One would think, for all of Jagmeet Singh’s self-touted years of martial arts training, the federal NDP leader would know a thing or two about leverage. The concept is central to the Brazilian jiu-jitsu the 44-year-old Singh practices: It’s how a smaller force can exert its will over a larger opponent. It’s also how a smaller political party, in most circumstances, holds sway over a weakened government that relies on its support for survival. Knowing—and applying—leverage is how a non-governing party pushes for the change it wants to see. But there’s a big difference between the former and the latter. And if Singh knows the NDP has leverage, it begs the question: Why isn’t he using it?
The question loomed over Singh’s visit to Halifax on Monday, Sept. 11. The NDP leader was in town speaking with graduate students at Dalhousie University about the critical lack of affordable student housing in Canadian cities, Halifax included. Mere months ago, dozens of Dal, King’s and Saint Mary’s University students rallied outside of Province House, calling on Nova Scotia to extend its 2% rent cap amid historically low rental vacancy rates.
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“The cost of renting a place is through the roof,” Singh told reporters outside of Dalhousie’s Student Union Building on Monday. “After eight years of a Liberal government, they’ve not taken this seriously.”
Why, then, one is left to wonder, haven’t Singh and the NDP used their confidence-and-supply agreement with the federal Liberals to push for the kinds of changes Singh says he’d bring if he were prime minister? And what is the benefit of such an agreement to the NDP if Singh doesn’t use it for all it’s worth?
A short history on confidence and supply
The New Democrats and Liberals announced in March 2022 that the NDP would back prime minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government until June 2025. The deal, as the CBC reported, was contingent on the ruling Liberals implementing a “negotiated list of policies and priorities.” For Trudeau’s Liberals, who had gone from a majority government in 2015 to successive minority governments in 2019 and 2021, the benefits of the deal were obvious: It meant more years in power, without risking defeat to a strengthening Conservative Party in a hastily-called election. For his part, Singh spun the agreement as a “big win” that would hold the Liberals accountable on key NDP priorities—dental care, pharmacare, housing and climate action among them.
But 18 months onward, the benefits of that agreement seem harder to defend for Singh. In March, he admitted he was “not satisfied” with the deal he’d struck, suggesting the NDP could do better “if we were the ones calling the shots.” Earlier this month, Singh told reporters that his party would begin to “push for things outside of the agreement” with the Liberals. Thus far, the NDP has pointed to a newly-launched Canada Dental Benefit (intended for families earning less than $90,000 a year) and an extended GST rebate as evidence of swaying government policy. But what of climate action? And what of housing? The Trans Mountain oil pipeline the NDP once mocked is still going ahead on the federal dime—and the costs are mounting. And any federal housing action has fallen woefully behind in meeting the needs of Canadians: Look no further than Halifax, where the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia now estimates more than 1,012 unhoused people can’t find a place to live—a figure that has nearly quadrupled since 2019.
Couldn’t Singh push the Liberals further on housing, if he wanted to? Isn’t that the power he wields within a confidence-and-supply agreement—one that protects the governing Liberals from what could be a brutal next election for the party? On those matters, Singh’s answers came up lacking.
“We’re forcing this government to do things that they would not have done for people,” he told reporters in Halifax on Monday. “We’re forcing this government to act. And we’re going to continue to do that.
“There’s a lot more to be done. We’re going to focus on housing when we resume [in Parliament] later on this month. Our focus is going to be on making this government build more homes that people can afford.
“They’ve chosen to make our housing market really great for investors, a great place to make a lot of money, but not a great place to find a home.”
Singh proposes partnering with provinces and post-secondary schools in a three-way split to build student housing. He also envisions repurposing vacant commercial properties into dormitories. He has said that he would require post-secondary institutions to issue study permits based on having a plan to house their students—a message that fell on eager ears among the crowd of students that gathered to hear his impromptu press conference.
Say this about Singh: He knows his supporter base well. On Dal’s campus, he enjoyed the kind of reception Norm would get at the bar on Cheers. But there’s another matter that has nagged at his “for the people” reputation among his base in recent weeks: His wife is a landlord.
The politics of property
Property investment is nothing new or particularly rare among the political class. Roughly a third of sitting cabinet ministers count on rental or investment properties for some portion of their wealth, and almost half of Nova Scotia’s MLAs own multiple properties, a Coast investigation has learned. (One in five Nova Scotia MLAs, including both premier Tim Houston and the province’s housing minister, John Lohr, own three or more properties in the province.)
What’s unique in Singh’s case is the extent to which he has campaigned as the antidote to politics-as-status-quo and the commingling of political and corporate greed.
“We’ve got to change our approach and make housing about people finding a home, not about rich developers getting even richer… We can absolutely change the way our market is structured,” he said on Monday.
The revelation of Singh’s wife owning a rental property in Burnaby, BC—disclosed under the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons—and listing it as her sole source of income has provided endless fodder for the likes of Rebel News and True North. And on its face, it looks bad. There’s an element of hypocrisy in a politician profiting from the same industry they decry as exploitative.
The thing about Singh is, he came across most genuine on Monday when he addressed the matter head-on:
“We have a home in Burnaby where we live, and we only need one part of the home. So we rent out our basement. I think that’s a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “We don’t need the whole space, and that gives someone else a home. Our tenant is able to live a great life, he’s got his two kids with him, and we think that’s an important thing.”
As answers go, it was a real one. One of Singh’s political gifts is his in-person candour when the microphone is off, and in the midst of an otherwise prepared speech, he broke from his scripted remarks to be what his supporters want him to be: Human.
If Singh would do the same at all times—not just when discussing his party’s efforts to push the Liberals on policy issues, but also its failures to do so—he might find himself beginning to garner the broader voter support he seeks.
And who knows? Maybe then, he could start making the changes he promises to bring.
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2023.
The problem is mass immigration and visas, not housing.