BURNABY, B.C.—Surveying the defeats his party suffered in Monday’s federal election, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says he can’t explain how New Democrats were completely shut out of Toronto and failed to pick up any seats they coveted in the wider GTA.

Singh spent much of the campaign in the crucial battleground region, where the party zeroed in on ridings officials believed they could win from the Liberals. That included Jack Layton’s old seat in Toronto-Danforth, former MP Andrew Cash’s attempted comeback in Davenport, and in Brampton, where Singh started his political career as a provincial MP in a riding now represented by his brother at Queen’s Park.

But despite making promises targeted directly at the region — including a pledge to convince Doug Ford’s conservative government to build a new hospital in Brampton — the NDP failed to achieve any gains. For the second election in a row, the Liberals swept Toronto, and the NDP were kept to the two seats in Hamilton they held before the vote.

Singh was at a loss to explain what happened.

“We’re going to have to figure out what we can do moving forward and how we can make sure we get our message across. I don’t have an answer for you right now, but I know that’s something that matters to me,” Singh said Tuesday morning at a hotel in the riding where he was re-elected in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

“I love Toronto. I love Brampton. These are places that are really near and dear to me,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that need us out there, and we’ve just got to work harder.”

The NDP entered the election with 39 seats in parliament. While the party was reduced to 24 seats in Monday’s vote, NDP officials welcomed the result in light of the NDP’s limited finances — annual donations have plummeted since 2015, according to returns filed with Elections Canada — and low expectations at the beginning of the campaign that included speculation they would fail to win the 12 seats needed for official party status in the House of Commons.

The party also managed to defend enough seats to hold the balance of power in a minority parliament led by the Liberals — a twist that will give the party added heft in the House of Commons even with a smaller number of MPs.

But the NDP was decimated in Quebec, the province that propelled the “orange wave” of 2011 under former leader Jack Layton. It now holds just one seat in Quebec, represented by deputy leader Alexandre Boulerice in the Montreal riding of Rosemont—La Petite Patrie.

The party was also wiped out in Saskatchewan, a province with NDP roots that date back to the founding of the party, where it won three seats in 2015.

Singh brushed aside questions Tuesday about the security of his leadership, stating that it was “really difficult” to lose so many MPs, even as they won new seats in Newfoundland, Nunavut and Winnipeg.

Later Tuesday, the NDP leader was set to fly back to Ontario and said he would meet with his new, smaller caucus to strategize about how to influence the Liberal minority when parliament resumes in the coming weeks.

“We’ve come a long way and this campaign really mattered, and it made a massive difference,” Singh said. “There’s obviously a lot more work that needs to be done, but we have built a strong foundation. And we have come a long way, and I’m proud of that.”

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