OTTAWA—NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is defending his party’s decision to delay its next national convention, where he is slated to face a vote on his leadership, claiming he has “no doubt” that New Democrats support him.

Singh said the convention delay — first reported by the Huffington Post in early January — is meant to ensure the NDP is prepared for an election if the Liberal minority government falls in the coming months.

“We’re in a minority and we want to make sure that we are able to do a good job as parliamentarians, but also that our party is in good standing and good health,” Singh told reporters Wednesday on Parliament Hill.

He added in French that he has “no doubt” members will support him when the time comes for a leadership review at the next convention, which the party says will be scheduled in early 2021 instead of sometime this year.

Anne McGrath, the NDP’s national director, told the Star she would prefer to hold the convention as soon as possible, given what she sees as Singh’s solid personal popularity in the wake of last fall’s election campaign.

But McGrath said the party needs to focus on paying down its debts and replenishing its war chest ahead of the next election. Annual fundraising for the NDP dropped from more than $18 million in 2015 to around $5 million in 2018, according to Elections Canada returns.

After taking out a $12-million mortgage on its Ottawa headquarters in 2018 and spending $11 million on a national campaign last fall, McGrath said the party is still about $7 million in debt. Running a convention now would cost the party at least $400,000 and possibly more than $1 million, she said.

The NDP will now plan to hold its next convention in early 2021.

“This is about getting rid of the campaign debt, investing in fundraising and making sure that we are ready to build up a campaign account so that we can run a much bigger and better campaign whenever it comes,” McGrath said.

The federal NDP requires that members vote on whether to hold a leadership race at every national convention, which are typically scheduled every two years. The last one was held in Ottawa in 2018, when Singh received the support of 91 per cent of voting members in attendance.

In 2016, following the federal election in which Justin Trudeau and the Liberals won a majority government, 52 per cent of NDP members at a convention in Edmonton voted to hold a leadership race to replace Thomas Mulcair.

Singh said Wednesday that he is confident he will avoid Mulcair’s fate.

“We ran a campaign that put people first, that showed what happens when you speak to Canadians with a voice that is concerned about making their lives better,” Singh said. “I’m confident that our party wants to continue to see that type of campaigning and that type of focus on people.”

The NDP lost 15 seats in the last election. The party was completely shut out of Toronto for the second campaign in a row and lost all but a single seat in Quebec, the province that formed the foundation of the “orange wave” under Jack Layton’s leadership in 2011.

McGrath and others in the party have described the campaign as a success despite those losses, pointing to Singh’s performance in debates and polls that showed a spike in his approval rating.

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That makes the question of resources all the more important if the party hopes to leverage that popularity into seat gains the next time around, McGrath said Wednesday.

“It’s no secret that we ran this campaign with very limited resources,” she said. “We didn’t have the budget that we needed to capitalize on the successful leader’s tour and debates and all of the things that happened during the campaign that really started to introduce Jagmeet to Canadians. And I don’t want to do that again.”

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