An underrated irony of last month’s federal election: in a campaign dominated by Canadian nationalism, one of the distinctively Canadian features of our political system was nearly wiped out. The NDP, down to just seven seats, has lost official party status in Parliament.

Should that bother anyone other than NDP members? Absolutely. As an authoritarian disaster unfolds in the United States, the features that set Canadian politics apart are only growing in importance: they are guardrails that help prevent Canada from descending down the same path. High on that list, I’d put the presence of a viable social democratic party—one that has long defended programs like single-payer health care (in the words of Tommy Douglas) as the expression of “economic democracy” in Canada.

Over the past months, that idea ought to have been newly relevant, especially with Donald Trump and Elon Musk giving us daily proof that inequality corrodes democracy. It did not work out that way. As Trump’s tariffs and “51st state” threats upended Canadian politics, the CBC reported at the outset of the campaign, “core NDP campaign issues, like affordability and housing, might no longer be at the top of voters’ minds.”

They were not. The Liberals’ remarkable polling comeback is the story of the election—but noteworthy too is the collapse in NDP support that did so much to enable it. In a first-past-the-post system like Canada’s, it’s not unusual for the major parties to consolidate support in the run-up to an election. But in the bigger picture, the NDP—and the Canadian left more generally—seems to be at a loss for purpose in a political landscape that is suddenly oriented around threats from our southern neighbour.

In his closing statement in the English-language debate, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh asked voters to elect New Democrats “to make sure that no government cuts the things that we hold dear, like health care, to show that we can do everything possible to make it more affordable to buy your groceries, to get a home. I’m asking for your support in this election so that I can continue to defend the things that make Canada, Canada.” That’s a fine message. But is it fundamentally different from the message in 2019? Or 2021?

In 2025, Canadian politics is defined by one overwhelming fact: we’ve entered a world in which the US is a major threat to our sovereignty and to liberal democracy. The Canadian left has to adapt to that world—much more thoroughly than it has to date—if it wants to rebuild. That will take more than tacking on “because of Trump” to policies the left would be inclined to support anyway.

And in taking on that more ambitious work, there is a great deal to learn from what earlier generations of Canadians did to make an essential connection. It’s the connection between our outrage at arbitrary power directed toward Canada, and a vision of a world without arbitrary power at all.

When I was researching my recent book on the erosion of American democracy, and what it means for Canada, I was struck by how often and how openly earlier generations of Canadian thinkers described this country as a “colony” of the US. That was, in fact, a dominant theme in Canadian intellectual life in the middle decades of the 20th century.

In passing from the British to the American orbit, economist Harold Innis wrote in 1956, “Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.” Here is conservative philosopher George Grant in 1965: “Poland and Czechoslovakia are as much part of the Russian Empire as India was of the British, or Canada and Brazil of the American.” Here is literary critic Northrop Frye in 1971: Canada “is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony, colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.” And here is novelist Margaret Atwood in 1972: “We have been (and are) an exploited colony; our literature is rooted in those facts.”

To be honest, I found that kind of language self-indulgent until very recently. Whatever its power differential with the US, Canada is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world—not to mention a colonial power in its own right with respect to Indigenous nations. In that light, the image of Canada as a colony can be a way of claiming a degree of innocence to which we aren’t really entitled.

But on the other hand, think of how all the economic coercion, all the annexation talk and the denial of Canadian identity have felt over the past few months. For me, it feels as if grotesquely powerful people have reached into my life and my children’s lives and made them harder and more uncertain for entirely selfish reasons—and that I couldn’t do anything to stop them. It is infuriating, it is humiliating, and it is exactly what it feels like to be the object of arbitrary power.

Some of us don’t need any reminder of that feeling. Some of us may be feeling it for the first time. But regardless, everyone in Canada has now had that potentially unifying experience.

I say “potentially,” because the experience only becomes a unifier on those terms if someone organizes around it. At their best, I think that’s what those earlier Canadians did. The idea of Canada as a colony was not confined to the left. But many of the more ambitious Canadian thinkers of the mid-20th century worked to connect Canada’s particular experience with a dominant neighbour to the decolonial movement sweeping the world in those days. And over roughly the same period, Canada made a series of political choices that set it on a decisively different path from the US: single-payer health care, official bilingualism and multiculturalism, staying out of Vietnam.

While it would be much too simple to draw a direct line between those developments, it shouldn’t surprise us that moments when American domination seemed especially salient have often been moments of progressive opportunity. Those are moments when unchecked power looks us directly in the face—and when leaders and movements can push us to turn that experience into solidarity with others.

We need an NDP capable of doing something similar for our time. At a time when the Liberal Party is still at risk of framing its response to Trump too narrowly, someone needs to be the party of “yes, and”—the party that pushes Canada to turn our experience with the US into the broadest possible source of solidary, at home and abroad. In domestic policy, an NDP that thought in these terms could make an intuitive connection between committing to reconciliation and fighting oligarchy. It could point out that we have institutions like unions to keep people like Trump and Musk in line, and to prevent anyone in Canada from ever accumulating their kind of power. Affect matters, too: when Prime Minister Mark Carney (in the tradition of technocrats everywhere) is promising “an end to the division and anger of the past,” and the right mainly offers the self-indulgent rage porn of conspiracy theories, surely there is still a place for the disciplined and righteous anger that has driven so much social progress in this country.

Precisely because we are at what Carney called “one of those hinge moments of history,” Canada’s foreign policy debates also need forthright voices from the left. Multilateralism and investment in international institutions are important principles of a left foreign policy—and they are also Canadian traditions. The NDP should continue to stand up for them, even when that means putting more distance between Canada and the US than the prime minister would prefer. As much as the prime minister wants to stress Canadian ties to Europe, Canada needs an NDP to point out that we have powerful models for resisting authoritarianism in this hemisphere, too—especially in popular social democratic governments like Lula’s in Brazil. And Canada needs an NDP to insist that identifying ourselves as victims of aggression is a serious claim that imposes serious obligations on us—in particular, to aid other current targets of US-abetted aggression who have it far worse than we do, especially in Ukraine and Palestine. The reason to do this is not so that Canadians can feel morally smug about themselves—it is to build the biggest possible coalitions in order to stand up to bullies.

That is the left’s “superpower,” and I think it’s the key to finding a new purpose for the NDP at a moment when Canadian politics is completely reorienting. In this view, our experience of aggression isn’t a distraction from what the left would rather be talking about, or one more issue among many. It’s the defining experience that frames the rest, and that helps us connect with the outrage of the allies we’ll need to turn back the authoritarian tide in North America.

Rob Goodman is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and a former US House and Senate speechwriter. He is the author of Not Here: Why American Democracy Is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself.