The federal NDP is walking a long road to rebuild the party, but leader Avi Lewis admits it’s unlikely they will be able to capitalize on the flurry of upcoming byelections to gain much-needed seats in the House of Commons.
To fight its way back to official party status and the benefits that designation carries, the NDP will have to contend with its shifting identity and supporter base, a notable challenge as some trade union members jump ship to the Conservative Party.
The NDP are not expected to win in the Aug. 31 byelections in North Vancouver-Capilano, Beaches-East York and Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, but those races are still “really important” for the party, Lewis told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview.
“It’s early in our rebuild as a party, but each and every byelection is an opportunity to build our ground game, and that’s a huge focus for us.”
“We are coming off a leadership race where we raised money and signed up members in every single corner of the country,” he said. The party is treating these three byelections — and a handful more that are soon to come — as “campaign schools” and developing local organizing capacity for the long-term, Lewis said.
Lewis admitted he was tempted to run in Beaches-East York, but ultimately decided “it’s just too soon” and opted to focus on travelling the country and building local organizing networks with an eye to the federal NDP’s future.
Winning government or becoming the official opposition “seems like a tall order” in the next election, Lewis said, but he is confident the NDP can regain official party status, and, in two to three election cycles, recover from this historic low and become competitive in Ontario, Quebec, the Prairies and Atlantic Canada.
Rebounding from 2025
The disastrous 2025 federal election decimated the federal NDP as the US trade war drove voters to the Liberal Party.
“Many people don’t realize how bad of an election it was for the NDP,” Quebec-based pollster Philippe J. Fournier told Canada’s National Observer.
“It takes years to rebuild a party when you go from regularly having 18, 19 per cent down to six per cent,” Fournier emphasized. For context, the Bloc Québécois and NDP both received 6.3 per cent of the popular vote in the last election.
The crushing defeat set the stage for a high-stakes leadership race to decide the federal NDP’s direction and Lewis blew the other contestants out of the water. He led in fundraising in every region except Alberta and raised more than the other four candidates, combined.
A closer look at the leadership race fundraising numbers, mapped by Canada’s National Observer, highlight a trend that is happening to left-of-centre parties across Western countries like France, Germany and the US, Fournier said.
“Now, the crowd that seems attracted to the NDP has really gotten younger, (and) more urban. They live in denser areas where schools and colleges are,” Fournier said, noting the donations clustered around Kingston, Ottawa and Montreal.
The federal NDP has always been more popular with younger voters compared to older voters but, right now, its numbers with older voters “are absolutely atrocious,” Fournier said. The NDP is polling at four per cent with voters 55 and older: “[T]hey completely lost their older voter base, and you would think that many of them were working-class unionized workers, but they left for the Conservatives,” Fournier said, adding that it’s part of a pattern playing out in other countries.
In central Canada, Lewis enjoyed ample support from downtown Toronto ridings, as well as large clusters of support in Montreal, Kingston, Ottawa and Kitchener.
Canada’s National Observer mapped the donations federal NDP leader Avi Lewis received during the 2025 NDP leadership race in Tableau to identify clusters of support in Ontario. Data visualization by: David McKie and Natasha Bulowski
“The city of Toronto is a very progressive set of ridings, and the fact that we’ve been shut out there since 2015 is, I think, [an] anomaly,” Lewis said. The strong fundraising numbers in downtown Toronto were in line with his expectations, given that he lived and started his career as a broadcast journalist there.
Broadly, left-of-centre parties in other western countries “have mostly lost the culture wars among rural workers,” Fournier said.
The NDP typically does better with lower-income voters, while the Liberal Party does better with higher-income university-educated voters that populate downtown Toronto, Daniel Westlake, a political scientist and labour researcher, told Canada’s National Observer in a video call. That could be a challenge as the NDP works to regain a foothold in Ontario.
Lewis, for his part, thinks the NDP will break through in the city in the next election.
“We don’t need to put extra emphasis on it because our base there is actually really strong, and I think the Liberals have gotten used to taking Toronto for granted,” he said.
The first-ballot results of the leadership race — when the labour candidate underperformed — also show a “misalignment” with the federal NDP’s core identity, said Westlake.
Rob Ashton, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ran in the 2025 federal NDP leadership contest. Ashton came fourth on the first ballot. Photo by: Natasha Bulowski / Canada’s National Observer
“It doesn’t look good for the NDP that the union-endorsed candidate, Rob Ashton, finished fourth and didn’t seem to be able to convert what I thought was an attempt to build a working-class image into much success in that leadership race,” he said.
