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Likewise, when Mulcair says “an NDP government will not accept any deal that puts our dairy and poultry farms at risk,” it’s always possible it could decide, on closer inspection, that the deal the Conservatives negotiated did not do that. After all, the Liberals pulled much the same trick with regard to NAFTA.

But it’s risky to read too much into these things. Whatever the semantic possibilities, what’s significant is what the party wants to be understood from the letter: that it would tear up a major trade deal just days after it was negotiated, at whatever cost to Canada’s long-term economic interests. That’s big.

Indeed, if I thought they meant it, I’d say it disqualified them for office. This is no mere promise to run minor budget deficits for a couple of years, in the style of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. It would cut us out of what would be the largest free trade area in the world: bigger than either NAFTA or the European Union, nearly as big as the two combined.

In short, this is not the act of a centrist party, or at least of a party that wants to be perceived as such. In taking this move, with two weeks left in the campaign, the NDP risks alienating many of the voters who had been willing, for the first time, to give the party a look. But what option does it have?

Most polls now put the party in third place, with about 26 or 27 per cent support. A month ago, it was in first place, in the mid 30s. If it is prepared to blow up the strategy on which it has been running until now, it may be because it has proven a cataclysmic failure. Or rather, it may be because the assumptions on which it was based have turned out to be false.