There's a network of Liberal and NDP powerbrokers, including former Liberal cabinet minister, Lloyd Axworthy, and former Manitoba Premier and Harper's ambassador to the US, Gary Doer, who are collaborating on putting Manitoba NDP Premier Wab Kinew in the Prime Minister's Office. Kinew is being positioned to knock off Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives are likely to win the 2025 federal election.
Much of the path will be cleared for Kinew when Liberal PM Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh resign after the 2025 federal election. It is almost a certainty that Trudeau will be defeated and the Liberals will suffer their worst defeat since the Harper years. Unless the NDP can make significant gains in seats and the popular vote, Singh will also be forced to resign.
Whatever the Liberal and NDP leadership questions after 2025, it will still be too early for Kinew to step into the federal arena. Premier Kinew will not have a single term under his belt until the 2027 Manitoba election. It is more likely the case that Kinew will look to win re-election in 2027 and then move into the federal arena after the 2029 federal election.
Given the shallow, stagnant pool of MPs from which the Liberals and NDP can choose their next leaders, one can anticipate doomed one-election leaders like Liberals Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion, or NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin. If Singh or Trudeau hang on to run in 2029, it is all the better for Kinew to swoop in and replace an old, defeated failure.
After the 2029 election, midway through his second term, Kinew will jump out of provincial politics into the Liberal or NDP leadership race. He will win by riding a wave of progressive liberal delusions stoked by a slick media campaign, and then take on Poilievre's Conservatives in 2033. Kinew will come to power presiding over a reforged progressive liberal bloc (or blob).
A key lesson for Kinew comes from Singh's failure to establish his
provincial bona fides before he graduated to a federal leadership race.
Singh had only been elected in Ontario in 2011 and 2014 before he went
into the NDP leadership race in 2017. Recall how strong sections of the
NDP establishment and caucus publicly undermined Singh after his
leadership victory and through his by-election campaign for a seat in
2018-2019. He was an upstart above his station. He was only a
second-term provincial politician and deputy leader of Ontario NDP. He
has never been an effective leader and after two lousy elections,
including his disastrous TikTok campaign in 2021, he cut a backroom deal
with Trudeau that turned the NDP into Liberal backbenchers.
The coming Liberal-NDP merger
Another key element in the Kinew campaign is the prospect of a Liberal-NDP merger shaped by the push to throw Poilievre out of office, and the ongoing rapprochement between the neoliberal progressives of the NDP and the Liberals. Singh's coalition deal with Trudeau is a concrete manifestation of this rapprochement first overtly articulated in the neoliberal period by Sask NDP Premier Roya Romanow at his retirement press conference in September 2000.
The evidence and pressures for a merger are mounting every year. Over the past 20 years, the NDP has removed labour's special voting privileges, dropped references to socialism from its program, fully abandoned its NATO withdrawal policy, and continuously purged pro-Palestine members, candidates and elected officials.
The favourable grounds for a merger isn't just a matter of right-wing federal policy of this third party propping up the Liberals. Every single NDP government since 1990 - 14 majority and 2 minority governments in 6 provinces - has accepted permanent austerity, abandoned public development, indulged in corporate welfare and bailouts, failed to reverse regressive taxation, embraced pipelines, done nothing to delegate democracy, and turned on workers (Kinew has yet to really do this since he has compliant union leaders shoving shit contracts down workers throats, as witnessed in the hospitals this spring).
In Western Canada, the NDP has also become the de facto provincial adjunct of the federal Liberal Party. This is self-evident with Kinew in Manitoba and the Horgan/Eby regime in BC. This rapprochement follows decades of two-party systems in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the recent emergence of a two-party system in Alberta driven by urbanization, immigration, and the social and economic failures of Alberta's one-party state.
Additional evidence of Western provincial NDP collaboration with the federal Liberals includes BC NDP Premier Ujjal Dosanjh's jump to Chrétien's Liberal cabinet in the early 2000s, as well as Sask NDP Premier Roy Romanow's call for a federal Liberal-NDP merger. Former NDP Premier Bob Rae has also become a stalwart of the federal Liberals. This federal merger dream goes all the way back to the first NDP leadership race in which Tommy Douglas defeated Hazen Argue, Argue crossed the floor to join the Liberals claiming organized labour had gained too much power in the new NDP.
The Ontario NDP remains a roadblock to a Liberal-NDP merger but trends suggest this won't last for much longer. The recent 2018 and 2022 elections marked the crumbling of the NDP's old labour strongholds in Hamilton, Windsor and the north, as well as major wipeouts in working-class Brampton. The NDP is losing the organized base of labour that once made it distinct, in great part because the Ontario NDP never recovered from its attacks on workers under Rae's regime in the early 1990s.
In this context, Wab Kinew may be the figure that Canada's colonial capitalist ruling class needs to break the pesky vestiges of the multi-party democracy foisted upon them. They want to take Canada back to a so-called two-party system like the one shattered a century ago by the farmer and labour revolt of 1919.
However, a new two-party system won't be like the one of old. It will be more like the system to the south: a corrupt cartel of corporate-financed machines that gerrymander elections and serve the collaborating and clashing interests of the capitalist class in both domestic and international affairs. After all, the Liberals and NDP are already patrons of the American Democratic Party, its leaders, operators, tactics, and continental agenda and imperialist wars.
This NDP-US Democrat relationship went into hyperdrive after Obama was elected. It is no surprise then that Kinew has expressed his admiration for Obama. Obama is, after all, the figure that buried popular opposition to war while serving up the treasury to corporate looting and accelerating police state violence against his own people.