Article content continued

Was it that defeat that did him in? Or was it the party’s much-advertised move to the middle of the political spectrum? Well, of course it was both. Had he lost the election, but was seen to have “fought the good fight” by the base, he might still be leader. Had he dragged the party to the centre and won, he’d be prime minister. But to have done both — to have aimed for the broad middle, and missed — was unforgivable. It left him exposed to attack by a strange coalition of the party’s idealists and its pragmatists, the former for abandoning principle, the latter for losing the election.

Caught between the two sides, Mulcair adopted a position … that only seemed to earn him equal degrees of contempt from both

This was only accentuated by the issue that split the party at the convention: the Leap Manifesto, whose agenda, explicit or otherwise, is to shut in Canadian oil and gas production, and shut down the industry, inside of a generation. Caught between the two sides, Mulcair adopted a position — that he would support the manifesto, if that were what the party wanted — that only seemed to earn him equal degrees of contempt from both.

Yes, yes, I know: the party didn’t vote to endorse the manifesto — it only voted to debate it, in riding associations across the country, for the next two years. This is a distinction that will be lost on the broader public, and rightly so. The salient point, faced with a set of proposals as objectively extreme as this, is that the party did not give it the back of its hand. Were the Conservatives to vote to debate — and not only to debate, but to “recognize and support as a high-level statement of principles” — banning abortion, I can imagine the reaction, whatever their final decision. Now suppose they were also debating bringing back the death penalty, and oh, what the hell, privatizing the national parks.