By some metrics, Jack Layton and the New Democratic Party had one of their best electoral showings in history. They came out of the election with 37 seats, seven more than in the previous parliament. The NDP kept the Montréal riding of Outremont, held more or less reliably by Liberals since 1935, which Thomas Mulcair had captured for them in a 2007 byelection. This is the first Québec riding to be taken by the NDP in a national federal election. The NDP also saw one of its members, former provincial NDP leader Jack Harris, elected in the Newfoundland riding of St. John’s East, the NDP’s first MP in Newfoundland and Labrador in more than twenty years. The NDP also made gains in north-western Canada, taking seats in northern Ontario, northern Manitoba, Vancouver, the northern coast of B.C., and a surprise upset in the Alberta riding of Edmonton—Strathcona, where they unseated a Conservative MP to pick up the seat. With over eighteen percent of the national popular vote, all in all, it looked like a pretty good night for the NDP.
But it’s impossible to discuss the NDP’s role in this election without bringing up the uncomfortable topic of to what extent they split the left-wing (and even the centre-left) vote in Canada. Here are the numbers:
| Party | % of popular vote | Number of seats | % of seats |
| Conservative | 37.64% | 143 | 46.43% |
| Liberal | 26.23% | 76 | 24.68% |
| NDP | 18.19% | 37 | 12.01% |
| Bloc Québécois | 9.98% | 50 | 16.23% |
| Green | 6.80% | 0 | 0% |
| (Independent) | 0.69% | 2 | 0.65% |
Let us leave aside some of the obvious problems here—have no fear, we will tackle this table in an upcoming issue of Who’s to Blame—and focus on one thing: the numbers for the Conservatives versus the rest of the left-of-centre parties. Consider the following table:
| Party | % of popular vote | Number of seats | % of seats |
| Conservative | 37.64% | 143 | 46.43% |
| All major left-of-centre | 61.20% | 163 | 52.92% |
| (Independent) | 0.69% | 2 | 0.65% |
As you can see, if you consolidate the left-of-centre vote there’s no contest in the popular vote column, and even the number of seats in Parliament, which is still radically out of proportion to the popular vote, forms a majority for the left-of-centre vote. So the question becomes: who or what is responsible for the split in the left-of-centre vote? And part of the answer has to be that there are four major left-of-centre parties compared to one right-of-centre. Three of these parties—the NDP, the Bloc, and the Greens—showed extremely well, while the Liberals showed extremely poorly.
Does this mean that we can blame Jack Layton and the NDP for being the most important factor in the left-of-centre vote split? Some people, like Ujjal Dosanjh, certainly think so. Dosanjh, a former NDP premier of British Columbia who was elected as a federal Liberal from the riding of Vancouver South, narrowly held on to his seat by 33 votes over Conservative Wai Young. (An automatic judicial recount is pending as I write this.) But the important thing is what Dosanjh said after the election on Tuesday night:
Dosajh blamed NDP Leader Jack Layton for splitting the left-of-centre vote and giving Canadians another Conservative government.
The Liberals, he said, obviously bled votes to the Greens and NDP to no purpose.
“(The) NDP’s irrelevant insofar as the federal scene is concerned except insofar as they have the ability by splitting the vote to effectively elect a Conservative government, which they’ve done twice,” he said Wednesday.
He criticized Layton’s “pretension to the throne,” campaigning as if he could become prime minister when the NDP “didn’t have that kind of support.”
“If you say you’re applying for the job of prime minister and you gain less than one point nationally in the polls, what does that say? Everyone recognizes that was simply a delusional Jack Layton.”
Dosanjh does have a point regarding his own party: the Liberals did bleed—hemorrhage would be more like it—votes to the other left-of-centre parties, especially to the NDP (cf. the aforementioned hold in Outremont). But the thrust of his complaint—that the Jack Layton is to blame for the Liberals’ poor showing and the resulting Conservative government—smacks of sour grapes. The NDP did indeed swing up only 0.79% of the popular vote since the last federal election, but they gained eight seats, while the Liberals swung down 4% and lost twenty-seven seats. And of course, there’s no direct connection between those two pairs of numbers anyway due to a dozen different factors about the way the electoral system works, not the least of which involves geographical distribution. But still, if you’re going to make that criticism, what does that comparison say about the party you ran for?
Furthermore, Dosanjh’s critique of Jack Layton is unfair in that Layton never seemed to me to be actually running for prime minister. Of course he was in a formal sense, and he did focus quite a bit of attention personally on Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, and he did say things like “You go to win the race.” However, given the party’s performance in past elections and current poll results, he certainly realized that his party never stood a chance of actually winning this election. Furthermore, the campaign that Layton ran was not focussed on a nationwide strategy, like the Liberals’, but instead on holding certain ridings and picking up others that they knew they could contest—again, cf. Outremont, the Vancouver east side and metro area, even Edmonton—Strathcona. What’s really unfair is that the NDP got over 18% of the vote and only 12% of the seats, while the Bloc (for example) got less than 10% of the vote but controls over 16% of the seats.
But I won’t totally exonerate the NDP and Jack Layton. Their campaign was marred by missteps and gaffes, with several candidates (especially here in B.C.) having to step down for various reasons (one dropped acid on video, another exposed himself to a group of teenagers, and others said unforgivable things about 9/11 and U.S. conscientious objectors). This forced the campaign to do a lot of clean-up work and play a lot of defence. Layton also did a poor job of fighting a two-pronged campaign against both Stephen Harper and Stéphane Dion, even though he had some memorable zingers in the English-language debate.
If things had been different, perhaps the NDP could have displaced the Bloc as the third largest party in the House of Commons. As things went, the vote was split and nobody really ended up getting what they wanted. As to whether Layton’s job is secure, I would say that it probably is—after all, he did pick up eight seats for the party. But questions are definitely going to be raised about what lessons can be learned from the NDP’s campaign and this election in general for the future.
Previously featured on Who’s to Blame: Stéphane Dion (Part 1 and Part 1a), Stephen Harper (Part 2).
