How the NDP’s deal with the Liberals died

On the same day the Liberal government’s House leader told reporters she was “confident” her party’s governance agreement with the NDP would last until June 2025, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was busy recording a video in front of Parliament saying he was killing the deal.

“I’m fairly confident that agreement is a good agreement, it’s a strong agreement and we’ll get to the end of June,” Karina Gould told an early morning news conference at the federal cabinet retreat in Halifax on Aug. 27.

One week later, Gould and the rest of the Liberal cabinet were hit with a political bombshell that caught them completely by surprise — when the NDP pulled out of the confidence-and-supply agreement that was set to keep the Liberal minority government in power through to next June.

The decision could see the government toppled before fall 2025 and introduces a new degree of instability to the coming sitting of the House of Commons, set to start Sept. 16.

Several NDP and Liberal sources spoke to CBC News about the final days of the deal and the NDP’s closely guarded secret plan to blow it up ahead of its stated end-date of June 2025.

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The sources spoke on the condition they not be named, as they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal party operations. CBC News agreed to that condition in order to get a better understanding of the decision and the timeline of events.

The NDP had been hammering out the details of their plan to leave the deal for at least a month before Singh’s video was released. Some NDP staffers and MPs said the deal was tying the NDP to a toxic Liberal brand polling up to 20 percentage points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

Sources also said New Democrats believed they’d achieved all they could from the agreement.

That opinion was echoed by NDP House leader Peter Julian, who spoke to CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton in an interview airing Sunday.

“It’s fair to say, members of caucus understood we’ve kind of hit this limit in what the Liberals are prepared to do,” said Julian.

All but decided in June, planned out in August

Sources told CBC News the party’s decision to break the agreement was largely settled by Singh early in the summer, a full year before it was supposed to end.

A senior NDP source said that in June, as the spring sitting of Parliament was wrapping up, “there was a discussion about, this is probably as much as we are going to get. It’s probably time to end the agreement and move on — and then it was just kind of putting together the how and when of it all.”

“People were saying, ‘We’ve got to get out,'” another senior source said. “But it wasn’t hard and fast at that point.”

A source said there was “a final conversation” with caucus in June where MPs were told “the likely scenario here is that this agreement is ending … [and] then we just kind of got to work on figuring out what that all looked like.”

Party organizers decided they did not want to pull the plug right away. Sources said MPs wanted to go back to their ridings and talk to constituents about what they wanted.

“It had just become so crystal clear over the summer,” said one NDP source. “Candidates were knocking on doors, hearing over and over again that they’ve had it with [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and the Liberals.”

The final decision was made in early August — and that’s when the planning began, according to two senior sources involved in the discussions.

Senior members of the NDP team meet almost every day on Zoom or, when the House of Commons is sitting, in West Block. That group includes Singh, his chief of staff, his principal secretary and several other senior party staffers.

At one of those meetings, sources said, Singh asked the team to put together an exit strategy. That’s when they decided to record a video to be released a day before Singh appeared publicly to take questions, and to have that video lead their communications strategy.

It was decided that the video would be put out after Labour Day and one week before caucus is set to meet to discuss the fall sitting of the House of Commons.

Sources say that on Aug. 29, two days after Singh recorded his video announcing the end of the deal, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre issued a public letter to Singh calling on him to pull his party’s support for the Liberal government so that Canadians could go to the polls this fall, instead of next year as planned.

Still, the party insiders kept the plan quiet.

Anne McGrath, Singh’s principal secretary, was seen at a popular downtown Ottawa restaurant the day before the NDP ended the confidence-and-supply deal. She was having a drink with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford and several other top Liberal staffers. They toasted Telford’s birthday after a chance meeting at an Ottawa political event.

Less than 24 hours later, on Sept. 4, everything was in place. Senior NDP staff gathered for their usual morning meeting to go over their assignments for the day. People involved say the vibe was excited but calm as the party set about blowing up the deal.

The first to hear were members of caucus. An email was sent in the morning: “Today, Jagmeet will announce that we are leaving the Confidence and Supply agreement with the Liberals signed in 2022.” The letter told MPs to keep the information private until 1 p.m. ET, when Singh was set to release a video on social media.

Soon after, some national media were given the head’s-up that Singh was set to make the announcement.

Around 12:15 p.m. ET on Sept. 4 — 40 minutes before the news would become public — sources say an email was sent to a generic PMO email address telling them the deal was over.

At 12:44 p.m., Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley posted a copy of the email sent to the NDP caucus on social media.

Three minutes later, a member of the NDP senior staff called the PMO directly. But at the time, Trudeau was at a school in Rocky Harbour, NL, talking about a national school lunch program.

He was not directly contacted by the NDP before taking questions on the subject from journalists. 

The move left a bad taste in the mouths of some Liberals. The confidence and supply agreement included a commitment from both parties that there would be “no surprises.”

“What the NDP, what Jagmeet Singh demonstrated is a lack of courtesy. He didn’t even have the courage to call our prime minister to talk about it. Our prime minister heard the news from the media,” said Liberal MP Stéphane Lauzon, speaking in French at a Quebec caucus retreat.

A senior Liberal official told CBC News that the NDP’s move is forcing the Liberals to rethink their strategy going into the next sitting of the House of Commons, now that the “normal” rules of minority government have been restored.

“Everyone’s dusting off the old playbook,” he said. 

Singh’s chief of staff, Jennifer Howard, told CBC News that her party was “very proud” of the agreement’s success. She cited the introduction of anti-replacement worker legislation, the national dental program and pharmacare legislation as key accomplishments.

“Now it is time to move forward and it is very clear the next election is shaping up to be a contest of visions of the future of the country,” she said.