Jagmeet Singh and the No Good, Very Bad Byelections

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a proud NDP tradition. It’s refreshing that despite the party’s flashy new leader Jagmeet Singh, the old traditions still run strong.

On top of getting ground into dust in four federal byelections this week, the Canadian Press ran a story on Wednesday suggesting that Singh had launched a byelection campaign in his hometown outside the bounds of the actual riding. He was quickly able to clarify that the event in question was a “Jagmeet and Greet,” not an actual campaign launch.

But he was unable to clarify why the NDP candidate involved championed the out-of-riding event as a campaign launch on his own social media. Nor was Singh able to explain why he didn’t campaign in the Scarborough-Agincourt riding at all during the byelection, despite not holding a seat in Parliament that might keep him otherwise occupied.

Between the botched byelections and the butchered clarification, there might be a few lessons the NDP might want to heed before they flub their next foray onto the federal battlefield.

There were four by-elections across the country on Monday. Despite a gruelling fall both in and out of the House, the Liberals took three of them—including a former Conservative stronghold in British Columbia. The best NDP showing was cracking 13 percent of the vote in Battleford-Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. Otherwise, they took between 4-5 percent everywhere else in the country.

You don’t want to read too much into four by-elections. But this is not a great showing for a party that has just minted a hip new leader who was supposed to battle Justin Trudeau for our hearts and memes.

Not that you can pin all of this on Singh. The by-election in Newfoundland was going to go overwhelmingly Liberal whether the party ran a dog or a dog-sized venomous spider, and the Dippers were never expected to be contenders in the western ridings. Plus, the guy has only been on the job for about two months, which is not an especially long time to make a mark on party organization.

But the party’s awful showing in Scarborough-Agincourt might be a sign of some deeper problems. That riding was Singh’s home turf, and it was the exact area he was supposed to give the NDP a new bulwark of strength: a suburb with a large South Asian community. That the party only pulled 5 percent of the vote in the riding is extremely bad news. It casts some serious doubts as to how well Singh can translate the forces that won him the party’s leadership into the real world of electoral competition. The NDP didn’t have to outright win the race to chalk up a victory in the riding, but polling in Christian Heritage/Libertarian party territory when you’ve got a home field advantage is a pretty firm rebuke.

Judging by his poetic post-election tweeting, though, Singh appears to be unphased by the setbacks:

Yes. Well. NDP organizers, meanwhile, were more specific about what they needed to grow and nurture: namely, campaign funds. The post-election email blast sent out by the party lamented that they’d been outspent by their opponents and vowed that it would never happen again. Good luck with that.

Anyways, there are limits to the conclusions you can draw from a smattering of mid-term byelections. But there is enough in here to glean a cautionary tale: Jagmeet Singh will not make any gains against Justin Trudeau on compelling personal brand alone. Say what you will about the political depth of Trudeau when he took over the party in 2013, but he had the Liberal machine at his back. Despite its historic lull in the polls between 2003 and 2015, it still had about three to five decades of living institutional memory in terms of winning and holding power at the federal level. They don’t call it “Canada’s natural governing party” for nothing. The NDP has a comparably wonderous showboat, but without that vicious Grit engine.

It’s unfair to expect a rookie to lead his party to victory in ridings with historically weak NDP showings. But to get so brutally roasted in his home town, and in the exact geographic and demographic space that should be Jagmeet Singh’s greatest strength is a red flag visible from space.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.