Less than a year out from a federal election, the prospects for Canada’s social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) are uncertain. The party hit a historic high in 2011, which saw it win over a hundred seats, achieve an unprecedented breakthrough in Québec, and become the country’s Official Opposition for the first time. Optimism, however, soon gave way to grief as its popular leader Jack Layton died of cancer and the historically dominant Liberal Party selected a media-friendly nostalgia vehicle in the figure of Justin Trudeau (son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau) to carry its banner into the 2015 federal election.

While Layton’s successor Thomas Mulcair proved effective in Parliament and embraced a platform incorporating universal childcare provision, support for trade union rights, and a national pharmacare program, his ultimately conventional electoral instincts would contribute to the punishing defeat that followed. Despite a brief surge during the election’s early weeks, the contest ended in a devastating collapse which saw the party lose more than half its seats and bleed votes throughout much of the country. While a xenophobic Conservative campaign pivot unfavorably shifted the election’s dynamics and scorched the NDP’s support in Québec, bewildering decisions by the leadership to rule out raising income taxes on the wealthy and to promise four years of balanced budgets created an opening for the Liberals to feint left and reap the electoral benefits.

Having repeated an all-too-familiar pattern by which consecutive years of electoral gains culminate in defeat and retrenchment, the NDP was returned to its traditional status as a third party. Ousting Mulcair, whose leadership was compromised by self-defeating attempts at centrist respectability, members strongly opted for Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh by a margin of 53.8 percent on the first ballot at a 2017 convention in Toronto. Singh, the first person of color to lead a federal party in Canada, is still relatively unknown throughout the country and does not yet have a seat in Parliament (he’ll soon be contesting a by-election in the Vancouver-area riding of Burnaby South). The NDP’s poll numbers, such as they are, are not particularly favorable, tending to hover in familiar territory somewhere below 20 percent.