conservatives, under his leadership, secured a record number of union endorsements, largely from construction and police unions.

Conservatives frame NDP concerns on climate change and Indigenous sovereignty as anti-development and anti-labour, explained Savage.

“Rightly or wrongly, [blue-collar workers] believe that the NDP has traded in class politics for identity politics,” he said. “I think there is certainly a segment of blue-collar, working-class voters who want the party to focus more on lunch bucket economic issues and less on social identity or social justice issues.”

Skidmore says that this oversimplifies the reasons for the NDP outcome in the 2025 election.

“There’s a lot of play in this election,” said Skidmore. For one, people who might have otherwise voted NDP ended up strategically voting for the Liberals, to keep Poilievre’s Conservatives from winning.

The NDP’s supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals didn’t help them. Savage said he thinks this made it challenging for the NDP to “forge a separate identity” from the party in power — and they got little credit for what good came from the agreement.

“On one hand, they're an opposition party criticizing the Liberals for the affordability crisis, but at the same time, they're propping up the Liberal government that is overseeing an affordability crisis,” he said.

Jenny Kwan, a longtime NDP MP in Vancouver East, and one of the few who kept her seat, said she heard this sentiment from people during her campaign.

“People still were challenged with the very notion that the NDP worked with the Liberals at all,” she said, adding that the Conservatives had “worked really hard” to make the NDP support for the Liberals an issue.

‘Struggles to connect’

Kwan said Conservative slogans around affordability might have resonated with voters and contributed to the NDP losing some of their vote share to Poilievre's party.

Savage said campaign messaging is important, but the NDP’s problems go deeper than that.

“Clearly working-class voters didn't see a credible plan they could get behind from the NDP,” he said. “I don't think the party was well positioned to win working-class votes, because what it had on offer was not attractive to working-class people.”

Sean Strickland, the executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions, a non-partisan organization that represents over 600,000 construction workers across Canada, agrees.

The NDP “struggles to connect” with its membership around natural resource development, he said.

“Our members build pipelines. Our members work in oil and gas. Our members build LNG terminals. Our members build nuclear facilities, and our members are going to be building SMRs [small modular reactors].”

While both the Conservatives and Liberals had skilled trades development in their platforms, they didn’t see this from the NDP.

On one hand, Conservatives worked hard to reach out to union members in the past three years and “relate to our membership and understand the struggles,” Strickland said. When asked about the Conservatives’ traditional anti-labour stance, Strickland said Poilievre had promised he wouldn’t introduce anti-labour legislation this time around.

On the other hand, the Liberal government had voted in anti-scab legislation (preventing federally regulated employers from replacing striking or locked-out employees) and investment tax credits (which require union wages for business to receive investment), which Strickland called “some of the most progressive pro-labour legislation in the history of Canada.”

While he acknowledged that these pro-labour policies were brought in with NDP advocacy, he said New Democrats need to find a way to talk about resource development in a way that speaks to their membership — if they want their support.

What path forward?

Other political experts disagree, like Jäger Rosenberg, who ran for the NDP in the recent election. He wrote in The Tyee that he thinks the party needs to take a more progressive route.

There’s been a long-standing debate in NDP circles about its identity, said Savage. Should it hold on to its political principles on the left, or shift to the centre to get more votes and win?

“I think a central question that will emerge in the NDP leadership contest is whether the NDP should refocus on working-class issues and reclaim its identity as a party of labour, or continue to adapt its political message in search of broader appeal,” he told The Tyee.

Experts agree that the party needs to work on how it reaches the non-union working class. The party tends to rely on unions to make a pitch to their members, Graefe said. The Conservatives have been effective at targeting them through podcasters, websites and blogs “where they are meeting working-class voters,” he said.

But both Kwan and Skidmore say that New Democrats are committed to rebuilding the party, despite this setback.

And Strickland hopes they do.

“The NDP has had a long history in this country of delivering progressive legislation, supporting progressive legislation, helping working people. And improving society writ large,” he said.

“We need their presence. We need them to be in Ottawa. We need them to figure this out, and we need them to get back in the game.”