Construction working class drifting right
The disappointing results for Ashton and losses to the Conservatives suggest the NDP is losing touch with its stereotypical, blue collar, working-class roots — leaving the party searching for its new base, Westlake said.
Ashton was endorsed by a number of prominent unions and labour leaders, including Canadian Labour Congress president Bea Bruske and the United Steelworkers. But those endorsements did not provide enough votes.
Although union members, generally speaking, are more likely than the average voter to support the NDP, construction and building union members specifically tend to disproportionately support the Conservative Party, according to Westlake’s 2025 study on the labour vote in Canadian federal politics.
Westlake hasn’t studied it yet, but he suspects a similar shift could be happening with the auto sector working class and resource sector working class, the latter of which is often positioned in conflict with environmental regulations and progressive policies.
“That creates some interesting and complicated dynamics around working-class politics in Canada that I don’t think we fully explored or fully got a handle on,” Westlake said.
The federal NDP has historically performed well in many rural ridings, but that support has also been bleeding to the Conservatives, Fournier said.
Canada’s National Observer combined the results of the last three federal elections to show the drop in vote percentages for the top three traditional NDP ridings in Ontario. The ridings that saw the biggest drop in support last election were Hamilton Centre, Windsor West and London-Fanshawe, all hubs for the union-heavy auto sector.
The Liberals won Hamilton Centre, but it was largely the Conservative Party that gobbled up the NDP’s vote share, Fournier said. A similar shift played out in Windsor West: the Conservatives captured the NDP vote and emerged with their first ever victory in the riding. In London-Fanshawe, meanwhile, the Conservatives nabbed their first victory since the riding’s creation in 1997 — again at the expense of the NDP, which held it for nearly two decades.
The precipitous drop in support in these blue-collar union towns is troubling, but Westlake says there could still be a chance for the NDP to capture the support of other segments of the working class because the group refers to so much more than the stereotypical construction and resource sector jobs where members are shifting rightward, Westlake said.
“What about the service sector? What about people who are working in retail? What about people in more precarious positions?” he said. There’s a second group of lower-paid professionals, including healthcare workers and teachers, too.
“There might be some space there for the NDP to make gains,” Westlake said, adding that this segment of the working class would have less conflict with the NDP’s environmental and socially progressive policies compared to people working in some industrial sectors.
The fact Ashton came fourth despite his union endorsements suggests, to Lewis, that Canadian union leaders (like their cohorts around the world) are having trouble mobilizing their members for political action. Bucking a global trend is easier said than done, but Lewis’ approach is to focus on building strong organizing networks across the country and finding ways to connect his policies — like a public option for groceries or free heat pumps — with the specific, regional struggles Canadians are facing.
NDP must address local realities: Lewis
With more byelections on the horizon — including two progressive Montreal ridings — Lewis and the federal NDP may have time to refine their ground game, identify great candidates and build a grassroots organizing base.
But he says success will require adapting the party’s message and ideas to each region.
“The key for us is not to have a one-size-fits-all approach across the country,” Lewis said.
For example, grassroots organizers in Saskatchewan reformulated and renamed Lewis’ campaign pillar of a Green New Deal.
Avi Lewis supporters gathered in Ottawa on Sept. 25, 2025 to hear his pitch for the future of the federal NDP. Photo by: Natasha Bulowski / Canada’s National Observer
It became “jobs come first” and recontextualized the concept of a Green New Deal around the reality that Saskatchewan’s resource economy includes oil and gas, potash and uranium work.
“It was all accurate and faithful to the political vision in our platform, but it was rethought for a local audience,” Lewis said.
“They mapped the skilled trades in the current economy to the skilled trade opportunities under a green industrial strategy that foregrounds public ownership and accelerates the energy transition without abandoning workers.”
People in big cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal have no time for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bitumen pipeline, Lewis said, adding that while he was door-knocking in Beaches-East York, people voiced their displeasure unprompted with the West Coast pipeline proposal. This is one of the political opportunities Carney’s shift to the right has afforded the NDP.
Polling from both Abacus Data and the Angus Reid Institute shows just over 60 per cent of Canadians surveyed support the proposed pipeline from Alberta to BC’s coast. The polls were conducted in July, shortly after the federal government and Alberta advanced their pipeline proposal on July 2.