PORT ALBERNI, B.C.— It’s about the energy.

Ed Ross felt it when he pressed a long, slate grey eagle feather into Jagmeet Singh’s hands. Ross was among a group of drummers from the Tseshaht First Nation who sang and played for the NDP leader as he disembarked from his campaign bus Friday morning in this valley town in the mountainous interior of Vancouver Island.

“When I gave him the feather at first, he grabbed it, embraced it, and then went in and held it through the whole (event),” said Ross, dressed in an orange T-shirt and black vest with a band of sweetgrass tied around his head.

“I’m an energy guy. It’s how I feel when I meet you,” he said. “I can see that he’s listening. I can see that he’s engaged. I can see the eye contact that he makes …

“You can see that he’s a good man.”

For weeks before the start of the federal election campaign, top NDP officials were saying Singh — the 40-year-old rookie leader of Canada’s social democratic party — had personal magnetism and charisma that could ignite on the campaign trail. Now that the campaign is in its final days, polls suggest they may have been right. Singh has seen a bump in recent weeks, both in national voting intentions for New Democrats, and in his own personal favourability ratings, that one pollster characterized as “through the roof.”

Marie Della Mattia, the NDP’s campaign co-chair, said the party has stayed true to its plan. At every turn, Singh has cast the Liberals and Conservatives as beholden to the interests of the rich, and tried to convince Canadians that New Democrats will tax corporations and the wealthy to pay for broad and expensive social programs that would benefit everyone.

A big part of why people might be listening, Della Mattia said, is Singh himself.

“He’s a really good campaigner. He’s energetic. He’s enthusiastic. He loves doing this,” she told the Star on Friday outside the NDP’s campaign office in Port Alberni. “We couldn’t wait for the campaign to start.”

When it finally did start, in early September, the NDP appeared to have a rough road to voting day. Annual fundraising returns had tanked from more than $18 million in 2015 — when the party was the official opposition in the House of Commons — to just $5 million last year. Several high profile incumbents, like B.C.’s Nathan Cullen and Quebec’s Hélène Laverdière, had decided not to run again, and the party lagged in filling a roster of candidates for the coming campaign.

There were also questions about Singh himself, who had stumbled repeatedly in the early months of his leadership, sometimes appearing ignorant of his own party’s policies as he tried to lead the NDP caucus for more than a year without his own seat in the Commons.

Farouk Karim, a former NDP caucus press secretary said the struggles that Singh appeared to endure may have given him an advantage in disguise: he entered the federal campaign this fall with low expectations.

This “allowed Singh to introduce himself for the first half of the campaign without being a threat and therefore without attacks from his opponents,” Karim said. “It also allowed Singh to make a very good impression to Canadians who might have written him off because of the negative chatter on the party.”

Della Mattia believes the seeds of the NDP’s momentum were sown in the early days of the campaign as Singh hammered a message of contrast, with the NDP on one side and the Liberals and Conservatives on the other. At the first debate in early September, which Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau skipped, she said Singh tried to show that he’s preoccupied with everyday Canadians by citing examples of their struggles to afford prescription drugs or find housing.

Lorne Bozinoff, president of the polling firm Forum Research, said he believes a turning point for the NDP was Singh’s emotional reaction to images of Trudeau in brownface and blackface. After Singh listened to Trudeau’s first apology that night, he decided to make a late-night statement urging people of colour not to “give up on Canada, and please don’t give up on yourselves.”

“That got people looking at him and listening to him,” Bozinoff said. “He was very, very compelling.”

Della Mattia said the reaction was pure Singh. “He reacted with such humanness and it was super raw … It was just what he was feeling and thinking at the time.”

But rather than being the turning point, Singh’s campaign co-chair sees the moment as one of several through the campaign that set the stage for the recent lift in the polls. In Grassy Narrows, Singh shot down a question about spending unspecified amounts of money on Indigenous infrastructure and social services by asking whether resources would be a concern if Vancouver or Toronto didn’t have access to clean water. He was generally seen to have performed well in the official campaign debates, and flared on social media with a viral “Tik Tok” meme video.

“What I said all along … it doesn’t happen right away,” said Della Mattia. “It takes five to 10 days to percolate into the consciousness of dental hygienists with two teenage boys.”

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On Friday, as Singh toured Vancouver Island, he was questioned — as he has been all week — about how the New Democrats will handle a minority parliament, given that they’ve ruled out supporting the Conservatives in any way. He refused to say whether he would try to defeat a Conservative minority before it tries to scrap the federal carbon price, or whether he would make the cancellation of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion — a key priority for federal New Democrats — a condition for supporting the Liberals.

But regardless of what happens when votes are counted Monday, Della Mattia argued that the NDP campaign has already succeeded. Singh could be the kingmaker in a hung parliament, just weeks after many questioned whether the NDP would even retain official party status in the House.

“Despite the smaller budget than the other parties, our campaign has actually looked better and been stronger,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything I could say we would do differently.”

Correction – Oct. 21, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Farouk Karim was press secretary to former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.

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