MONTREAL

Pity the electorally torn progressive voters of Ontario! By all accounts, they will make the difference between a Liberal and a Conservative provincial victory on Thursday.

Between now and then scores of them will have to decide whether the risk of a return to more conservative policies at Queen’s Park trumps their thirst for change.

Since the weekend the Liberals have been hammering the self-serving message that a vote for the NDP is a vote for Tim Hudak.

Pointing to the distant third position of the New Democrats in the polls, they argue that only Kathleen Wynne can stand in the way of a Conservative win.

Like it or not, that full-court Liberal press is a dress rehearsal for next year’s federal campaign.

More so perhaps than any recent federal election, it will feature a fight to the finish for progressive voters between Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau.

Based on the pattern of the provincial campaign, the NDP/Liberal federal battle for Ontario will be Trudeau’s to lose.

As much as many left-of-centre voters fear a Tim Hudak government, that pales in comparison with the trepidation that the possibility of a fourth Stephen Harper mandate often inspires.

In 2015, it will be the federal Conservatives and not Trudeau’s Liberals who will be campaigning with baggage against the cyclical tide of change.

Since Trudeau took over the reins not a single national poll has shown the NDP within striking distance of government.

In Ontario, the federal NDP consistently ranks a distant third in federal voting intentions.

Under both Jack Layton and Mulcair, the NDP has moved closer to the centre, presumably the better to attract Liberal supporters. Only an optical illusion would allow anyone to describe today’s New Democrats as Liberals in a hurry.

But again based on the Ontario experience, they may only be making it easier for New Democrats to move over to the Liberals.

Polls suggest that Horwath’s campaign may have made soft-NDP sympathizers more amenable to Liberal calls to abandon ship on Thursday.

Mulcair’s strategists believe that the daily pressures of a campaign will show once and for all that Trudeau is out of his depth — leaving their leader as the only credible alternative to Harper.

But a Liberal crash is neither guaranteed nor without collateral risks for the NDP. In Ontario in 2011, the Conservatives benefited from Michael Ignatieff’s travails.

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Those considerations would have less or no place under a more proportional electoral system but such a reform in not in the cards for the near future.

Meanwhile, as Ontario goes, so must apparently Canada.

Thus irreconcilable differences between the NDP and the Liberal Ontario clans have gone a long way to bring both sides to all but rule out a pre-election rapprochement between Mulcair and Trudeau.

The enmity between the two opposition parties in the House of Commons increasingly runs higher than their common dislike of the Conservatives.

Some New Democrats are even musing about exporting the Ontario model to Quebec. With the Parti Québécois at an all-time low, they think the time has come to introduce a social democrat option on the Quebec ballot, one that would compete, from the left, for federalist votes, with the provincial Liberals.

What could possibly be wrong with the idea of applying to Quebec a model that has contributed to bringing to or keeping right-wing governments in power in Ontario and at the federal level!

In fact, if any province should offer a template for a redesigned federal progressive landscape, it should be Quebec.

Over the past four decades, its social democrat voters have mostly had to cohabit with less left-leaning federalists or sovereigntists inside the province’s two main parties. Thus, Trudeau and Mulcair voted for the same (Liberal) party in last April’s Quebec election.

From universal child care to parental leave, pharmacare and social rights, Quebec is also a rare province that has fulfilled much of the progressive ambitions that the New Democrats federally and in places like Ontario have been putting on the back burner in the so far vain hope of climbing their way to power.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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