Orange crushed: What’s next for the NDP

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pauses while addressing supporters on election night, in Burnaby, B.C., on Monday, April 28, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck (DARRYL DYCK/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

When Parliament resumes, the NDP will return to the House of Commons as a much-weakened political party with only seven seats.

It fell five seats short of qualifying for official party status in Monday’s federal election.

“We have to figure out with a diminished size and influence how we can best use what we have to make an impact,” said NDP campaign spokesperson Anne McGrath.

Without official status, the New Democrats will have much fewer resources. Parliamentary staff will be cut and it will lose its communications and research budget. NDP members also won’t be able to sit on committees. The loss of status will also result in fewer questions allocated to the party to hold the government accountable.

In an interview with CTV’s Power Play, re-elected Vancouver-Kingsway candidate Don Davies says that he’s working on a proposal to seek party status for the NDP in Parliament.

Davies, who won his riding by just 308 votes, says there is precedent for giving a party status that doesn’t meet the quota. He says in B.C., during the last legislative session, the Greens were able to secure party status with three MLAs.

“Everything is negotiable in politics. I’m already thinking about official party status. That number is arbitrary of 12... The NDP voice in Parliament is critical,” says Davies.

“I look forward to meeting with my colleagues and coming up with a proposal to bring to Parliament whenever it starts sitting,” Davies adds.

The party will also be leaderless in the House after Jagmeet Singh came in third in the B.C. riding of Burnaby Central.

McGrath who also served as principal secretary to the NDP leader, says the caucus will soon schedule a meeting to determine which of the returning MP’s will replace Singh as interim leader and conduct a postmortem on what went wrong.

The NDP had 24 seats before the writ was dropped and lost 17 seats across Canada when the ballots were counted. That was the worst result in the party’s history, even worse than 1993, when under Audrey McLaughlin the NDP returned nine MPs.

George Soule, a strategist for the New Democrats, was involved in getting out the vote on election day in Singh’s riding. He had previously said that internal polling showed the NDP would win between 12 and 15 seats. But on election day, Soule said he found it challenging to convince stalwart supporters to vote NDP.

“People were scared of Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre. When I knocked on the door, they said ‘We like the work you’re doing. We like Jagmeet, but we’re scared this time, and we feel like we need to vote for Mark Carney to stop Pierre Poilievre,” Soule said.

The party was able to hold on to two ridings in Vancouver and one on Vancouver Island, and won single seats in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal and Nunavut. Even as the rebuilding process begins, the NDP once again hold the balance of power. Striking a deal with Carney’s minority government could facilitate the smooth passage of bills, but this time, the Liberals could also choose to work with the Bloc Québécois.