ANALYSIS: Singh’s ‘joyful struggle’ campaign ends as his future hangs in the balance

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh speaks during a campaign stop in Penticton, B.C., on Sunday, April 27, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

BURNABY — After spending much of the election campaign working to keep staffers’ morale high in the face of grim polls, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh paused his campaign Sunday to confront a shocking tragedy — a vehicle attack on a Vancouver community event that left 11 people dead.

Singh left the Lapu Lapu Day event, a Filipino cultural festival, about ten minutes before the attack took place. He’d taken photos with families and danced with festival goers.

“I keep on thinking about the joy. I was there literally minutes before this happened, and I can’t stop thinking about, how much happiness was there, how much it was a family event,” Singh said in Penticton, B.C. on Sunday while holding back tears.

“People were so positive and so joyful, and then to have such a horrific thing happen … I keep on replaying it.”

For New Democrats, it was a bleak coda for a difficult campaign. Singh has spent many days since the campaign began pursued by questions about the NDP’s future — and his own.

But the NDP leader has been working hard to keep his team’s energy level high. When the campaign plane stopped in Ottawa on Saturday to pick up extra staff, Singh led them in chants of “NDP” and “joyful struggle” before takeoff.

On the plane and on the campaign bus, Singh keeps the mood light and collegial, with core campaign staffers trading jokes and talking about favourite movies and music. At no point does the atmosphere suggest a campaign on the ropes.

The polls do, however. Multiple surveys have suggested the NDP has been bleeding support to the Liberals during the campaign and could lose official party status in the House of Commons in Monday’s vote. Some polls suggest Singh himself risks losing his own riding of Burnaby Central.

In one of his final press conferences of the campaign, Singh said he always sought “joy” during the tough times he experienced growing up — when, for example, he had to take in his teenage brother at age 20 as his dad struggled with addiction.

“In all those struggles I found you could either laugh or cry, right, in those tough, tough times. I always choose that you’ve got to have joy in the struggle,” Singh told a Toronto press conference on April 25.

As always, the NDP will review and reflect on what they could have done differently once the campaign is over. But NDP candidates, volunteers and supporters all know that their biggest obstacle this time was fear — of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and his threats against Canada’s sovereignty.

“I understand that people are scared, right, and there’s the Trump effect. They’re worried about their jobs. We lost a whole bunch of CAMI jobs. We lost 450 CAMI jobs,” London-Fanshawe NDP candidate Lindsay Mathyssen said on April 25, referring to recent layoffs at the General Motors assembly plant.

Toronto resident Jean Golden — who described herself as a friend of the late NDP leader Jack Layton — said she fears the party might lose official status.

“We’ll see what happens. Or if they’re not there, then they’re going to have to go back to grassroots and working outside of the Parliament,” she said. “It seems that they might be growing recently, but we’ll see.”

The NDP says it’s buoyed by internal polls conducted late in the campaign that suggest its support is growing in Ontario and B.C.

But with a record-setting 7.3 million votes cast in advance polls this time, any momentum shift may come too late.

Singh shifted his central message about midway through the campaign. He started calling on Canadians to elect more New Democrats to hold the balance of power in the House of Commons.

He ruled out supporting a Conservative minority government but left the door open to again lending support to the Liberals.

Singh has said throughout the campaign that the NDP’s 25 MPs had enough leverage over the minority Liberals to compel the government to introduce legislation for dental care and pharmacare.

More than one million people now qualify for government-subsidized dental work, while diabetes medication and contraceptives are available in three provinces and one territory at government expense.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney has promised to expand the number of people eligible for dental care if his government is re-elected, while Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that people already receiving benefits will continue to do so if he wins on Monday.

New Democrats say they aren’t taking those promises at face value — which is why Singh has been campaigning on the pitch to elect more New Democrats to protect and expand these programs.

“Our goal is to lift up people. Our goal is to make people’s lives better. We want to take better care of each other. So it motivates you in a very different way … it’s hard not to be filled with joy when you’re surrounded by incredible people, fighting for such a great reason," Singh said Friday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 27, 2025.

David Baxter, The Canadian Press