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Alberta’s cardinal industry is in tatters: more than 100,000 jobs have been lost, its revenues have fallen off the cliff, and what little hope the industry has is being strangled by the fevered and irrational opposition to any pipeline — north, south, east or west — that might restore at least a few jobs. And here is the NDP, having been blasted to also-ran status in the recent election, heading to the one province dependent on the energy industry with a pre-packaged pledge to do all it can to suffocate what’s left of that industry.

Once upon a time — long, long ago — the NDP was seen as a working-class party, a party with a feel for the little guy, a party that almost revered workers and their jobs, and visibly ached when those at the bottom of the economic pile were knocked out of the workforce. Where is it now? Hard to tell, but it’s certainly more of an urban, yuppie, trend-driven faction than the party that once championed the “working class.” The current NDP will get more worked up over “de-gendering the bathroom” than job losses in Alberta, or anywhere else.

It is particularly held hostage to the environmental doomsayers, from whom come the drastic LEAP Manifesto, which the NDP will consider adopting at the convention. LEAP is a piece from the pen of, among others, Avi Lewis, who seems to sense no disharmony between his manifesto and the consideration that he worked for a fossil-fuelled dictatorship — the oil-sodden sheikdom of Qatar — as an Al Jazeera journalist, for the better part of a decade. Apparently, he had no trouble drawing his sustenance from the wealth generated by one of the world’s largest oil producers, and also has no trouble turning his anti-fossil fuel guns on the democratic hamlet of Fort McMurray, Alta.