Resistance fighter Charlie Angus has been out west recently, taking his elbows-up message into ridings represented in the last parliament by New Democrats. The former MP for Timmins-James Bay, who is not re-offering, was on Vancouver Island on the weekend and in Edmonton on Monday to support former NDP colleagues who are in danger of losing their seats as support for their party drifts to the Liberals.
Angus’ message is aimed at Trump and what he terms Canada’s “Maple MAGA movement” led by Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith. But the main menace for New Democrats out west is the surge in Liberal support – that phenomenon is not only poised to take seats from the NDP, but ironically it may also hand a clutch of erstwhile NDP seats to the Poilievre-led party. So Charlie Angus is crusading to save the NDP from a double disaster – more Poilievre Conservatives in a House of Commons nearly devoid of New Democrats.
With over half their caucus in the last Parliament coming from British Columbia, retaining as many seats as possible in that province is crucial to the beleaguered NDP getting the 12 seats necessary to retain official party status in the House of Commons elected on April 28. It will not be an easy task.
As demonstrated in a provincial election last autumn, the right wing has been on the rise in British Columbia. David Eby’s provincial NDP narrowly defeated the MAGA-style B.C. Conservatives in a campaign that included Green Party candidates and no Liberals. But in the federal campaign the non-Conservative vote will be split three ways between the NDP, Greens and the resurgent Liberals, giving the Maple MAGAs a distinct advantage.
In past federal elections, the NDP – and to a lesser extent Elizabeth May and the Greens – have been able to win four-way contests because of Liberal weakness outside Greater Vancouver. Over the last three general elections, the Liberals, Conservative and NDP have each won at least 10 of the 42 seats in the province. (The Greens do better in B.C. than in other provinces, but they’ve never won more than Elizabeth May’s seat in a general election).
Although it has been a three- or four-way contest for the province as a whole, such races don’t happen in every district. In some ridings it’s Conservatives and Liberals, with the NDP and Greens far back. In a couple of seats in Vancouver, it’s the Liberals and the NDP, with the Conservatives in third place. In others, it has been the NDP and the Conservatives head-to-head, with the Liberals a distant third.
In the competition for Vancouver Island’s seven seats, it has been the NDP and Greens taking on the Conservatives, with the Liberals usually fourth. In the 2021 election the NDP won six of the Island’s seats, and Elizabeth May won the other. But the rise of the right, combined with movement to the Liberals to stop Poilievre has put those seats in doubt.
According to the polls, B.C. is mirroring the rest of Canada with some planning to abandon other parties – especially the NDP – to vote Liberal. The tables below compare results from the 2021 election with voting intentions and projected seats counts from CBC’s April 17 Poll Tracker.
Table 1.Voter intention compared with 2021 election
| Party | Share of vote 2021 | Intention 2025 | Percentage point change |
| Liberals | 26.9% | 42.0% | 15.1 |
| Conservatives | 33.1% | 39.3% | 6.2 |
| NDP | 29.3% | 13.2% | -16.1 |
| Green Party | 5.4% | 3.6% | -1.8 |
| Peoples Party | 4.9% | 1.3% | -3.6 |
As the table shows, almost the entire 16.1 percentage point swing from the NDP seems to be going to the Liberals. Also interesting to note in Table 1 is the sharp drop in support for the Peoples party – from nearly five percent in the election of 2021 to just over one percent in the polls. That is similar to the rest of Canada, indicating that Poilievre’s plan to move the Conservatives to the loony right to take support from the Peoples party seems to be paying off.
Table 2. Projected seat count compared with 2021
| Party | Seats won in 2021 (42 seats) | Projected for 2025 (43 seats) | Change |
| Liberals | 15 | 22 | 7 |
| Conservatives | 13 | 19 | 6 |
| NDP | 13 | 2 | -11 |
| Green | 1 | 0 | -1 |
| People’s Party | 0 | 0 | No change |
It needs to be stressed that predicting winners at the riding level based on overall poll numbers is a mug’s game, as most recently demonstrated in the Ontario and Nova Scotia provincial elections where the NDP won more seats than projected based on province-wide polling data. So things could well change between now and election day as New Democrats focus on re-electing incumbents.
Nevertheless, as shown in Table 2, based on the Poll Tracker New Democrats stand to lose 11 seats in B.C., including that of leader Jagmeet Singh who is trailing a Liberal in a Vancouver-area riding. That would be unfortunate for the NDP and the House of Commons which could lose Singh as well as stalwarts like Peter Julian and Don Davies. But at least the MAGA movement doesn’t stand to benefit from those upsets, which is more than can be said for the seven other ridings in B.C. and one in Alberta where Liberal gains seem to be helping the Conservatives.
According to recent projections, the Liberals may take five seats – including Singh’s – from the NDP in greater Vancouver and Victoria. The other six, four on Vancouver Island and two on the rural mainland, could end up with the Conservatives. The Conservatives are also in competition with the Liberals to win Elizabeth May’s riding, and are leading the NDP incumbent in one of the party’s two Edmonton seats, again the result of NDP support going to the Liberals.
One of the potential gains for the Conservatives on Vancouver Island is in the riding of North Island-Powell River where candidate Aaron Gunn, a prolific right-wing propagandist, has come under attack for his comments on residential schools. Indigenous leaders, local politicians in the community and a nation-wide petition called on Poilievre to give Gunn the boot. The advocates are citing online posts Gunn made several years ago, arguing that the residential school system did not constitute genocide and had, in fact, been requested by “indigenous bands.”
But Poilievre has defiantly stuck by his candidate, and if current trends hold, Aaron Gunn, described in the petition from the advocacy group Leadnow as “a residential school apologist with a history of sexist and transphobic positions” will be joining Poilievre’s post-election caucus, part of a sizeable contingent of B.C. Conservatives on the verge of winning seats previously held by the NDP.
Strategic voting
It is possible that western Canadians with NDP sympathies may be flocking to the Liberals because they are taken with Mark Carney. But if they are anything like the soft NDP voters encountered by canvassers in this part of the country, what’s happening in British Columbia and Alberta is a case of strategic voting, in this case gone badly awry.
A byproduct of our first-past-the-post system of electing MPs, strategic voting occurs when instead of their preferred candidate, someone votes for the candidate they think has the best chance of defeating their least favourite. For many anti-Conservative voters with NDP sympathies that sometimes means being influenced by national polls to vote Liberal, even though the competition in the local riding has traditionally been between Conservatives and New Democrats with Liberals the also-rans. Strategic voting has not been particularly successful in the past, and as things now stand the 2025 election in B.C. could set the standard for unintended consequences.
It should not have come to this. As I’ve argued before, the issue of climate action alone would justify co-operation by the four federal parties that acknowledge the necessity of climate action against the one party that does not. Indeed, in this campaign the Poilievre party has completely abandoned federal climate policy and is promising a massive ramp-up in fossil fuel development. The Trump threat may be an even stronger argument for those same four parties to co-operate against MAGA Maple. But by the time the full scale of that threat became known, the parties had already committed to pursuing their own interests.
And of course there would be no need to even discuss co-operation if JustinTrudeau had kept his word that 2015 would be the last election conducted under the first-past-the-post system. Because of that broken promise the old first-past-the-post, strategic voting blueprint continues, with perverse results. Voting to keeping Poilievre and the Conservatives out may lead to the election of more Conservatives at the expense of the New Democrats and the Greens – including the leaders of both parties.
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**This post has been edited to correct geographical errors about seat locations.
