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Here’s a key to understanding Justin Trudeau’s government and the strategy it has employed since assuming power last November: The New Democratic Party is gone.

Of course the NDP isn’t actually gone. It holds 44 seats in the House of Commons, the party’s second-biggest contingent ever. Leader Thomas Mulcair badgers the Prime Minister daily there, just as he did his predecessor, albeit with less time at centre stage.

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And yet in a strategic sense the Dippers are gone, after a fashion. Their base of support has been absorbed by the Liberal party, in a big shift that began in late August, when Trudeau turned the election campaign upside down by promising “a modest short-term deficit” of no more than $10 billion in each of a Liberal government’s first three years, after which it would return to balance in fiscal 2019-20. That was the pivot point, in retrospect, that derailed the NDP campaign. In one deft move, Trudeau had outflanked them on the left.