ADAMS: The NDP Still Thinks It Lost by Accident

The NDP's Review and Renewal Report wants credit for honesty. It deserves none.

Yes, the document acknowledges a “historic setback.” Yes, it admits the party collapsed nationwide. But after 21 pages of managerial prose, the real message becomes clear: nothing fundamental was wrong, nothing should be discarded, and no one at the top bears real responsibility.

That is not renewal. That is institutional self-preservation.

“Don't Discard the Playbook” Is the Problem

The most revealing line in the report is not about Trump, tariffs, or polarization. It is this insistence that the party should “resist drawing too many causal links” between campaign strategy and defeat, and should not “permanently discard” elements of the 2025 playbook.

That is an extraordinary thing to say after losing official party status.

If a political party is reduced to seven seats and 6.3% of the vote, the playbook is not a sacred text, it is evidence. The refusal to discard it is not prudence; it is denial.

The report repeatedly frames the loss as the result of context: Trump, polarization, voter fear, Liberal consolidation. Everything except decision-making. Everything except leadership.

A Phantom Argument, Invented to Be Dismissed

Then comes the most telling paragraph of all: a scolding aimed at “some New Democrats” who supposedly argue that people should stop donating to the federal party until it proves it invests in grassroots organizing.

This argument is described as “confounding” and “perplexing.”

There's just one problem: this not an argument anyone is making.

What is being argued—loudly, for years—is that centralized fundraising has starved EDAs of capacity, hollowed out local organizing, and turned riding associations into election-time shells.

That is not the same thing as refusing to donate. It is an argument about where power and resources flow.

By deliberately reframing decentralization as nihilistic donor abstention, the report avoids the real critique: the federal party does not trust its own grassroots, and it governs accordingly.

You cannot “build capacity” while hoarding money, talent, and decision-making in Ottawa. And pretending otherwise only confirms that the lesson has not been learned.

The Leadership Question They Refuse to Name

The report goes out of its way to avoid naming the single most obvious failure of the 2025 campaign: Jagmeet Singh was not a compelling leader, and Canadians did not take him seriously.

Voters did not see Singh as a crisis leader. They did not see him as a future prime minister. Many saw him as unserious, performative, and disconnected from the stakes of the moment.

This is not new.

It is the same failure that defined Tom Mulcair's leadership in 2015: a leader who divided internal factions and more consequentially, failed to persuade the country that the NDP was ready to govern. Mulcair sounded managerial and hollow. Singh sounded inspirational and hollow. Different aesthetics, same outcome.

And in both cases, the party responded not by interrogating leadership failure, but by blaming messaging, media, or voter psychology.

A party that cannot admit when its leader failed is a party that will repeat the mistake.

Magical Thinking Is Not a Platform

The report strongly implies that the NDP's previous election strategy was fine—perhaps even too detailed—and simply poorly communicated.

This is fantasy.

The NDP's 2025 platform consisted of a web-hosted powerpoint presentation which, when converted into a document, amounted to approximately 17.5 pages. With generous formatting, perhaps 20.

By comparison:

• The Liberals released a 95-page platform
• The Conservatives released 93 pages
• The Greens released over 120 pages (closer to 80 in real density)

The issue was not length. The issue was credibility.

The NDP platform asked voters to believe that enormous structural change could be achieved without a clear governing roadmap, institutional leverage, or political sequencing. It read less like a governing program and more like a moral wishlist.

That works only if voters already trust you to run the country.

They didn’t.

“Policy Wasn't the Problem” Is a Dangerous Lie

The report insists—repeatedly—that the problem was not policy, but “culture,” “communication,” and “strategy.”

That is only half true.

Policy becomes a problem when it is divorced from power. When there is no believable theory of how a party moves from promise to implementation, policy turns into magical thinking.

Voters are not stupid. They understand constraints. They ask one basic question: How are you actually going to do this?

The NDP did not answer it.

Instead of confronting this, the report reassures the base that nothing needs to be abandoned, only better framed. That is comforting. It is also electorally lethal.

The Real Lesson the NDP Won't Say Out Loud

What this document ultimately reveals is a party still deeply uncomfortable with decentralization, still protective of central authority, and still unwilling to accept that power must be built outward, not managed inward.

The nods to grassroots organizing are procedural, not philosophical. The defense of centralized fundraising is reflexive. The avoidance of leadership accountability is deliberate.

Most damning of all, the report explicitly rejects the idea that the NDP should rethink its governing posture, while acknowledging that voters never saw it as a governing option.

Those two positions cannot coexist.

The lesson of 2025 is not that the NDP failed to communicate. It is that the party failed to persuade Canadians it deserved power.

That failure was structural. It was cultural. It was leadership-driven.

And until the NDP stops treating its worst defeat in generations as a misunderstanding rather than a verdict, it will remain exactly where voters put it: on the margins, issuing reports, congratulating itself for honesty, and wondering why no one is listening.

Hope is not a strategy.

Neither is denial.

This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.Read our Content Policy here.