Coming off a catastrophic election campaign that reduced it to seven seats and stripped it of party status, the federal NDP has released an internal analysis to try and explain their 2025 results.
The Review and Renewal Report lays blame on just about anyone it can think of—Trump, Poilievre, workers, the left, even its own local volunteers and candidates—except for the party leadership itself. Inadvertently, the report shows exactly how the short-sighted, reformist perspective of the leadership has made the party irrelevant.
Who is to blame?
From the start, the report makes it clear that the leadership has not, and will not, learn anything from their failure. In their own words: “we should exercise caution and resist drawing too many causal links between any particular campaign strategy and the outcome of the 2025 election.” According to them, the election of Donald Trump and the onset of the trade war meant they were doomed from the start. Their own politics had nothing to do with it!
There is no real analysis of how the NDP approached the trade war, and why voters might not be attracted to a platform that consisted of meekly imitating the demands of the two bigger parties, calling for the same corporate subsidies and hikes to military spending instead of putting forward a working-class solution to the crisis. After all, “there is only so much that can or should be learned from an election conducted in a context like the last one.” This is certainly a convenient conclusion for the leadership.
Clinging to the establishment
The report also laments the fact that the party was seen as indistinguishable from the Liberals, and “punished” for its supply and confidence deal with Trudeau.
At the same time, it acknowledges that the party’s traditional voter base, unionized workers and youth, have completely deserted it. But again, they have no explanation for this. The party put forward a great program, but “the context of the election meant that people were not really listening.”
This shows just how deeply out of touch this leadership has become. Why would voters want to support a party that propped up a deeply hated government which oversaw the biggest cost of living crisis in generations? Why would young people not vote for a party that propped up the Liberals while they funded the genocide in Gaza?
The leadership is unable to put two and two together. In fact, the report brags about the “historic gains” of the supply and confidence deal and promises to pursue similar agreements in the future. Their failure to oppose Carney’s austerity budget backs this up, though it’s unclear what “historic gains” were won for workers there.
The closest the report comes to self-awareness is when it acknowledges that many members of the party have looked to Zohran Mamdani for inspiration. But rather than taking inspiration from his platform, which promised things like free transit and childcare and spoke out boldly in support of Palestine, the report attributes his victory to the amount of volunteers he was able to mobilize.
This is a perfect demonstration of the losing mentality of the current leadership. There is no mention of Palestine and no mention of the fact that Zohran described himself as a socialist—which the NDP leadership does not. No mention of the actual policies Zohran ran on, no concrete discussion of politics at all. They fail to see the obvious reality: workers and youth volunteered for Zohran because he put forward policies that would genuinely improve their lives, and because they saw him as an alternative to the hated establishment.
This reality is anathema for the NDP brass, which has watered down its program in the interests of becoming a part of this establishment. But the party has no other option so long as it accepts the limits of capitalism, so it has no choice but to bury its head in the sand.
Race to the bottom
The report paints a picture of a party in a deep existential crisis, trapped in financial freefall, discredited in the eyes of its traditional voter base and completely severed from its former grassroots methods.
But the bureaucratic clique running the party is unwilling and unable to change course. The best it can do is offer petty organizational tweaks, like hosting workshops to teach local volunteers how to use campaign software and devoting more money to social media promotion. And as it consoles itself that “the campaign did not ‘look’ like a losing operation” it continues to line up behind the Liberals at every turn. This only drives the NDP further and further into irrelevance.
A party driven by methods like this cannot be an effective tool for the working class, no matter who is at the head of the party. Currently, it seems like Avi Lewis, who calls himself a socialist and criticizes capitalism, has a good chance of being the next NDP leader. But until the bureaucracy is reckoned with, they will suffocate anything that poses a genuine threat to capitalism.
