John Ivison: Why the NDP is losing the blue-collar vote to conservatives

MONTREAL — Striking day-care workers gave local NDP candidates a noisy welcome when they showed up with coffee and doughnuts at a picket line on a chilly Wednesday morning. Workers, who are in a pay dispute with Quebec’s ministry of families, chanted “Solidarité,” banged drums and waved rattles. Supportive parents squeezed their kids back into snowsuits amid flurries and falling temperatures, about five minutes before they needed to go pee (it is an immutable rule). NDP Jagmeet Singh was absent. His team said he was “under the weather” and resting ahead of Wednesday evening’s French-language debate. But local candidates Craig Sauvé, Julie Girard-Lemay and Nima Machouf were embraced by workers, even though their union, FSSS-CSN does not officially endorse a federal party. The striking thing was that the picket line was made up entirely of women. Once upon a time, male-dominated unions backed the NDP reflexively, but those days are gone. In the 2025 general election, unions are taking a far more transactional approach to the relationship. Fourteen Canadian labour unions have backed Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and his “boots not suits” plan to boost skilled-trades apprenticeships. Those endorsing a party that has not always been friendly to organized labour include police associations, plumbers, electrical workers and boilermakers. The NDP has retained the support of the country’s biggest union, CUPE, the United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transit Union, which together account for one million workers. In previous elections, Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union, has championed strategic voting to block Conservative candidates. But in 2025, it is pushing for candidates who will “stand up to Trump” — a mix of Liberals and New Democrats. But it is clear that the relationship between the NDP and union members, if not their leaders, is strained. A forthcoming article in the Canadian Journal of Political Studies, co-authored by Larry Savage and Jonah Butovsky of Brock University, and Daniel Westlake of the University of Saskatchewan, suggests the changing landscape of party-union relations has made the NDP’s challenge more difficult. Canada Election Study data suggest members of union households were 19 percentage points more likely to vote NDP than non-union members in 2008, but that margin had shrunk to just seven percentage points in 2019 and 2021. Cracks in the union affiliation reflect a broader disillusionment among male voters generally. The most recent Abacus Data poll has support among all voters for the NDP at nine per cent, but that number dips to seven per cent among men (compared to 12 per cent of women). CES data suggest 13 per cent of men voted NDP in 2021. One reader who wrote to me, Lorne Morrison, said he has voted NDP in the past but won’t do so this time because it has morphed from the “party of the worker to the party of identity politics.” He pointed to the party convention in Hamilton in 2023, when the co-chair, Sylvie Sioufi, a senior CUPE executive, told delegates that the convention had  special speaker priority rules. “Please remember to give space to those who face systemic barriers and discrimination, including women, Black, Indigenous and racialized folks in particular, people with disabilities and 2SLGBTQIA+ folks,” she said. “If you identify with a gender other than men for the purpose of the equity-seeking rule, you will have received a yellow card.” Morrison said it meant that those with a yellow card spoke first, and white men went to the back of the line. “If they don’t want to hear from me at their conference, they aren’t going to hear from me at the ballot box,” he said. Brock University’s Savage said he is less convinced that male union voters have been pushed out of the NDP. “New Democrats have always been left on social issues,” he said. Rather, it is a shift in the ideological opposition to organized labour by provincial and federal conservative parties that has encouraged blue-collar, male-dominated, skilled trades unions to endorse them. “They’re not threatening to decertify them anymore,” he said. Savage and Westlake’s research on  whether union endorsements actually matter  found that, outside of Quebec, 37 per cent of members are “somewhat” or “much more likely” to vote for union-endorsed candidates. (In Quebec, the number was 27 per cent). That number rose or fell, depending on how satisfied the member was with his or her union. Veteran New Democrats like  Don Davies , the five-term MP and current candidate in Vancouver Kingsway, have pointed out that the party has a track record of defending workers and their families by pushing recent Liberal governments to adopt paid holidays for federal workers and introduce legislation against replacement workers for regulated industries (which was passed last year in the House of Commons unanimously but has been opposed in previous iterations by the Conservatives,  most recently in 2016 ). Lorne Morrison said he sees the departure of leader Jagmeet Singh as the “first step in the NDP’s road to recovery.” Singh leaving seems more likely to happen than not. But whoever succeeds him has a big job convincing blue-collar men in particular that the NDP is the party of the worker — and that yellow cards are a thing of the past. National Post jivison@criffel.ca

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