Jagmeet Singh’s Political Career Is Falling Apart

Jagmeet Singh’s political career seems to be on the rocks these days. Singh may still be the leader of a major federal party that is polling around 20 percent but it is clear that anything the NDP currently has going for it is all in spite of his leadership. 

Back in the 2021 election, it was clear that Singh’s strategy to try and monopolize the youth vote by streaming himself playing video games on Twitch with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and shooting TikTok videos did not pay off at all. Despite Prime Minister Justin  Trudeau’s deep unpopularity and O’Toole’s limp campaign Singh could only pick up a single seat for the NDP, after a 2019 election where he lost 15 seats. 

And somehow things only got worse after the last federal election.

Despite the Liberal’s massive strategic political errors when dealing with the Freedom Convoy, protesting their travel vaccine mandates, NDP decided to jump on the anti-trucker ban wagon. The Liberals refused to meet with the convoy leaders and invoked the Emergencies Act despite the Ottawa Police, OPP, and RCMP not requesting it, and yet, the NDP under Singh gladly signed up to back Trudeau’s attack on disgruntled working-class truckers despite that being a large portion of the NDP’s base.

The majority of those that were a part of the convoy may have been conservative-leaning individuals, but the police crack-down on the truckers and their supporters still demonstrated an aversion to the working class that Jagmeet Singh seems to possess.

Trudeau and the Liberal Party may have been the main ones to blame for the police and banks’ crackdown on the Freedom Convoy, but many identified Singh as Trudeau’s biggest enabler and increasingly started to protest him at different events.

Not being satisfied with just enabling the Liberals during their scandalous handling of the Freedom Convoy protest, Jagmeet Singh then formed an irregular alliance with the Liberal Party, committing to keeping them in power until 2025. 

After that, the first direct showing of disapproval towards Singh was by anti-mandate protesters in Peterborough during the Ontario provincial election, where Singh reacted to being heckled by an angry crowd by running away from the situation and then implying the protesters were intolerant and “violent.” This was less indicative of Singh’s overall unpopularity and more of his dramatic inability to deal with disagreement publicly. 

He is absolutely flat-footed in the face of any criticism. 

The next protest that really indicated Singh’s lagging support was the demonstrators from the Sikh community in Brampton showing up to an event Singh was hosting with Ontario NDP MPP candidate Navjit Kaur. 

Singh ran from the protesters, who identified themselves as NDP supporters who were disappointed in his promotion of vaccine mandates that are affecting members of the Sikh community.

It should be noted as well that the Sikh community is heavily represented in the trucking industry, so it should not be surprising to see Sikhs protesting Singh after he supported crushing the Freedom Convoy protest with a massive police force.

This all then led to a fairly dramatic upset defeat of Jagmeet Singh’s brother during his reelection bid in the Ontario provincial election.

MPP Gurratan Singh previous was elected in Brampton East in 2018 with 46.9 percent of the vote, but in 2022 he was tossed out of office, only winning 30.8 percent of the vote.

The fact that a previously popularly elected Sikh NDP MPP, in a riding with a high Sikh population, who is the brother of the federal NDP leader was so decisively defeated seems to indicate that the value of the Singh brand has taken a nosedive.

Jagmeet Singh has effectively taken the NDP, which used to have a strong blue-collar union base, and has turned it into a party for college-age socialists and woke urban voters the Liberals still hold a plurality of. 

There is no obvious politically-viable coalition left for the NDP federally, making it difficult for the NDP to win, or even hold onto, seats outside of ridings where they don’t have long-time incumbents present. The only thing keeping the NDP in business at this point is the astounding corruption of Trudeau’s Liberals, and even Singh is trying to deprive himself of that advantage by closely allying with them rather than acting as left-wing opposition. 

It would be surprising at this point, based on how much we have already seen Jagmeet Singh’s political career unravel if he was the federal NDP leader going into the next election. 

UPDATE:

In October (2022) Jagmeet Singh was uninvited to the Saskatchewan NDP’s AGM by party members, likely due to a perception that Singh’s urban elitist image would hurt their provincial brand.